Respect atheists says cardinal...
Apparently religious folks are responsible for the decline in faith because they have been treating god as a "fact in the world" - that's according the crusty cardinal Cormack Murphy O'Connor. You see the problem is that you apparently can't treat imaginary gods as if they were real without sounding, well, a bit whacky.
Instead he was arguing for keeping the mystery and his coup de grace was explaining that his god also existed for atheists too, it's just that they didn't recognise it. He explained (though that's really stretching the meaning of the word to the limit) that a life without religion was dangerous and used Hitler and Stalin to frighten the children. He tried to imply that a secular society would end up like Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.
But then, as if not really being convinced of the strength of his argument, he declares that "To believe in god is not unreasonable." Errr, yes it is!
The big problem with any arguments with theists is that they dispense with reason in the first breath - it's a faith thing and therfore does it does not have to meet the rigorous standards of reasoned argument and it reduces to "I believe because I believe because..." As Dawkins pointed out, there are no other areas of human dialogue where such positions would be taken seriously.
In the political arena where such claims are the expression of blind prejudice, they start wars. Take for example the belief that Blair and Bush had about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no evidence but they didn't need it, because they were guided by that alluring vagueness called faith, and as we all know, nothing fails quite like faith.
The whole point of the movement called the Enlightenment was to subject claims to reasoned testing, to free people from irrational leaps of faith which often had dire consequences. Instead of killing people who became ill, under the medieval backwardness of belief in devils, we started to make medical advances, to study the symptoms, try to identify causes.
Instead of the cardinal offering patronising and disingenuous respect for atheists, he would be better advised to try to improve his ability to reason rationally, to question faith wherever it appears and to promote scepticism, and above all, to respect the advances in knowledge brought about by the very rationality he fears so much.
Cardinal, witch doctor, shaman, and crystal-selling new age mystic merchant... they all have the characteristic that they've dispensed with reason. You wouldn't want any of them making decisions that affected you.
