I’m don’t consider myself a humanist so maybe I’m not the best person to reply. But for me personally, I go out of my way to learn and grow. Just because I’m an atheist and a skeptic, that doesn’t mean I don’t learn and take in new information on topics that I previously thought I understood. In fact as I near my 40th birthday, I realize I know very little in most areas and have much to learn in just about everything. So I still listen to arguments given for all kinds of things.

Unfortunately I’ve yet to hear anything original by anyone when it comes to religion or any kind of god.

Since I was quite religious as a child, I feel I’ve grown up and educated myself to be able to shed religion and faith. Why would I re-embrace ignorance and fear-driven submission to men and an invisible man in the sky again?

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t be quite interested to have someone answer every one of these questions honestly and accurately. That would make things very interesting to say the least. But from my personal experience, and from everything I’ve learned over the years, there just is not a single speck of proof for a god.

So, giving a religious person the chance to convert me? They do it nearly every day.

Wouldn’t it be neat if religious people would be thoughtful enough to give someone a chance to DE-convert them?

Also, this seems to imply that humanists deny any attempt to accept information that doesn’t agree with them? Perhaps I’m just reading into the sentence though.

I welcome any further thoughts.

You are also not completely aware of the pederasty of ancient Greece. First off, copulation with the young was seen as something barbaric and shameful. And even then, it was rarely anal penetration–it was typically femoral. But I fail to see how this relates to the overall numbers of sex crimes. Rape was still outlawed after all.

A more accurate quibble would be over population. Lower population typically equates to less crime. But even adjusting for percentage, it’s still much lower. Now the sex trade back then was of course vast, but going more into that makes a bigger point of how corrupt the biblical world was. If you wanted to argue the point, you’d have to argue the effects of the sex trade… which, behold, would benefit the original point against Christians anyways.

I do have a little quibble with it, though, relating to sex crimes in Ancient Greece. There were fewer sex crimes because a lot of stuff that we consider awful was legal back then, including rape and pederasty. Rape, from what I can tell, was really common.