Look, any day now I'm going to drop a 3,000 word essay on youse all with obscure quotations, diagrams, never-before-heard arguments and a flavourless mush I call rootmarm. Promise. But in the meantime, read all of
this article - despite half of it kicking pseudo-leftist* butt rather than nutjob faith-u-likes - and ponder whether or not the following quote, although lacking the to-the-point appeal of our current tagline, sums up the rationalist viewpoint just about perfectly.
The first and all too often the last virtue of any of the monotheistic religions is faith, because it is faith that holds the flock together, and defines Us, inside, against Them, outside. But faith is not a virtue. Faith is credulity: the condition of believing things for which there is no reason. It is a vice, and it inevitably encourages other vices, including hypocrisy and fanaticism. It needs to be said, loudly, that it makes no more sense to talk of faith-based schools or faith-based education than it does to talk of superstition-based science or terror-based debate. There have, of course, been educated and enlightened people who profess faiths, but their education and enlightenment happened despite their superstitions, and not because of them. Faith is by its essence the enemy of education, which teaches people to base beliefs on reason and on reason alone.Gawd, it's like atheist pr0n.
*but please don't for a minute mistake me for a member of the "Decent Left".