Atheism...

Atheism is not certainty; it is the rebuttal of certainty. Atheists don't know – and most don't claim to know – that there is no God. This is a proposition which can neither be verified nor falsified. Trying to prove that a supernatural being doesn’t exist is a fool’s errand, and trying to prove that an absentee God does exist is an assignment too taxing even for the most eminent of theologians. While evaluating these possibilities we should keep in mind the maxim, promoted by Christopher Hitchens, that “what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”.    
     Without any leverage as effective as the threat of damnation, atheists must fall back, instead, on persuasive arguments. Atheism requires no special protection against recrimination or ridicule, and atheists should always be willing to subject their ideas, opinions and intuitions to a critical review. While the righteous have invented terms – heresy, blasphemy, apostasy, etc – to stigmatise those who don’t share their beliefs, atheists neither require nor demand such ideological conformity. The only commitment to orthodoxy that we might expect from atheists is their determination to find better explanations for the way the world works, and a reluctance to be taken in by con-artists, charlatans and snake-oil salesmen in this life or the next...