First comment (slightly edited):

(Addressing the Raving Atheist's metaphorical example): ”Christians don’t believe in the Wizard of Oz -- is that non-belief their “religion”?)

Yes, but you know who wrote, produced and directed the Wizard of Oz. You have evidence of the actors that played the roles, and the exact soundstage it was filmed on. It is empirically true that it is a work of fiction, with roots not lost to the sands of time.

Now, while you can also apply this skeptical standard to religious tomes like the Bible (even without possessing all of the contrary evidentiary specifics, this comparison passes the logical smell test), many of the appropriate pieces of the puzzle are lost (authorship, for one). Still, I'd agree that this is a tenable comparison.

But, go one step further and address the existence of "God," a sweeping spiritual concept that can be independent of the tenets of a specific mythology - one that doesn't pass the Wizard of Oz test. A Creator. A Supreme Being, etc. From an evolutionary perspective, man has a natural proclivity to embrace worship of a higher power or a guiding spiritual concept. In addition, tabling the minutiae of written (man-made) mythologies that claim to know specifics about God's origin, character, flowing beard and six arms, etc., your Wizard of Oz comparison fails because we know exactly zero about such a supernatural force, except that historically, and from a perspective of evolutionary biology, man tends to be wired for "faith," and we have little in the empirical world that addresses the "why" of man's existence and purpose (which seems a fairly nagging question).

In this setting, without falsifiability of a higher power, I don't think that it's unreasonable to view militant (raving) atheism as a "faith" in the (strictly) tangible, the knowable, to the aggressive exclusion of everything that is not knowable. And the problem with this absolute materialism is, there is still a hell of a lot that is unknowable. Hence, an alternate hedged distinction of literal agnosticism sprinkled with detached atheistic tendencies seems slightly less "faith-based."

Second comment, responding to commenter "Sportin' Life's" unkind call of "bullshit" on my assertion that "From an evolutionary perspective, man has a natural proclivity to embrace worship of a higher power or a guiding spiritual concept:"

I call "bullshit" on calling "bullshit." Just one examination of this claim by noted cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (that actually doubts faith as a specific evolutionary adaptation, yet still effectively illustrates my point):

Do we have a “God gene,” or a “God module”? I'm referring to claims that a number of you may have noticed. Just last week, a cover story of Time magazine was called "The God Gene: Does our deity compel us to seek a higher power?" Believe it or not, some scientists say yes. And a number of years earlier, there were claims that the human brain is equipped with a “God module,” a subsystem of the brain shaped by evolution to cause us to have a religious belief. "Brain's God module may affect religious intensity," according to the headline of the Los Angeles Times. In this evening's talk, I want to evaluate those claims.

There certainly is a phenomenon that needs to be explained, namely religious beliefs. According to surveys by ethnographers, religion is a human universal. In all human cultures, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that ritual can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by a variety of invisible person-like entities: spirits, ghosts, saints, evils, demons, cherubim or Jesus, devils and gods.

All cultures, you might ask? Yes, all cultures. I give you an example of a culture we're well familiar with, that of the contemporary United States. The last time I checked the figures, 25% of Americans believe in witches, 50% in ghosts, 50% in the devil, 50% believe that the Book of Genesis is literally true, 69% believe in angels, 87% believe Jesus was raised from the dead, and 96% believe in a god or a universal spirit. You've got your work cut out for you!

So what's going on? In many regards, the human mind appears to be well-engineered. Not literally well-engineered, but it has the signs or appearance of engineering in the biologist’s sense. That is, we can see, think, move, talk, understand, and attain goals better than any robot or computer. You can't go to Circuit City and buy Rosie the Maid from "The Jetsons" and expect it to put away the dishes or run simple errands. These feats are too difficult for human-made creations, though they're things that a five-year-old child could do effortlessly. The explanation for signs of engineering in the natural world is Darwin's theory of (Natural) Selection, the only theory we've come up with so far that can explain the illusion of design in causal terms.

The question is, how can a powerful taste for apparently irrational beliefs evolve? H.L. Mencken said that “the most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It's the chief occupation of humankind.” This poses an enigma to the psychologist.

The fact that tendency towards "irrational" or spiritual belief is a human constant clearly raises evolutionary biology issues. And this is even observed among strident atheists, many of whom search out secular manifestations (political ideologies, causes, for example) to satisfy this universal human impulse to attain "meaning greater than oneself." Pinker doesn't completely buy it as an evolutionary "religious" imperative, as he states in his conclusion:

To sum up. The universal propensity toward religious belief is a genuine scientific puzzle. But many adaptationist explanations for religion, such as the one featured in Time last week, don't, I think, meet the criteria for adaptations. There is an alternative explanation, namely that religious psychology is a by-product of many parts of the mind that evolved for other purposes. Among those purposes one has to distinguish the benefits to the producer and the benefits to the consumer. Religion has obvious practical effects for producers. When it comes to the consumers, there are possible emotional adaptations in our desire for health, love and success, possible cognitive adaptations in our intuitive psychology, and many aspects of our experience that seem to provide evidence for souls. Put these together and you get an appeal to a mysterious world of souls to bring about our fondest wishes.

But while I find the particulars and information in his treatise very interesting, I find his contextual conclusion a bit semantical - he's arguing that evolutionary tendency toward religious belief is an indirect byproduct of various other adaptations tied directly to evolutionary biology. To which I say, "fine."

But given the muddled and complex nature of determining causality in specific behavioral traits related to evolutionary adaptation and the near universal drive towards belief in the irrational or spiritual across all cultures, his distinction is practically tenuous. It can be argued that it's terribly subjective, really, as we always make terribly subjective assumptions about how any human behaviorial traits are adaptive, and I repeat, these inferences about behavior are all based on a maddeningly complex set of biological and environmental factors.

So while a hubristic individual like (the commenter "Sportin' Life") might aggressively dismiss the idea that religion (or spiritual belief) is a trait supported by evolutionary validation, because, you know, (he's) terribly arrogant and all, in practical terms it's a nearly universal tendency among humans, and thus, from an argumentative standpoint, theists can point to a stunning catalogue of historical constancy to buttress their position about the importance (and derived credence) of faith.

And this puts atheists in an interesting position, as they opt out of the common methodology of fulfilling a rather compelling human tendency to believe in something that makes life "important," by lending the individual meaning beyond the "self."

Me personally? I sublimate tradional belief systems like the whole "Body of Christ," etc. mythology into collecting hummels of adorable children and animals. And as another example, perhaps it spiritually comforts a fellow like "Sportin' Life" to be a sneering punk.

Whatever successfully lends the individual place, purpose and peace, I suppose ...