Best summed up in the words of Vivekananda: 'When we have nobody to grope towards, no devil to blame, no personal god to carry our burdens. When we alone are responsible; then we shall rise to our highest and best.'

In addition, I could say, along with Einstein, that 'if there is anything in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it'.

Now, in light of the above, and the below, for that matter, I don't want anybody to think that I am some stubborn, hard-headed or hard-hearted unbeliever, but can honestly say that I would readily convert if given some decisive proof of the existence of supernatural entities (who wouldn't?).
It is simply my view THAT THERE IS ENOUGH EVIDENCE to justify DISBELIEVING in God, gods, or any other form of supernatural entity.

But my atheism is only about what I don't believe.
I do believe in a lot of other things, but I keep such beliefs in strict proportion to the evidence, recognizing that any appeals to faith (at least in the sense of that word used by theists) by its very invocation is a transparent admission that religious claims cannot stand on their own two feet.

On a more positive note (and I am fundamentally a positive person), one of the truly most moving and inspirational things that I have read in a long time - and which pretty much sums up my own spiritual position and motivations, although I could not have expressed it as eloquently - is to be found in Richard Dawkins wonderful book, 'Unweaving The Rainbow', wherein he writes: 'The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music or poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite...I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.'

Amen to that, Richard.

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