Over at Light of Reason, Arthur Silber is hosting a great multi-post, multi-day discussion on theism and atheism.

I’ll add my two nickels. (Inflation, you know.)

As readers of this site know, I’m an atheist – but I’m hardly hostile to religion. To steal something my father wrote twenty years ago: “I believe god is an invention of Man, for Man.

I don't look down on those who have religion. Hell, I oftentimes envy them. Judaism has kept a persecuted minority extent for 5,000 years, much of that without a homeland. Christianity made a great ethical leap -- away from the tribe and towards the individual – that made much of later human progress possible. Islam kept alive much knowledge that an entrenched Christianity had abandoned, saving us centuries of backwardness.

There is much to admire in the Big Three monotheist religions, and even more when one adds the practical wisdom of Buddhism and the untrammeled sexuality of Hindu beliefs.

As a very small child, I pictured God as a sort of King of the Monsters. There was Dracula, who would drink your blood; the Werewolf, who would bite or kill you on the full moon; the Mummy who would haunt you in the unlikely chance that you disturbed his tomb on the sets of several so-so Boris Karloff movies for Paramount Pictures; and there was God, the good guy monster who, if you said your prayers, would protect you from the icky monsters.

So I outgrew god at the same time I outgrew my fear of the boogeyman under the bed.

And by saying so, I am not trying to impugn religious faith as something as silly as fear of the Closet Creepies. I’m simply describing the process I went through.

In fact, one reader emailed me to tell me I’m an atheist only because god hasn’t decided it’s time yet for me to Believe. And that’s fine with me – maybe someday He/She/It will give me faith. I’m not holding my breath, mind you, but I took the email in the same kind spirit (no pun intended) in which it was meant.

What I am hostile to is religion as an entrenched bureaucracy, protecting its most deviant little bureaucrats from prosecution for molesting children. I am hostile to religion entrenched as a political system, engaging in barbaric attacks on civilians to mask its own, richly deserved, failures. I am hostile to religion as a modern, political lobby group, twisting our arms on teaching science, treating homosexuals as lesser beings, or forbidding our libraries from shelving inconvenient books.

In other words, I welcome organized religion, so long as it adheres to the same standards of civilized society that everyone else has to live up to.