So you’re certain that Christians can’t be certain, but you can be?

“Compassion” is not compatible with a theory that purports survival of the fittest/strongest. Evolution says might is right and the weak will die out – so having compassion on the poor and under privileged contradicts this world-view.

Why though, would a loving God force someone to spend eternity with him in heaven if they reject him and want nothing to do with him? That sounds far more capricious than a God who offers life through Christ to those that believe.

What you call a “modest transgression” is a decision to reject God and his heaven so surely a greater transgression would be to forcefully push someone into heaven who made a decision they wanted nothing to do with God.

Nonsense. Disbelief is the absence of belief. It is the default position. It doesn’t take any faith whatsoever to say that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist. Nor does it take any faith to say there is no historical evidence that Jesus existed either, or that prayer never works.

“everyone accepts that you take a risk (ie step of faith) to believe or not believe in God”

Again, utter rubbish. Atheism is not even a belief, let alone faith.

“existence of universal fine tuning”

Do you guys never think of a new argument? Fine tuning is just teleology in drag, and it’s been utterly discredited. The universe is hardly fine-tuned for life.

“existence of human rights – contradicts evolutionary theory”

Rubbish. That we have the capacity for reason and compassion is not in dispute, and from there, human rights, contraception, the welfare state and many other human inventions that diverge from out evolutionary heritage are easy to understand. The evolution of these capacities is still not fully understood, but there are many excellent and highly plausible hypotheses. A single plausible naturalistic hypothesis is always enough to debunk infantile ‘god of the gaps’ arguments like this one.

“You realise that whereas you can reason to a point of probability, it takes personal commitment to get to certainty”

I realise no such thing. Absolute certainty is a red herring. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of epistemology can see that absolute certainty on the question of the existence of gods is unattainable for both theists and atheists. However, the arguments for existence are so incredibly poor and the evidence utterly non-existent. On this basis we can conclude that gods are as real as leprechauns, faeries and Thetans, and for all practical purposes we can be sure they don’t exist.

Nearly half of the Malagasy are Christians, which attests to the value you place on evidence.

Aside from that, explain how a believer can consider it reasonable to call Jesus (the Way, the Truth, and the Life) ‘good’, when he makes it perfectly clear that 55% of Malagasy are to be tortured for all eternity, for the modest transgression of not believing any of your nonsense?