The Atheist - Agnostic - Non religious thread

Semantically perhaps, but even then that's open to interpretation. The world is littered with obsolete gods, we no longer need Horus to move the sun across the sky or Zephyrus to make the wind blow for example, in fact there is whole host of obsolete gods we no longer need that we've retired and shipped off to the Elysian Fields rest home for out of work gods in Eastbourne. 

Paraphrasing the shouty post to "is mankind's need for god obsolete?" removes any possible chance of ambiguity and misinterpretation and the obvious answer to that is no, as you imply in your next paragraph, there are many people on this earth who need to believe in a god for whatever reason (whether he exists or not). In contrast there are also many atheists in this world for whom the concept of god is not required. For my own part I would say that my need for god is obsolete and that does not require any god to ever have existed for me to say that.

The 3,801 posts in this thread show atheists care to admit lots of things, least of all that many of us were born christian, (and in that religion-lottery if we had been born in a different part of the world we have been born into a different religion with a different god, and if we were born to different parents we could even have been born non-believers). So for some of us belief in god was something indoctrinated into us from a very early age. Through no choice of our own we were born "believers" whether we like it or not so understandably some atheists really did once believe that god was real and they also believed lots of other things that their religion had told them were true. Whether a god actually existed or not, the belief in that god was real enough ... and that's it: Gods do not have to exist for people to believe that they do.

lazland wrote: For billions of people around the world, of many faiths, God plays a big part in their lives. This is a matter of fact. It does not prove God exists, but it does prove a massive belief in such a supposition.

[see above.] Furthermore, the need for a god must exist for us to have created one, in pretty much the same way as the need for the tooth fairy must have existed for us to have created one.

lazland wrote: I have said before on this, and other, threads, the belief that God does not exist is as much a belief system as that which states that he does.

And in my (literally) 100s of posts in this thread I have gone to great length to explain how and why atheism isn't, and cannot be, a belief system.