"Growing up, my parents never really talked about religion. My father was a Catholic, and my mother was a Protestant. My father was frustrated with the Catholic church over the baptism of my brother and I, due to the fact that my mother was Protestant, so the subject just never really came up. It's not that I was trained as a child to mistrust, or disbelieve in religion of any sort, just that no one really told me about it. I had some idea that some kids went to church and some believed in this 'god' thing that didn't really make any sense to me, but beyond that I had no exposure to it. So as far back as Kindergarten, when we would say the Pledge Of Allegiance, I can clearly recall never saying 'under god'. I was just quiet when other kids said it. A rational decision of my own, that far back. No one ever noticed. I can still tell you which corner of the room the flag hung in, I remember having to use wooden clothes pins to scrape crayon off the metal fronts of desks as punishment for drawing on the desk, the quick voice of my slow-moving teacher, my green, 'Husky' pencil, etc. I still retain it all with pretty good detail. Imagine my surprise to find out as a Teenager, that the Pledge as I said it, was actually its original form! (Pre-1956)

At this time, no one ever told me not to believe in god, to my knowledge. No one ever told me that I should believe either, so I applied my own limited reasoning powers, and found this concept of 'god' unimportant, or the stuff of mythology. Around that time I had read a lot of Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, and I considered that they could not all be true at the same time, and that no apparent evidence existed to support any of them as true, so I discarded them all as entertainment, not fact, and moved on. As a kid, I tried to read the entire library of my elementary school. A-Z, nonfiction, to fiction. I made a pretty good dent in it too. Like a lot of parents worry their kids play too much video games, as a kid my parents worried that I read too much.

Today, I am not "hostile" to the possibility of a supreme being that created everything around us. I just don't see any evidence of it. I don't need it to help explain the world around me. I classify Religion like you might classify the supernatural, like tarot cards, or UFO's, or maybe even a faith that might seem silly to you, like Scientology, or Norse Mythology. I don't believe the supernatural is impossible, but I consider it highly improbable, or unsupported by any evidence I can see in the world around me."

In summary, a lack of faith (I would say 'blind faith' but you would probably take it as a insult, when I do not mean it as such) is not a faith of it's own. Two sentences:

I do not believe your god exists.
I believe your god does not exist.

Do these two sentences say the same thing to you?

But actually, given the inherent authoritarian aspects of most conceptions of God, I think the idea of a Supreme Daddy-figure is psychologically and morally crippling--and that being against it might be worth some passion.

So if extremist is becomming more commonplace and church numbers are falling is it fair to say that belief is polarising?

I think that is exactly the case. I wrote a post last summer, "Receding Waters", about the growth of ultra-conservative American megachurches - a disturbing trend, but one that can be better appreciated when placed in context, namely that the overall number of Christians as a share of America's population is declining, while the number of nonbelievers is increasing.

This trend is visible not just in religion, but in politics as well: more and more, the true believers are retreating into their own private world and pulling up the drawbridge behind them, even as the society around them becomes more liberal and more secular. I think the increasingly strong evidence that their views have failed is persuading the fundamentalists to become more insular and only to talk to each other, but the rest of us can see quite clearly what they would prefer not to acknowledge.

Is this an effect of the moderates getting fed up and leaving the churches, leaving no one to stand up and say, "That's outrageous!" when the remaining fundies float some new abomination on the sea of church ears?

It seems like there's a positive feedback mechanism going on.

1. Fundies step a little over the line of average church opinion.
2. Moderates leave church in disgust.
3. Average church opinion swings towards fundy.
4. Goto 1.

This quote really says a lot about some religious believers. Belief for them is a desperate flight from fear. They seek to fill up their own emptiness with a belief in god. Belief assuages their terror in the face of an incomprehensible universe.

Christianity has literally reached saturation point in our society; it has nowhere left to spread to. It is so pervasive that a great number of people are nominally Christian not because they truly believe the religion or know a great deal about it, but because it is the cultural and social default.

Just to go off on a complete and utter tangent for a second... It's interesting that, in American society, the Christian "mission" is essentially done - there are very few people who haven't heard of Jesus, and almost everyone who's ever going to believe in him already do. If they really want every church to be "healthy and growing", their only real options are to

• send missionaries to unsaturated countries,
• have children and raise them as Christians, or
• call other churches "lost" and poach members from them.

I can't help but think that this explains a lot.