We live in exciting and dangerous times.

Exciting - because we understand so much more about the world today
than we ever have before.  We live in an immense cosmos that is 13.7
billion years old, a cosmos that is made up of an enormous number of
fundamental particles.  The particles come together to form about 100
chemical elements that make up everything in your bodies and this
room.  We live in a solar system that came into being from the ashes of
dead stars 4.54 billion years ago.  Earth, our home, orbits a sun that
warms us through the reactions of nuclear fusion and will continue to
do so for billions of years.  All life is intimately related, having
descended from a single living thing that arose about 3 billion years
ago.  We and the apes share a common ancestor that lived in Africa
about 5 million years ago.  All people are truly brothers and sisters,
sharing the same genetic heritage.

We know these things not because of prayer, or religious revelation, or
sacred texts, or meditation, or sacrificing of goats, or altered states 
of consciousness, but because generations of scientists weren't afraid to
question the dogmas of previous generations, sometimes losing their
lives or their liberty in the process.

Our scientific picture of the universe is now far grander and subtler than
anything conceived by the authors of the Old Testament, the New
Testament, and the Koran.  And there is so much more to be discovered.
Inner space -- the understanding of the brain and its functions -- has
given us a picture of interacting subsystems, shaped by evolution, that
may eventually give us a scientific understanding of religious belief,
free will, and other conundrums that have baffled philosophers for ages.

But we live in dangerous times, too.  We are now confronted with
threats more serious than ever before.  The threat of global climate
change, bringing significant disruptions to our lives, hangs over us.
The plague of AIDS threatens to disrupt the entire continent of
Africa.  Nuclear proliferation brings the spectre of mass destruction,
or a dirty bomb that could render major cities unliveable for thousands
of years.

Faced with these threats, what does fundamentalist religion offer us?
My opponent offers the absurd and grotesque image of the supposed
creator of the universe, the inventor of everything that ever was or
will be, unwilling or unable to aid us with these significant threats
to our survival, but ready to subdue agressive bulls or bring rabbits
back to life for the cost of a brief prayer.  The fundamentalist god is
one that is obsessively and intrusively concerned with our sex lives,
but apparently unwilling to allow us to perform experiments on stem
cells to make life better for the sufferers of disease.

When your model is wrong, you get the right answers only by accident.
As Sam Harris wrote

	We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words --
	"Jesus", "Allah", "Ram" - can mean the difference between eternal
	torment and bliss everlasting.  Considering the stakes here, it 
	is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary
	to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or 
	the right ones for the wrong reasons.  How can any person presume to
	know that this is the way the universe works?  Because it says so in
	our holy books.  How do we know that our holy books are free from
	error?  Because the books *themselves* say so.  Epistemological
	black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world.

I am a provisional non-theist, someone who has not been convinced
by the arguments of Christians, Jews, or Muslims for the existence of
supernatural beings.  But I am not the enemy of theists.   On the
contrary, if yours is a theism that is willing to acknowledge that your
conception of god might be wrong, that your belief in a supreme being
doesn't create any obligation on the part of non-believers, that your
holy books are human artifacts that may be read metaphorically or might
contain errors, that we should behave charitably towards our fellow
humans because it is the right thing to do, and not because of threats
of eternal torment -- then you are my brothers and sisters.  Let us go
and solve our problems by reasoning together, without relying on the
dogmas of past ages.  As Professor David Seljak of St. Jerome's
University said,

	Christians ought to remember that normal, thinking people do not
	automatically see the sense in their claims. Indeed believers ought to
	be a minority. Even Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians. "but we
	preach Christ crucified: ...foolishness to Gentiles". This stuff is
	supposed to sound crazy to you guys. After all, we Catholics believe
	that if we eat the flesh and blood of a Jewish zombie who died 2000
	years ago, our invisible friend in the sky will save us from death. :)
	Faith does not come "naturally"; that is why we call it a "gift". We
	should hardly be surprised when a number of people say, "no thank you,
	that sounds ridiculous." It seems to me that Christians should be a lot
	more humble about our truth claims and a whole heckuva lot more
	charitable to people who don't take them up."

But if your sect is the enemy of rationalism -- if it requires that
evolution be false, or that homosexuals be stoned or shunned or
forbidden to teach elementary school or adopt children, or if you agree
with Martin Luther that a lie that serves the one true Church is
ethically acceptable, or (as my opponent admitted at a presentation
here at Waterloo just a few months ago) that genocide is perfectly OK
if God ordains it, then you're part of the problem, not part of
the solution.   As Stephen Weinberg said, "With or without religion,
good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good
people to do evil---that takes religion."  Lacking common ground, you
can expect me, and other scientists, rationalists, atheists,
freethinkers, and agnostics, to oppose you every step of the way.

A new survey offers some faint hope.  A September 24 study by the Barna
Group, an evangelical pollster, shows that "among 16- to 29-year-olds
... a new generation is more skeptical of and resistant to Christianity
than were people of the same age just a decade ago" .

Will we remain children, consoled by the false promises of
fundamentalist religion, slavishly adhering to the 2000-year-old dogmas
of illiterate sheepherders, blindly following the prejudices and
bigotry of past ages, or will we go forward together as adults to stand
on our own, ready to face the future with reason and courage?  Let's
all pray that we make the right choice.