> Holding onto faith in creationism and other religion-based myths is holding many people back from understanding what real evidence we have about the world.

When did I say that all religion was good or that faith never caused any harm? The thesis I was arguing against was that someone who has faith or mentions god is suddenly less capable of rationality.

> If you want to go to the extreme of arguing that using evidence as a justification for believing (or not believing) in something is an act of faith

No this is not what I said. To paraphrase myself: There are ideas and concepts that go beyond physical reality, for which there is neither evidence for or against. People choose to believe one way or another for personal reasons, neither one is more rational. It makes a lot of self-proclaimed rationalist atheists wriggle and squirm, but if you truly believe that you can only believe things based on evidence, then you can not believe God does or doesn't exist, because God is a concept which is greater than our physical powers of observation.

Even if your try to invoke Occam's Razor, it all comes down to definitions, which of course is tough to pin down when it comes to something like God. You can define God literally as a bearded man in a throne and then it seems unlikely. You can define God as just one thing, anything, which is above our cognitive capacity, and then it seems likely.

And maybe you think I'm just playing games here, but I'm not. People are important. People's inspiration is important. Being able to say "I think there is a purpose to the universe" is an important thought to some people. Those people might even do great things that you admire (like, say, invent Perl). To come around and just flip the loony bit on because someone mentions the G word is not quite so cooly rational as said individual would like to believe.

I'm not here arguing for religion, I'm arguing for the fair judgement of an individual's true quality.