Zombie, you know the really interesting thing here, you are the one calling theists idiots. Almost every post you wrote in this thread has mentioned how wrong religion is and how ignorant it is to believe in a god, and at the same time you say religious people are the ones spreading hate. You have also spent a fair deal of words talking non sense about pink elephants and little men named Fred. Somebody here said it takes as much faith not to believe in a god as it does to believe in a god. We have faith in God, but you have faith in science. There are a lot of things science cannot explain, and there are many theories in science that change over time. Science is all study done by man. All those text books are written by people, they are based off study, observation, and research, and they are mostly quite accurate. But science is so full of theories. Everything about the existence of the earth and how it came into being, it is all just theory. You say there is no such thing as a god until it is proven otherwise, and since there is no way to prove there is a god then he doesn't exist. Just as the pink elephant in your basement doesn't exist until it is proven otherwise, which I think is a pretty lame analogy but I think you were trying to make a point that belief in a god is just as lame. If you keep bumping into some unseen object while in your basement doing laundry, perhaps there might be a reason to believe in Pinky (do you mind if I call your elephant Pinky?), but as it is it is just an assumption based on nothing. I think the existence of the earth is enough evidence to give the hint that there could possibly be an intelligent being who created the universe. Everything in the universe fits so perfectly together. It seems very unlikely for this to have come by mere chance. You see religion as a reason to hate and a reason to explain thing we don't understand. But even with science, what you would call truth and facts, get a room full of 50 scientists, even fifty prominent ones who have contributed to texts books and journals, and let's get them to agree on the origin of the universe.

You said,
"Ignorance to such basic factual knowledge is bad for the progress of society."

Close mindedness is also ignorance. My grandfather believed that scientist made up dinosaurs to prove the theory of evolution. That is ignorance. I agree a lot of religious people today (and in the past like my grandfather) stick their fingers in their ears and yell when you give them scientific fact that they feel threatens there faith. But the fact is there are a lot of very well educated theists who find no conflict between God and science. I have several friends who are scientists, and many of them are theists. They have no problem believing in science and God at the same time. It is not true that the two are incompatible. You will find that if you read the Bible you will be hard pressed to find scientific inaccuracies or historical inaccuracies. If your idea that belief in God is sheer ignorance, then no educated person would be a theist. We would have all the upper-class educated people being atheists, and all the trailer park, low class, uneducated people dumbly believing in God. This however, is not the case at all. I happen to think close mindedness is bad for the progress of society. Anyway, I am not really wishing to make a fight, it is just annoying how you openly insult people who believe in God. You believe what you will, I have plenty of atheist friends and I wouldn't hold it against you. But you really shouldn't belittle people just because they believe differently than you. It is good to see things from more than one point of view, and it can be a great insight to have friends with an extremely different world view than yourself. It helps you understand the world better. Also, don't worry, progress of society won't be impeded by religious people. It has not been and it won't be. Also I am willing to bet that religious people have made as many contributions to society over the history of the world as atheists have been. I would love to see an example of them holding back the progression of society today.