Having just caught up on several days here, I think people are largely in violent agreement.
(Most of) those of us who call ourselves atheists are actually agnostics, in that we know we cannot conclusively prove the absence of any and all deities. Even Dawkins says as much. How about if the religious/spiritual people here accept that in exchange for my/our acceptance that not every religious person asserts their beliefs are factually true and are sufficient justification for public policy or injurious acts to others?
This is distinct from rejecting the tenets of specific religions, as I often do. This is a distinction many (but not all) adherents fail to make. I've lost count of those (usually Christian, since I live in the USA) who've told me "how do you really know there isn't something greater than yourself?" Perhaps this is understandable since they already think their own religion is the only correct one, so it's either that or nothing.
If you want, think of me as anywhere between "atheist" and "deist" because I believe those positions are all consistent with what we observe around us. The Abrahamic religions, on the other hand, are in my opinion inconsistent with observation (and logic) and that's why I reject them. I think it telling that when deism was popular several centuries ago, many people with Abrahamic beliefs considered it equivalent to "hard" atheism. And ironically, many fundamentalists now see religious terms in the writings of the founding fathers (many of whom were deists) and jump to the conclusion, against all evidence, that they must have believed and advocated exactly as the fundies now do, that the US was a "Christian Nation" and all that nonsense.
Basically, there's a whole lot of equivocating going on.
