What I haven't yet worked out, Thorne, and we can see den struggling with it too, is how you can, on one hand, say there's no way you can prove religions are false, yet on the other hand you call ministers of religion charlatans, and worse. You profess tolerance, yet want to be free of it.

Patronisingly, you say that people should be allowed to believe in whatever they believe in, but you condemn their leaders as utter frauds. Now the Buddha, Abraham, Zoroaster, Jesus and Mohammed might have each thought it a jolly clever ruse to make their followers think of them as divine, or divinely appointed, or in some other way connected to the greatest truth, so that people would follow them and do their bidding, or bring them food as they sat day-dreaming under the shade of a tree, but I think it is presumptuous of you to suggest that all religious leaders thereafter are knowingly colluding in the decption. Does not one of them have any faith? Not Calvin, or Luther? Not one of the popes or the rabbis or immans?

I think you are too sweeping.