or, 2) is pretending that he doesn't. Either way, his point of view is disingenuous.

I'm not sure either why atheists hang around religion blogs, unless they happen to be genuinely concerned about the deleterious effects of religion on their fellow human beings or on themselves. There's also that thing about being treated as a despised class by religious people that might be driving some of that behavior.

The notion that ex-religionists may be rejecting religion more than they reject god is conceivable, I suppose, but Daley seems to think that — James O'Keefe-like — he's honed in on the dirty secret at the core of atheism, when he's just speculating.

Let me speculate in turn: ex-religionists reject both god and religion, for pretty obvious reasons. After all, if your organization exists solely to propagate fairy tales, it's almost certainly going fall short of meeting genuine human needs. Fairy tales treated as real also offer a million different ways for institutional abuse to emerge, which I think the last couple of decades of revelations about (just as one example) profound wickedness at the heart of world Catholicism have made blatantly obvious.

I only pick on Catholicism because its sins are so baroque and the attempts to cover up so obscene and ineffective. Feel free to replace with your own favorite sect.

Daley's characterization of some atheists as saying "I hate god because he didn't give me a pony" is a weak and stupid argument, and he should be ashamed of himself for trotting it out. The absence of a prayed-for pony is certainly one way children set themselves on a path to liberating themselves from religion as they mature intellectually, but I wouldn't think it's meaningful in adults' lives. With regard to natural vs supernatural, I wasn't aware that any religion ascribed the doings of their god(s) as "natural" in this context. Whether I have the necessary information to tell the difference between science and magic really isn't relevant here. Any sufficiently advanced technology (to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke) is indistinguishable from magic . . . and that fact is meaningless in determining whether there's magic loose in the world or not.

Chalk up another red herring for Mr. Daley.

And advances in our understanding of how the human brain works — as in the "conflict" between rational and irrational — are again irrelevant to Daley's argument. Belief in the actuality of fictional beings is not one of those things that's at some imaginary border between rational and irrational — that's flatly an emotional point of view, and hence "irrational."

And thanks, Mr. Daley, for telling me that I'm "deaf" to god, and that's why I can't hear him. I'll go all the way: not only am I deaf to god, but I can't see, taste, smell, measure, communicate, or experience any effect whatsoever from "god." And as a practical matter, the only sensible thing to do is to live my life as if there were no god (and no white crows, leprechauns, or Nigerian bank managers wanting to make me rich). Thanks for clearing that up.

As for myself, I don't haunt religious sites looking to pick a fight. I consider the truly religious unreachable by reason so I don't even try. But when they insist on making public policy based on their favorite fairy stories, or insist that my society's leaders all profess obeisance to some fictional character or the other, then I push back.

Believe what you want, but don't try to use your beliefs as an excuse to claim ownership of the public square. From my point of view, there's no there there, and those of us who don't care to share your stories resent your assumption that we're missing out on anything but a shared delusion, and that your delusion earns you superior moral, ethical, or societal position.