Richard Dawkins

I am a great admirer of Richard Dawkins (official homepage here) but when I listened to his talk at the TED conference I was finding myself to disagree with him on his final point of being a more militant atheist. Dawkins is most famous for his anti religion stanz and his fight against creationists and intelligent design which I wholeheartedly agree with but in that talk he said that we atheists should stop being so damn tolerant and be more militant in our views. I interpret that in that way that we should start to be some kind of missionaries for atheism (or agnostic, whichever you want to call it) and try to convert believers into non believers. No thank you very much, I say let the people have their own faith in private. But I do agree in the way that we should not be shy about it, we should talk about our atheism and if people are willing to hear it explain why we don't believe. If we don't then religious people will dominate the discussion and "uninformed" people will hear just the religious point of view which is not good, there has to be a counterweight.

By the way, at TED there are a lot of nice talks (and not so nice, its a matter of personal taste and what you think is interesting), so if you find the spare time, have a look at a few of them.