sleepy jack

That's not true though. Atheism requires no faith whatsoever. It is natural, simple and instinctive and you need no intellectual justification to say "I believe in nothing." The intellectual justification falls purely on people who believe in magical deities, holy books and claim to know what happens in unknowable situations.

I also don't really understand how I make the assumption in my post that every person is a religious nut. You can't, without bastardizing and picking and choosing what you want to believe from whatever religious text you choose, reconcile faith with science. There is a conflict there; every religion makes claims about the way the world is and science explains it in terms that are contradictory to what is taught by religion. You can't say "I believe in Science but I also believe in birth without contraception, the ability of mammals to survive death, and other sorts of magic taught in the bible." Jesus and what faith says he did and Christians believe he did isn't something you can reconcile with the way the world works, according to science.

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SATCHMO

Your talking about two different forms of knowledge empirical and mythological. Something can truthful without being factual. There are plenty of Christians with strong faith who have enough intelligence to know that the book of Genesis is not a science textbook and shouldn't be treated as such, and yes many of them do believe in evolution. To clarify what I was trying to say in one of my earlier post you're making the assumption that every religious follower believes in a strict literal interpretation of their respective sacred text, i.e. a fundamentalist.and yes fundamentalism and fanaticism do represent everything that's evil about religion. But what's worse hardcore fundamentalist or a hardcore reductionism? Both are equally unyielding, and equally erroneous viewpoints.