"Religious belief of all kinds shares the same intellectual respectability, evidential base, and rationality as belief in the existence of fairies."

A fine quote from this most worthwhile essay by A.C. Grayling, criticizing religious belief as a practice and analyzing the roots of the "quarrel" between believers and atheists. Grayling, along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, argued for the atheists' side in a debate in England on March 27, which ended in a decisive victory for non-belief. The premise of the debate was "We'd be better off without religion." And it carried by audience vote, 1205 to 778. Arguers for theism — Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey — found themselves thoroughly pwned. Seriously, America is slipping into becoming an intellectual third-world country compared to the UK and Europe.