I suspect that most believers I know, have feelings of distrust of the prosperity theology preachers on tv that gsxrace does. But I agree with another post above, saying that you can't paint that broad a brush so broad to include everybody who does it.
On the atheism as a religion, I'd vote yes on that for a couple of reasons. It is a religious view. And I'm certain it takes more faith to hold that position than it does to believe what I believe.
OUr existence screams design. And all the evidence we have about how creation functions, would exclude not having God. When you hear the absurdity of those, confronted with the contradictions of believing that there used to be nothing, and out of that came not just things, but life and love and sex? It's beyond preposterous. They are more willing to believe that aliens from other worlds planted us here. And of course the same problems arise from the existence of the aliens. But for the God haters, that is without any foundation, but more believable for them, than the God who communicated with us, in our limited ability to comprehend compared to Him.
It's not that in life, that I guess gsx thinks, that somehow an amoeba came to be out of non living goo, and then we somehow came to be from that. But that the complementary person, either the female or the male also only needed several billion years to make it happen. It takes a whole lot more faith to believe that. (And he has no possible explanation for the goo.)
I mean for generation two to happen, then the parents of generation one had to be perfectly there at the same time in history and place. Her eggs had to be sitting there waiting to be fertilized when his sperm know just how to get there.
And even the great atheist Stephen J Gould recognized and admitted in some later writings that marco evolution is not in the fossil record. He just knew that it had to be true, because he'd already presupposed that God was a figment of some long ago imagination.
Atheism has become the official religion of the United States government. And I know what the Constitution is supposed to say about that.
