Do I believe God created the Universe and all it contains? Yes.
Do I believe he did it in 7 days 6,000 years ago? Not so sure.
All current physical evidence points toward an extremely old universe. I love to study scientific advancements and the universe around us. God Created an incredibly complex Universe and every new thing that is discovered makes me say WOW, look at how wonderful this creation is.

I don’t expect any of you to respect a religion for sake of it being a religion. I guess I come from the mindset that people deserve respect and courtesy unless they do something to warrant disrespect.

If you were debating the validity of string theory, it would be inappropriate to call your opponent childish because their opinion is different than yours. It doesn’t support or oppose any point and it doesn’t add to the conversation.

I have no problem with debating my beliefs or buddhism in general. I have no problem with people scrutinizing religion. I’ve attempted to come into this with an open mind. As a religious minority, I likely deal with as much crap as the rest of you. However, it’s difficult to have respect for people who refuse to respect me. It’s difficult to listen to people ask for respect for their beliefs while they are disrespecting others.

In many ways I share the same opinions as the people here. Hell, I’m a buddhist who lives across the street from Mt. Zion Christian Academy. Last year they put a anti-terrorism sign becaue they’re not only too stupid to realize that 99.999% of muslims aren’t terrorists, they can’t even tell the difference between buddhism and islam.

The freedom from religion issue isn’t just a problem with atheists. Maybe, you can talk to some of the others affected without calling them childish, loony, sensless, intolerant, etc. Those are hardly words I would expect find in a scientific or constrcutive critique. If anything, a group of people engaged in science should be able to put aside personal issues to addres a real problem. But then again, that’s what the video was about to start with.

If you can find a sailor who has never seen any evidence of land, I’ll be frankly amazed. I think that for the most part, we *can* take an absence of evidence as evidence of absence, given how long we’ve been looking.

As for agnosticism, it deals with a subtly different question: atheism involves a claim about one’s belief about the existence of a god or gods; agnosticism is a claim about whether or not one can know that a god or gods exist. It is therefore possible to be both an agnostic and a theist, or an atheist and not an agnostic (I wish there were a decent opposite of ‘agnostic’ given that ‘gnostic’ means something completely different).

If someone elects to identify themselves as an agnostic*, that strikes me as a bit of a cop out for a couple of reasons. The first is that theism is a positive position: the belief in a god or gods. Atheism is a rejection of that position. If your answer to the question “do you believe that a god or gods exist?” is anything other than “yes,” you’re an atheist — i.e.: you have fallen short of the position of theism. The second is that to claim that it is impossible to know anything with “absolute certainty” (as Bill Maher rather infuriatingly does often) is an equivocation of the term “knowledge” — outside of mathematics or formal logic, this kind of knowledge is impossible. Saying that it isn’t possible to know with absolute certainty about specific things isn’t really saying much of anything because it isn’t possible to be that certain about anything else, either.

“Real” knowledge (i.e.: knowledge about real-world phenomena) is based solely on interpretation of available evidence. Given that there is absolutely no evidence for any of the theistic positions, to ’sit on the fence’ and still try to claim some objectivity strikes me as silly. Are you ‘on the fence’ for all mythical beings for which there is no evidence? Come on down off the fence and join the evidence-based community. ; )

* I should point out that most of my friends and several among my family do identify themselves as agnostic but they could more accurately be described as apatheists — they really don’t care one way or the other. One could argue that this is also kind of a cop out.

Kind of like how racial discrimination will be dead when you get a black president.

This basic respect for each other’s beliefs is what I love most about being an American.

Nope. The “respect” is for people’s right to hold beliefs, not for the beliefs. To suggest that someone else’s beliefs should be respected merely because they hold them is antithetical to skepticism and is a pernicious distortion of what I love best about being an American: The right to say of someone else’s beliefs, “That’s loony.”