Admittedly, I come at this from the direction of clergy, and in general if someone starts up a conversation with me about athiesm, its to try to cheese me off. Almost inevitably, this person has less of a grip on his/her material than a freshman Philosophy student has on Sartre, and so I hear them out, smile, and shrug.

After all, they could be right.

That's the thing a lot of people don't get about faith. If I could prove my position, I wouldn't believe anything, I would KNOW it. An important distinction, in these matters. So I smile, and keep on keeping on, and someone looking for a fight gets angry because their way of attacking my faith is a lot like punching a pillow. Their dents don't last long.

A couple of my best friends are Agnostic, and are insulted by Atheism, as they see it replacing one dogma with another. Atheists may not be faithful, but they sure as hell are dogmatic. So are a lot of religious people. Dogmatism is a pretty big club, so it turns out.

So I smile, and keep caring for the sick, the poor, and the desperate on the orders of a Jewish Carpenter who, if he lived, lived more than 2,000 years ago.

That seems to be what really gets to them, after all.