I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm - not all - that religion used to fill.

Few would argue that Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous atheist, especially now that his friend and rival for the title, Christopher Hitchens, has now gone to meet his Maker.

John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's.

I'm an atheist but I'm very relaxed about it. I don't preach my atheism but I have a huge amount of respect for people like Richard Dawkins who do.

One of Dawkins' major gripes is against religion. I am in total agreement on that one. I abhor religion.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds ' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Few would argue that Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous atheist especially now that his friend and rival for the title Christopher Hitchens has now gone to meet his Maker.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.