I think you need to compare the irreconcilable nature of the different faiths you acknowledge earlier in your post with the assertion you make that it is wrong to "impugn the testimony and honesty of millions who live lives of integrity." In your view do millions of Mormons lack honesty and integrity, or do millions of Roman Catholics lack honesty and integrity? After all their views are irreconcilable. Do millions of Atheists lack integrity?
WRT Mormons: I'd say that the core leadership lacks honesty and integrity, or is sincerely deceived. Deceit can be propagated.
WRT RCs, pretty much the same, except that the RC church is a LOT more intellectually honest than Salt Lake's "American Religion", so a lot more people at or near the top are going to be aware of the problems/realities. One of my favorites is Aristotelianism, which has come to hold a higher authority in the RC Church than does the Bible or the Fathers, which has brought them to conclusions that even a large portion of their clergy find ridiculous, though publicly they have to endorse them (excellent example: a survey of the beliefs of RC priests, including monastics, back in the 80s showed that a slight majority do not actually believe in transubstantiation).
Atheists? I'd say they've reached a conclusion without sufficiently considering the problem. Many are misled by the antics of such hypocrites as Dawkins, who privately, if you read his statements, is actually an agnostic, but publicly quite rudely and arrogantly damns all religious people as fools (odd, since he certainly knows that there are more than a few religious people among Nobel Prize winners).
I am comfortable stating without any arrogance, that the views of millions of sincere people are truly empty. Wrong. Occasionally not just incorrect but fully the opposite of correct. Many millions more hold views that are vanishingly unlikely.
I'd go there, though not publicly except in cases that need to be denounced, such as radical Islam -- a system which not only is internally inconsistent if the Quran is its authority, but one which goes against any reasonable conjecture of how a Creator might be expected to interact with His children.
As regards Christianity, and following up on the blindness remark, I accept that Christianity is evidence-based and that "people encountered things that overwhelmingly convinced them that X is the truth. " My view is that they ought not to have been convinced. My view is that they have relied on evidence of the same calibre as Fleischmann and Pons had when they announced they had discovered
cold fusion.
I have from time to time pondered the things in my own experience that I cannot deny, and asked if they point without possibility of exception to Christ. That's a discussion I won't go into here, except to say that they were things I was neither pursuing nor expecting -- which lends weight that they point to
something.
And I don't deny the plausibility of Christianity because atheism has a policy of not wanting there to be a god - there's no such wish. I deny it because the evidence doesn't seem very good to conclude otherwise.
Which leads to a question asked by many Christians: if You gave me sufficient evidence, why not others? (compare the theologian's dilemna, cur alii prae allis)
The issue of terminology is keenly debated amongst atheist-types. A lot of it has to do with the ambiguity and inconsistent usage of the term "Agnostic." As the term was first explained to me, and in its original meaning, I look to Oxford
I don't agree with that type of agnosticism. It is a "limits" question in math. As the probability of knowing anything whatsoever about the reality of god's existence tends toward zero, the relevance of god's existence also tends toward zero. A hypothetical god can hide from our awareness by making no interventions, leaving no footsteps, having no bearing on anything real, exercising the utmost impotence, and he would thus make himself functionally non-existent. It seems pointless but I suppose it falls within the divine prerogative to cease to exist.
However any divine stirring, any intervention, any observation, would also undermine the classical agnostic point of view. So I reject the idea that we cannot know. We might not know now. And, exceptionally, we might never know, though as far as I can see, that rounds down to "he's not there."
One of my favorite agnostics was a physics professor who avidly watched students' lab work for one done right but turned out... well, not wrong so much as contrary to prediction. He maintained that we really only have accumulated statistical evidence that the laws of science are what we say they are, so he kept watch for something indicating our error. He had all sorts of speculations on why or how they might not be universal, but at the end he came down to the same statement he made about God: "At the moment, I don't know".
So he wasn't a "classical" agnostic, believing that humans can't know; like Captain Kirk staying civilized, he just didn't know
today.
He also had some entertaining speculations on why God might not be noticeable just now.
One last question: who is the arbiter of what is true?
Among humans? Reason. Contrary to common opinion, reason applies to scripture as much as to the latest ballistics information about North Korea's newest missile.
