Schism Among Atheists

Yes, I am now Atheist Reformed.

Le T:

Hey! I actually agree with Snert on something.

Oh-oh. Does that qualify as a miracle?

As an athiest I agree with Le T, which is why I for one would have little to do with such a movement.  Except for a part of my youth, when I believed what I was told by my parents and the nuns about god and Santa Clause, I've been a life long atheist.  I still have an open mind about Santa.  He's actually done more for me.

However, over recent years I've been pulled to the snert point of view.  My inclination is to live and let live, and for the most part, religious persons around me have not made that difficult.  The new strident aggressive evangelism has put me as a secular humanist on the defensive though, and the christan right has been trying to invade my space. 

I had a roommate once who refused to describe himself as an atheist because he argued this was letting the theists set the terms of the debate.

Caissa, that actually makes good sense.  An atheist by name, defines him/herself by what they are not, at once conceding a broader context which assumes the opposite.

Well, Caissa`s ex-roommate is still correct. It`s like the difference between Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx.

NOt that Caissa`s ex-roommate was Karl Marx, etc.

Some NDP folks have been great Anglican clergy: Dan Heap and Dennis Drainville, for example. And Bill Blaikie is a United Church minister, ain't he?

The "New Atheists" have a role to play in the public discourse, and overall I see that as a positive thing. Nobody can claim to speak for atheists generally, and the New Atheists don't.

The original post contrasts older "tolerant" atheists with younger "fundamentalist" atheists, though I question whether there is such a difference in attitudes amongst older and younger atheists. Indeed, the most prominent New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christoper Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, A.C. Grayling, et cetera aren't exactly young.

Not really. He wasn't content to be AGAINST religion. He wanted to be defined by something he BELIEVED IN. By seeking after faith, he risked becoming one of the faithful.

We genuine atheists (People's Front of Atheism, not the Atheist People's Front) are happy to oppose human failure, wrongdoing, and ignorance. If humanity spent more time ridding itself of those, and less time building "paradises", it might have avoided some of the notorious missteps of socialist experiments of the past, for example.

See, that's something that some deeply religious folk aren't free to do. They have difficulty when it comes to mocking their own faith, even though they often have few qualms about mocking others. That's one of the greatest sins that religion engenders. Atheists, however, are free to doubt everything, including themselves. O we of little faith...

Far be it from me to pick option #2.

ETA: Anyway, N.Beltov, if you want to have a serious discussion (and I don't mind), what do you think of my insight:

I think you're right, Unionist, to link Utopian (call it 'magical', if you like) thinking to religion, since that was one of the most compelling places utopia found its voice. Utopia, however, is a human, not religious impulse. You need only look at the bit of magical thinking Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. buy into: that if we eliminate religion, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will likewise disappear.

Now, personally, I don't have anything against utopia. That's how we move forward. Ridding ourselves of "human failure" is a fasttrack to tyranny.

This isn't a convincing argument in favour of atheist or atheist activism.  It is essentially Dawkins' current line:  As soon as someone says "Yeah, there probably is a God," -- it is only a short time before they are flying planes into buildings.  When you make an argument built like this on a caricature of the other side, it might make you feel good, but it will fail to convert anyone.  (Same with a circus like Blasphemy Day).

The other flaw in this approach is that it discounts the huge gains in social justice achieved by devout activists.  For example, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Tommy Douglas, and most recently the Toronto Metropolitan Church (in regards to SSM).

Also, it seems to play into society's worst stereotypes of atheists:  "Yeah, I'm an uptight asshole, so what?"  Queue mob of howling atheists (as usually show up at the Hitchens lectures).

One doesn't need an argument or reason to be an atheist. It's the default position really. If one is going to assert the existence of a god, the onus is on that person to justify that assertion with some evidence. Dawkins has been tackling religion, because it is interfering with his work as a scientist by reducing public acceptance of Darwin's theory.

Reading through this thread and the OP has given me the idea that Atheists have actually chosen the wrong name for their belief stucture. They should really be called anti-theist-based-relgionists (ATBaRs?). Most of the energy and thrust of their arguments are tied into challeging "religion"- a category that they reserve only for certain religions while excluding others like Positivism. It's not theism that they've got a problem with it's the social organizations that have risen around some theologies.

We're all atheist. It's just that some people believe in a few more gods than do others.

I don't have a problem with god.  It's his fan club I can't stand.

Everyone, including you, was born an atheist. It is the default state of all living creatures. Belief in supernatural beings is a meme that is taught, and is unique to our species.

Like Richard Dawkins, I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

If atheism is a religion, then health is a disease.

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian. (1985)

Atheism isn't something one can be fundamentalist about. There is no book of dogma to be fundamentalist about. You either believe there are god(s) or you don't. Consider "Can an atheist be a fundamentalist?" by A.C. Grayling: http://tinyurl.com/yffzsvo

Atheism isn't really a faith position either. Here is an excellent article by philosopher Stephen Law on that point: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2007/02/atheism-faith-position.html

In some sense the problems with term "fundamentalist" is with the root. What is "fundamental? As a historian, I have at times thought the term "literalist" was more appropriate but even that falls apart on some levels. The ability to recognize myth and allegory are sometimes at the heart of the debate. As a historian, I have trouble approaching documents without asking (along with many other questions) Who wrote it? when ? and for what purpose?

It is as a continuing life-long atheist (who as a juvenile also enjoyed shooting Jesus-fish in a barrel) that I consider Grayling's arguments trivial.

Grayling, and many of the so-called "New Atheists", trivially reduce the question of faith, and its more pernicious activities, to a belief or non-belief in God.  It is a kind of reductionist fundamentalism that ignores the underlying pervasive habit of the human mind willing to attach itself to something greater than itself for solace, meaning, and a call to arms. It doesn't need to be God and it often isn't.

The professional atheist Christopher Hitchens  evangelizes for slaughter on a biblical scale with unshakable faith in his own neoconsevativism. God is Not Great-but Wolfowitz Is.

In my case, that's very wrong. I have a real "problem" with theism - just as much as with the theist churches.

People who never go to church but nevertheless believe in the supernatural have a problem with the way their brains work - they believe in the existence and power of certain things without evidence. People whose brains work in that way are susceptible to all kinds of harmful fraudsters and purveyors of myths and fallacies, in all kinds of different areas. They can be convinced to vote for politicians who don't represent their interests; they can be persuaded to go along with their government's warmongering based on no evidence at all; they can be made to believe that scientific medicine is a huge conspiracy and that real disease can be cured by placebos, untested folk remedies, drinking plain water (as in homeopathy), or prayer. They can influence their children and others they come into contact with to believe these same pernicious myths, causing a great deal of harm to others and holding back real progress in society.

That's why it is not a matter of indifference to me whether other people believe in a god. It is just as important to me as their political principles.

That's a powerful generalization, N.Beltov. I'm not perfect, but I'll have no truck with that magical or non-evidentiary stuff.

I hope, sincerely, we meet sometime and you can explain to me in detail why you have these religious feelings.

Well it's a bit of magical thinking to think that if a person belives in God they will vote for a politician that doesn't represent their interest, or that one of those predicates implies the other.

Ayn Rand and the art of positive thinking is said to have flourished in US business schools and circles of banking and finance since the 1990's or so. But did the rightwing black magic work though? For some I think it did. Hugely successful as in laughing all the way to the bank.

How committed are you to your belief that there is no Santa Claus? Do you maintain a skeptical open-mindedness?

Agnosticism is an absolute system of belief also. It has greek roots A (not, no) GNOSIS (knowledge) and is an assertion that, given the nature of questions about "god", one CANNOT have knowledge as to the existence or non-existence of such a non-material configuration. It bugs me no end when people confuse being an agnostic with being a sceptic. If you are unsure, if you are doubting, if you think you could be convinced otherwise.... then you are sceptical. If you are an agnostic you are clearly stating that there is no way of resolving the question and therefore you say the question itself is essentially meaningless.

Thus speaketh the bagkitty... member of the provisional wing of the Alliance Against All Thing Holy (AAATH - provo)

And I am surprised no one has quoted Isaac Asimov yet.... so let me be the first:

(forget I said that)

I've kinda mellowed from my fundamentalist atheism to about where Oldgoat is in his thinking.  We seem to have arrived at a place from oposite ends.

I think what people miss about both Dawkins and Hitchens and others who are more strident is that this is a response to in your face religious zeolots trying, with some success, to take over not just the public discourse, but also our legislatures and our education systems. 

So, call me a fundementalist atheist on those issues if you like.  I've seen what happens to the timid and the accomodating in the face of religious totalitarianism. 

It leads to a condition called death.

So, it's a little galling to have atheists feet put to the fire when it comes to civil decorum in the public forum, but religious loonies get a podium when ever they like, few questions asked. It's like you go to a party, and all the religious people are crapping on the floor, and in walk Dawkins and Hitchens, who fart, and every one calls them pigs and asks them to leave.

So, instead of talking about improving public education, we have to entertain infantile arguments about creationism instead.  Or, we have to bar people of the same sex from solemnizing their vows, and enjoying the legal rights of marriage all because it offends the sensibilities of someone's self serving interpretation of some obscure passages in an old book.

Oh, but's it's the new atheists who are offensive.

Anyway.  Other than that kind of stuff, I don't really care what magic people choose to believe, as long as they don't try to kill me with it.

Like I said, I've mellowed.

But the thing is - some of them will.

I've posted this before, but it fits here, so I'm posting it again:

http://www.republic-news.org/archive/173-repub/173_nenonen_enlightenment.htm

"Hind argues that the central ethical conflict of our time is the struggle between the Open and Occult Enlightenments, between Enlightenment for the many and Enlightenment for the powerful few. The Occult Enlightenment supports state and corporate power, and it systematically undermines intellectual and political liberation. Thanks to the Occult Enlightenment, "We do not for the most part understand the world in which we live. Both the state and the corporation remain mysterious in themselves, and they generate misunderstanding and delusion on a vast scale. Trillions of dollars disappear from reckonings of government departments and the general population is routinely treated as an object to be manipulated. The private sector spends hundreds of billions of dollars making deception both palatable and ubiquitous. To the limited extent that we can grasp the facts in a given context, we find ourselves contradicted by the major media groups. In such circumstances we cannot reasonably claim to live in enlightened times."

"The conflict between the Open and Occult Enlightenments is obscured by what Hind calls the Folk Enlightenment. The Folk Enlightenment can best be described as a kind of theatre in which people pretend to fight battles that were won long ago. These battles are typically portrayed as occurring between Enlightenment rationality and an irrational and dangerous "other." For example, proponents of the Folk Enlightenment continue to focus on the threat of religion, despite the fact that religious institutions possess barely a fraction of their former influence, and that science and technology, not theology, are what empower the oligarchies of the modern world."

Done!

And here's a good piece on the "New Atheism" by Chris Hedges:

http://www.alternet.org/rights/80449/

"These New Atheists, like all religious fundamentalists, fail to grasp the dark reality of human nature, our own capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit. There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression, economic exploitation and to accelerate environmental degradation as well as to nurture and sustain life. There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving towards a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere.

"The New Atheists misuse Darwin and evolutionary biology as egregiously as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible. Darwinism, which pays homage to the final and complete mastery of our animal natures, never posits that human beings can transcend their natures and create a human paradise. It argues the opposite. The illusion of human progress, in the name of evolutionary biology, is actually anti-Darwinian. And in this the New Atheists are neither honest about science or Darwin. Science is used by them to supplant religion to provide meaning and hope. It is used to assuage these innate religious yearnings. Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human history and human progress is also cumulative. And in many ways science has simply replaced the faith our pre-modern ancestors had in God.

"But more ominously, the New Atheists ignore the wisdom of Original Sin, as well as studies in cognitive behavior, that illustrate that human nature is often irrational and flawed. We are all governed, even in our moments of greatest lucidity, by unconscious forces. This understanding, whether achieved through Augustine or Freud, has been our most potent check on schemes of human perfectibility and utopian visions. But the New Atheists, like all believers in myth, refuse to listen. They peddle the alluring and enticing fantasy of inevitable moral and material progress. This vision is not based on science, history or reason. It is an act of faith. It is a form of the occult. It is no more scientific legitimacy than alchemy."

The snippet is just that: a snippet of a larger argument, which itself was fleshed out in Hedges' book, I Don't Believe In Atheists. He provides enough evidence and well-constructed arguments in those works to demonstrate that he's attacking the guts of the New Atheists' positions, rather than jabbing at mere straw men. 

Right, and people who believe in God are confident in their belief. So we have two groups of people who are confident in their beliefs which contradict each other -- this I think is where a lot of the friction is being felt between the two camps and an impasse occurs. I think it would be better for atheists to take a more agnostic approach and say that, sure, there might be a God, but according to the evidence (or lack thereof), you choose not to believe in said God until evidence presents itself. I think that kind of example could do a lot for both atheists and even theists, especially when it comes to moral doctrines/dogmas.

I can only imagine he was also both white and a caucasian.

The absurdity of the post above the above post is worthy of a hall of fame. Imagine, if you will, arguing that because one can't disprove the Great Spaghetti Monster, one ought to accept that the Great Spaghetti Monster may exist. And why should atheists be forced to go halfway alone? Where are the faith holders? In the absence of proof, should they not also declare themselves agnostics until such time as the evidenice of their deity's existence is made available? Then we'd all be agnostics and finally we could all get along.

My faher was a good Anglican and attended church every day of his life until he collapsed on the front steps of the parish hall after one last christmas turkey stuffing. "He always did enjoy his turkey," Mrs. Chamberlain, the church matron, said to me the day of the funeral. The old chap was a life long atheist but said one must do one's duty to community which in his case meant supporting the local church. I never really understood until much later in life when it occured to me that belonging to the church was also of social importance in a middle-class environment.

While I consider myself an atheist, I wouldn't care to "preach" to others. Atheism is something people must come to of their own volition.

Might I ask which God you believe in, Caissa?

While it may be difficult to disprove the existence of some possible 'higher power', i believe it is rather easy to illustrate that any given 'god' of any major faith cannot exist as presented.

I'm an Anglican, LTJ, but I am certainly not going to  discuss faith issues on Babble. It is no safer for these discussions than it at times appears to be for a myriad of other topics.

I appreciate your perspective as well Unionist.

I'd rather not answer this other than by saying the creation of the sex workers rights forum might provide you with a loosely analogous situation.

When we speak of god, why do we refer to only the Judaism, Islam and Christianity beliefs?

There are many more religious organizations that have more interesting concepts of life and death.

Blasphemer! It's Flying Spaghetti Monster (pbuh)!

I'm an atheist who believes in things for which we have no sustainable evidence. Things like democracy, social justice and love. If I were scientist, I'd figure I would give up on such concepts as overwhelmingly improbable. And yet, la lutte continue. There are less tangible concpets I'd argue everyone needs to believe in. Kant called one of them immanence. I'd call it who we are in relation to the world.

I've been reading a lot about the vivisection debates of the late 1800s, when most of the scientific community, including Darwin, supported experimentation on live animals. Anti-vivisection activists caricatured such scientists as godless immorals, bent only on the advancement of science for its own purpose, slave to progress, unmoored from any shred of universal humanism. I don't see this position much different from Chris Hedges' "occult enlightenment," really. Not much has changed in the debate between what is human and what is science.

But I do think, as I alluded to in my McCarthy excerpt above, that there is a sinister undercurrent to the sentiment expressed by M. Spector above, namely, "I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world." This is the danger of enlightenment philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer pointed to, who saw the worst of enlightenment theory in the fascist regimes of Europe from which they escaped. Their argument, that the enlightenment's goal of eliminating fear of the unknown and men replacing religion as master of the world, is rooted in myth, which itself was a way for humankind to explain and thus control nature. This narrative of domination, they argue, has become radicalized under modernity and has by no accident led to Nazism. Please don't read this paragraph as an argument comparing Dawkins to Hitler, or whatecer; I am saying, however, that there is something about this kind of scientific trajectory that is very unsettling, and hardly wholly in the interests of humanity. I am starting to suspect, however, that this new atheism is closely tied to neo-liberalism--the work that this strand of thought does is not really scientific, it's political: it's doing far more to justify wars in the Middle East than it is keeping creationism out of our schools.

I also think that some new atheists have made an idol of religion, abstracting it from the social experience with which it was created. In a Grayling article above, he defines the religious narrative thusly: "Do good, go to heaven. Don't to good, don't go to heaven." Talk about crude simplifications and caricatures. There is a thread in the anti-racism forum that critiques the anti-racism movement for this same abstraction: why not, the article argues, target specific social changes rather than create a mythical racism understood only by its apostles? So, I would ask, why not target the foolish and ignorant attempts to put religion in our classrooms and in our legislatures rather than target a metaphysical immanence you cannot possibly contract and atomize?

Personally, I don't really get upset when I see Hitchens, Dawkins et al. do their talking outside of their fields (Like Terry Eagleton has said, how does Dawkins like it when metaphysical philosophers start talking about evolution without a proper scientific background?), because my thinking outlined above is not certain in my mind, and I hate the fact that there is a separate school board in Ontario, and that homophobia (and, effectively, pedophilia) gets a pass if it comes from the mouth of a priest. I don't really like it when people bring out the FSM as if they're clever, or start harping about how silly the big bearded man in white is, but lately I just let it go. I will always support taking the Christmas tree out of Parliament, just as I support taking O Canada out of our schools. I'm as suspicious of religion as I am of patriotism--and the most fanatical kinds of both are odious--but when someone's patriotism consists of a belief in tolerance, social justice, democracy and hockey...well, I don't see the point in having it out with them. But maybe I'm just too meek. I've heard that's good though...

Only two things bother me about religion:

1. That it sometimes provides "explanations" for natural phenomena as a substitute for (or as postiive opposition to) continuing empirical inquiry.

2. Far worse than #1: that it sustains a culture of people sticking to "their own" and being xenophobic towards others.

The personal faith part of it doesn't both me in the slightest, unless and to the extent that it leads to #1 or #2.

That's why I have trouble with Dawkins and the rest. They pay attention to #1 (and sometimes, it is true, in simplistic ways), but rarely deal with #2 in a satisfactory way. Or when they do broach it, they tend (like Sam Harris) to do so in a biased fashion, thereby revealing their own xenophobia.

Example: What other "mainstream" organizations frown upon "intermarriage"? I'm not saying all religions do - just those that represent the overwhelming majority of religious people on this planet.

ETA: Sorry, just realized I should have added #3, which is as bad as #2:

3. Use their "divine authority" to dictate codes of behaviour that are opposite to social progress (racism, misogyny, homophobia, ageism, etc. etc.) This is related to #2 but not identical. Justifying warmongering and genocide, for example, fall under both.

I am not a bible thumper, don't go to church and never initiate conversations about religion. What would be the point? But I've sometimes wondered at the wisdom of the Bible that so many people agree is full of contradictions and filled with stories of human rights abuse. I agree, the bible is filled with stories of murder, infidelity, misogyny, slavery etc. But I have to agree with certain parts of the Bible as US economist Michael Hudson has described about it on the internet. The debt crisis of the western world today and collapse of the monetarist monetary system could have been avoided if they'd accepted biblical advice(as well as Persian and other historical experiences with debt) to wipe the slate clean every so often in order to avoid the scenario where debts grow in excess of the economy's ability to repay them. And there is more good advice in the bible, like letting fields lay fallow for so many years before replanting etc. It is an old book that is out of date wrt most things today, for sure for sure.

This is timely, "The secularist case against "Atheism 3.0" " by Austin Dacey (his book The Secular Conscience is excellent by the way): http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/10/the_secul...

Not my point, Unionist. I was referring  to your phrase "sticking to their own and being xenophobic..." I'd rather not begin enumerating other groups that fall under this rubric. I was disputing your argument as much as saying it's not exclusive to religions. Hey, maybe I'll go out on a limb and suggest some religious people and maybe even religions are left-wing.

I think religions in general tend to foment a sense of "us" in terms of a collective humanity, whereas the religion of free market capitalism can only try to pretend to share the same goals and objectives as the rest of humanity. 

Thanks for your reply. But you know what - I was talking about organizations which promote social exclusion of "others". Do you know of any outside the various churches?

Are you sure that wars aren't all about warfiteering and resource grabs waged on behalf of capitalists worshipping false Roman gods of war? Or do they make war because they actually do believe that some deity is instructing them to? I'd be even more worried if they are total psycopaths driven by insanity than mere appalling greed and their own amoral value system.

Tommy, I think we've talked about this before, but postmodernism is really more of a historical mode than it is a philosophy. That means that if you think it "rejects" science--which I don't think it does, nor does it say "anything can be 'true'", although it's often caricatured in that way--in response to the enlightenment, you need to also consider how it is continuing the enlightenment project. Adorno isn't a postmodernist by the way--he thinks the enlightenment is spot on, we just don't know the maths anymore, and we need to get back on track. I definitely agree with you that some postmodern thought smacks of late capitalist economics and culture, but I'm encouraged to read it as dialectic--the same way Marx saw the revolutionary potential in the bourgeoisie, even as he saw how they had to be put down.

I do like the distinction between "open" science and "occult" science, and I think we could be on to something there. It's also a nice play that demonstrates religion doesn't have an exclusive on insularity, dogma and perverted moral imperatives.

ETA:

I dunno, white people?

I guess I'm missing your point, Unionist. Are you arguing that literalist religious institutions are unjust? Has anyone disagreed with you?

ETA: to elaborate, there are institutional, indexical and mostly oppressive strucures of religion that issue tyrannical edicts like the one you speak of. There are also cultural, social institutions also religiously rooted, that encourage the same kind of behaviour. And, of course, there are cultural, social institutions (eg, Western whiteness) that enact the same imperatives.

Okay I see your point. But wars have often been sold in the name of crusading religion. Iow's, no actual deities played a hand in the slaughter. When it comes right down to it, the immoral warfiteering and real estate grabs of history were actually orchestrated in the name of self-interest and appalling greed. The rape and plunder of new worlds was falsely justified in the name of any real god. Iow's, people were lied to. A lot. And they were lied to by mere mortal human beings.

And religion is being replaced by a new justification for attacking other countries. The Nazis started things off with marching into other countries without protest of the alleged democratic nations for a few years after and beginning with Spain in the late 1930's. The Nazis told people they were bombing other countries for humanitarian reasons. It's still happening today. And if bombing Yugoslavia to kingdom come was for humanitarian reasons, then what kind of humans have we become?

I agree that organized religion can serve as a veil for prejudice in many ways nowadays, but, to be frank, I think it is a bit more complicated than you are letting on. Take your example: "I want my child to marry a Catholic" is actually code for "I want my child to marry a white." Now, you might take this as evidence that religion divides people and encourages xenophobia; but I prefer to think of religion as our language of xenophobia--it's also our language for forgiveness, for trade, for romance and for war--it's humanity, bascially. Or, in much more poetic terms, it is the sigh of an oppressed people.

Part of me thinks that if you get rid of religion, we humans, flawed as we are, will simply find another way to veil our xenophobia and drive for division--but I think it's much more true to say: get rid of religion? Good luck with that.

Adorno isn't a postmodernist by the way--he thinks the enlightenment is spot on, we just don't know the maths anymore, and we need to get back on track.

No, I picked up on that from your quote, and was carefull-- I thought-- not to infer he was.  And yes, I do throw the word "post modern" around from time to time to describe schools of thought that might be described better with more precise labels. 

But then, I'm sure no post modernist would begrudge me describing it anyway I choose to.  It is my narrative after all. 

The only thing I have to add is that my nose is stuffed up again. I had the swine flu a few weeks ago, I thought I got over it, and now my nose is stuffed up again. I'm just way too immersed in self-pity to respond to any of the points anyone is raising here. 

Really. And when Jews in North America and Europe were taught to marry Jews, this was some colour thing? How about Ireland? And you think there are no non-white Catholics????? I think we're speaking different languages here, or emanating from different backgrounds.

I see. Who said, "get rid of religion?" I'm not on any crusade. But when religion is discussed, I do occasionally point out how it serves ignorance and hatred. It certainly isn't the source of ignorance and hatred. So perhaps we agree after all?

In the interest of giving the two sides of the schizm something to talk about, I'll close this one for length myself.