In this world that we live in, we have been left a social and cultural legacy of religion, or spiritualism - Narratives that have grown up around the human, primate need for a satisfactory explanation, coupled with the fear of the unknown, and, over the centuries,driven by a bunch of likely lads and lasses who have noted that being a high priest of a religion is a nice indoor job with no heavy lifting and more than a few material benefits and perks.
As we have matured as a species, and exercised the brains we have, the world, the universe, and its creation have become matters of interest, and we have a wealth of evidence that shows us, more or less, the chronology and the manner of development of the the universe and life itself. This is the scientific method, and using it has enabled us as a species to achieve quite remarkable things.
We do have this legacy though, hanging around like an atrophied appendix within the body of our society - a legacy based upon fear of the unknown, and murderously suspicious of change. That legacy promotes much of the bad stuff that happens around the globe - ethnic cleansing, the spanish inquisition, mass murder, terrorism, suicide bombers, murder of doctors, blasphemy, apostasy, patronising patriarchy, shackling of womens rights, torture of children who are supposedly possessed by evil spirits - all of this stuff can be linked to fervent religious and / or spiritual belief. Many thousands, maybe millions, have died or been made miserable by the demands of religion and the faithful.
And we still get statements like "god is all around us", or "god is love", or god is all-seeing, all powerful - but this belief is based entirely upon faith - belief in the absence of any shred of evidence beyond the anecdotal, and we rationalists are expected to respect such thinking? Indeed, those of faith are proud of having faith - proud that their belief transcends or ignores the facts, the science, the evidence! Why, precisely,should such thinking and such attitudes be afforded any respect at all?
If you posit the idea that your particular flavour of God (and remember kids, all these gods are different, and logically, only one of them could possibly be correct) is all powerful, all seeing, and able to interact with humanity beyond the rules and laws of physics in order to answer prayers or perform miracles, then you have to accept that all the bad stuff in the world comes from the same source - becuase an all powerful entity would be able to put a stop to all of that stuff, right?If not, then you saying that your all powerful god is either incapable of stopping the evil, ie not omnipotent, or they are an evil sadist, deliberately inflicting humanity with plague and worse, just to test our resolve, to test our faith? Either way, not a particularly edifying being to entrust your worship, your faith to, surely?
You cannot have it both ways. If God is real, then there should be empirical evidence to show that - there is not.
If God is able to answer prayers, and perform miracles, can you explain to me why it is that God hates amputees so much? How else can you explain why it is that your God has never seen fit to perform the simple miracle of allowing an amputee to grow back a limb?
Belief in a God is an anachronism, a leftover, withered, vestigial remnant of our fear and xenophobia; a true sign of the maturity of our species is when religion is consigned to the dustbin of history for good.
"Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion" - I wish I could properly attribute this - cannot recall now who was the originator of this particular meme..