none of the above

How do others feel about the RC? Hmmmmm.....I grew up an atheist in a very fundy/baptist environment, so of course it was heavily permeated with the Protestant critique of Catholicism. And I have to say this: the criticism is valid in almost all it SOCIAL (rather then theological) aspects.IOW, the concerns are: the massive hypocrisy of the wealthy church, the fetishisation of "saints", the overt power relationships between the shephard and the flock, the undeniable role the established church has played in the legitimisation of cruel and barbaric tyrants and kings. This is the church that proclaimed that poverty and excess were gods will and cannot be challenged.Religion is a con perpetrated on the gullible by the cunning. Catholicism is the most spectacularly succesful of these cons in christiantity.But all that said, I hate the protestants and the evangelicals more.

Ireland is very far from alone - you will recall that the RCC has been pilloried recently for covering up child molestation in America. In recent months, thousands of Spanish people demanded that the Pope excommunicate them as a protest against the Church's stance on contraception.But: while all of these are severe and important social problems, there is still a strand of philosophical sophistication in catholicism, shaky and intermittent as it may be. Relatively speaking, I find catholics easier to deal with in daily life than fundamentalists.My experience of the protestant faiths is that they are in fact much MORE fraudulent than catholicism; because the preacher is indeed relying much more on personal charisma, on saying what the audience wants to hear, in pandering to their prejudices and bundling all this small-town bigotry into a package called 'Gods Love'.

I take it a step further than that.I will go so far as to assert that not only have the above millions of adherents over thousands of years failed to produce any convincing evidence, but also that a resonable counter-theory can be advanced to explain the APPARENT existence of god (or at least, perception of the existence of god).To whit: that religion is a form, a mechanism, of social dominance and redistribution. This, to my mind, is a superior explanation of the observed "religion" phenomenon than speculation as to the existence of God or otherwise.Therefore, I'm quite hard on agnostics; I claim that they want to have their cake and eat it too. Due to the weakness of the evidence advanced by theists, I am not convinced that the very question of the existence of god is one we have a duty to explore, even for our own satisfaction. All we really need to explain is the occurrence of CLAIMS of the existence of god. Thus to me the agnostic is allowing their skepticism to prevent a commitment to one theistic position, but not allowing their skepticism to propose and alternative answer to the problem. The agnostic is thus to me a "crypto-theist" or something to that effect.

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Does her opinion carry weight with atheists? If so, then why does your opinion differ? If not, then why is her mug plastered all over the site? Are there competing "factions" of atheists?

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Not exactly. Atheists only share one thing in common - the rejection of religion. Therefore, there is no coordinated body of dogma which lays out atheism in an authoritative manner, nor is there likely to be. I can easily disagree with her or anyone elses opinion on what atheism is or should be becuase I am not bound into either a moral code or an institutional heirarchy.On Materialism:
I would disagree that classical Materialism died with modern science. There is nothing in formal Materialism that insists on absolute apparent causality or the explicability of the universe; the qualified modes of understanding we have developed since realising that the natural world was not as strictly and linearly poredictable as had been initially thought does not IMO undermine any of the principles of materialism; let alone Dialectical Materialism which actually relishes uncertainty makes a virtue out of necessity.