Christopher Hitchens (as quoted by dgp):
"Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason.
"...what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake....
".....We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mistery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books....
".....We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse.
...We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion.
"...Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement.
"...We atheists do not require any priests, or hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another..."
Thank you, dgp, for Hitchens' eloquent exposition of atheism as nonbelief, but not devoid of goodness and hope.
Still waiting to hear from you, Christians. I can't make up my mind until I've heard both sides of this issue.