When I was a child I was the only person who didn't believe in God that I knew. Everyone else had either been born into one of the major brands of Christianity, or at very least they'd accepted, by a process of social osmosis, the idea of God, even if they remained, for all practical purposes, indifferent.

And that's the good thing about the recent ascendancy of our belief, or rather our disbelief. For atheism does not presuppose, let alone impose, a set of views. All it does is unite us in religious scepticism about the existence of gods. Gods plural because, of course, even within one of the religious brands quite a few variations on God are made available.

So today is important because it tells people that atheism is all right. I didn't know it was all right. This greatly intensified my loneliness as a child. When I tried to tell my grandmother my doubts - I was raised by grandparents on a tiny farm -she boxed my ears. Ah, the solitary dissidents, the lonely thinkers, the people who may be the only disbeliever in a family or community. To that extent we need to borrow from our enemies and have some missionary zeal. Whilst we should avoid messiahs we need disciples to go out and spread the word and seek converts. But as I'll be arguing this morning we must also have to use our intellectual convictions to calm down the frenzies of faith.

I see some parallels here between atheism and homosexuality.'The love that dare not speak its name' as Oscar Wilde pronounced it. Leading to millions living their life in the closet. Atheism was, and to a large extent remains, the view that dare not speak its name. And it's only recently that I've observed atheists coming out. Finally confident enough to be, to borrow a gay slogan, loud and proud (Incidentally, spare a thought for gay atheists).

But in becoming prouder and louder I want to argue that we should not be too loud. And that we should not overestimate our importance as the tectonic plates of religion move slowly, rubbing against each other to cause mental and social earthquakes. By all means let us congratulate each other - but let us not fall prey to hubris.

The disintegration of many a previously monolithic faith cannot be attributed or credited to us. Roman Catholicism founders because conservative prelates have tried to undo the progress of Vatican II. The faithful refuse to comply with anachronistic instructions on the pill and the condom.

They're embarrassed by their Church's archaic stance on women and appalled by the ongoing attempts to cover up paedophilia scandals. Others bitterly resent the undermining of liberation theology - those valiant social justice campaigns. Or the stacking of the pulpits of Western Europe with arch conservative priests from Poland.

The woes of the Catholic Church are self inflicted. We've barely laid a glove on them. Ditto for the Anglican Church which is increasingly stacked to the rafters with agnostics while Australian Anglicanism and US Episcopalians self destruct over the issues of women priests and continuing ecclesiastic homophobia.

But even the foundering of major faiths doesn't necessarily swell our numbers. There's evidence that the major faiths have atomised, Balkanised into the ongoing nonsense of cults, the New Age and pseudo science. Religious energy, like energy itself, cannot be destroyed. It tends to morph into new forms.

Twenty years ago Dick Smith and I aided and abetted the creation of the Australian Sceptics, the local branch of CSICOP - the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP deals with displaced religiosity. Much of the loss of the market share for big brand religious beliefs was split up between the Pentecostalists with their shopping mall religions or the fast faith franchises, largely generated in California, right alongside the dream factory of Hollywood. Two worlds that overlap to an extraordinary extent.

Far from winning, the Sceptics and CSICOP have lost ground to Millenarian and Shirley Macleanish madness. Turn on cable or free to air telly and you'll see an ever increasing number of programs based on paranormal detectives while John Edwards and his fellow frauds talk to the dead. And the amount of space in newspapers given to astrology has by no means decreased. We live in a parallel universe to these people. The beliefs and behaviours that came from the Baptismal font in mainstream faiths have simply deformed and reformed.

Yes, atheism is on the march in the US, according to statistics. But we're starting from a very, very low base. And we should look across the census figures at the equally dramatic growth of Islam in the US. It's not coming from immigration but from conversion. Conversion within the prison system! Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali certainly started something.

So beware of triumphalism. Over the last half century I've learnt that my euphoria about atheism's progress, inevitable to us, about the advance of science leading to the retreat of God, was wildly optimistic. Yet the triumph of science, even in the scientifically triumphant US, has failed to convince the vast majority of Americans that evolution is a fact rather than a blasphemy.

Members of religions see atheists as their mortal enemies. Not immortal, of course, because atheists don't linger on through all eternity. We simply return to the nothingness that preceded our birth. Religions' immortal enemy is religion. We might shake our puny fists at the Vatican, at Islamic fundamentalism, at the religious right who turbo-charge the US Republican party - but it is the ancient and modern squabbles, the murderous contests between faiths and within them, that dwarf our dissent.

Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest of us are, at best, at worst, the most minor of irritants. The ancient and recent Christian crusades against Islam, the titanic struggle of the Protestant heretics against Mother Church, the recent internecine horrors in the Balkans, the genocidal hatred of the Jews incited by Martin Luther that evolved into Holocaust - these are the big stories. Savanarola was burnt at the stake by fellow Catholics - as was Joan of Arc. Atheists neither gathered the faggots nor fanned the flames. When religions are not at war with each other they tear themselves apart.

We cannot take the credit for the dramatic decline in religious observation in most Western nations. At last count, 90 per cent of Australian Catholics were not attending Mass. But that's not because of our arguments. It's because of their arguments with their priests, bishops and the more recent Popes, particularly those from Poland and Germany. Take us out of the equation and that rapid erosion will continue, perhaps accelerate.

It's even observable in the United States amongst the Pentacostalists. Just as the hippies were a reaction against stultifying and emotionally stunted parents, a great many children of US fundamentalists are shrugging off the dogmas of Mum and Dad. At very least they're moving at least fractionally towards the left. And American religious excess has certainly helped dim the flames of faith as far away as Western Europe. But it is important for us to realise - and let me borrow a couple of metaphors from the realms of cutlery - that it's self inflicted wounds that have done the most damage - particularly the Christian variants - than the cut and thrust of the atheists' arguments. We are, perhaps, the beneficiaries of this process but we cannot claim the credit.

Nor have we laid a glove on Islam or Hinduism. They are indifferent to us and our arguments. No, indifferent isn't the word, as in some Muslim countries our lives might well be at risk. You could argue, perhaps, that secular atheistic Jews are in constant conflict with the orthodox and ultra orthodox in Israel. Not that they seem to have won too many rounds (After all, Israel began its life as a secular state and, over the generations, has had to abandon territory to the religious right. They mightn't yield territory to the Palestinians but the religiously xenophobic don't seem to have lost much influence).

So perhaps we should reconsider our role, our allotted tasks, as people who believe in none of this nonsense we might see ourselves as honest brokers. Negotiate in their all consuming conflicts. Given our anthropological detachment from Messianic and Milleranian madness, from the boiling hatreds between Sunni and Shiia, we might share the role of the Norwegians. They're not particularly powerful or numerous but fight above their weight in hosing down dangerous situations. Confronted by rabid religiosity people who don't believe could try to ameliorate the hatreds of those who do. Mind you, you could mount an argument that that's exactly what the likes of us have been doing for the past few centuries. As to trying to convert the believer to disbelief - I tried that for the last half century and found it not only a fruitless but thankless task.

A confession I must admit to is being swept up in a religion as a teenager. I became, during the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its coldest and McCarthyism at its height, a member of the Australian Communist Party. I was 15 when I signed up and 18 when I was kicked out. And one of the reasons I lost my faith in atheistic communism was because it revealed itself as a parody of the Catholic Church. Catholicism had Rome, Communists had Moscow. Catholics had God the Father and his son Jesus. Communists had Karl Marx as God and Lenin as the saviour. They had the Bible, we had Das Kapital. They'd had Martin Luther and we'd had Trotsky. Both of us had forms of dogma, the show trial, confession, heresy, expulsion. Both published an Index of books not to read.

I remember noticing the eerie parallels between cheap Catholic tracts sold by the Catholic's Evidence Guild and cheap Marxist tracts sold at the international book shop perhaps a mile from where we are today. One tract would warn against heresy. The other against revisionism. One would have the upturned bearded face of Christ on the cover, the other the upturned bearded face of Lenin. Towards the end of my involvement in the party I used to swap them over, putting communist tracts into the racks surrounding a Gothic column in St Patrick's Cathedral - and smuggling the Catholic counterparts into the small Marxist bookshop. God knows, Marx knows, what happened as a consequence. How many Catholics were converted to communism, how many Commos accepted Christ as their own personal saviour.

I mention these parallels to dramatise that the atheist can be as susceptible to authority and dogma as the Catholic. And that's one of the reasons I differ in emphasis from Christopher and Richard. Just as I differed totally from Christopher on the war in Iraq. I've been an atheist for 66 years. I became atheist at the age of five, a decade before I knew what an atheist was. Before I'd even heard the word. But as a little boy, the son of a Christian minister, I realised I couldn't believe, that the notion of God was totally redundant. The great argument for God was that there had to be a Creation, a beginning. Some sort of cosmic orgasm that got things going. But my objection was simple. If God was the beginning who began God?

When I was discovering why I was not a communist I read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. In it he explained that he was 18 or 19 when he asked himself that all important question. If God was the beginning who began God? And it was at that moment that he lost the last vestiges of faith.

But I understand the yearning for belief. The poignancy, the wanting to believe. It is driven, principally, by the fear of death. Christians postulate a lopsided creation in which personal existence goes on and on and on for billions of years in Heaven. Yet that creation had a sudden, magical beginning with God.

I realised, at the age of five, that I'd already been dead forever. Because what happened before birth - all those billions of years of non-existence was identical to what happened after death.

Now, although I share much of the anger, indignation and rage that Hitchens and Dawkins express I am well aware of that vastation of terror that greets anyone who considers their mortality.

I started writing about that terror in columns almost half a century ago. It was, I believe, the first time these issues were raised in an Australian newspaper. As I took advantage of the fact that they were evolving from newspapers to viewspapers. Unable to compete with the urgency and immediacy of electronic media newspapers were opening their pages to interpretation of last night's news and could be encouraged to give space to philosophical meanderings. So I used that window of opportunity to start discussing, in newspapers like The Age, The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the notion of living in a meaningless universe, without author or purpose - its only destiny to go cold and dark in obedience to the second law of thermo dynamics.

The notions of personal mortality, our denial of death or its burial in euphemism - are central to most religious belief.

For a while the attacks in response were deafening and strident but, little by little, I got a sort of a dialogue going with people of faith - which I still find valid. Because on a vast variety of the social issues - the social justice issues that I care about - people whose beliefs I find ridiculous can become my colleagues.

A decade ago Australia went through the most appalling wave of bigotry in the way it addressed the so-called problems of a few refugees. Building on the paranoia of white Australia, the Pauline Hansons and John Howards - and sadly some on my side of politics - prove that under the veneer of tolerance Australians remained deeply racist. On that issue amongst the first people to sign up for justice for refugees were Jesuit intellectuals and Josephite nuns. Just as Jews played a major role in the civil rights movement in the US - yes, largely secular Jews but nonetheless operating within a Jewish religious tradition - just as Jews joined with black leaders like Luther King to overthrow America's apartheid, members of Australian religious organisations (by no means enough of them, in very small numbers) manned the barricades.

As they did on Aboriginal rights. As they do on a wide variety of issues. While it's true that atheists have to put up with bullshit from the religious that deny us any claim to ethics or morality we must not make the same mistake. There are atheists who refuse to accept the possibility that Christians, for example, can be taken seriously as social reformers. They argue that they do it for the religious counterpart to frequent flyer points. In its crudest form, they argue that only the atheist can be truly ethical. Well, tell that to the Reverend Martin Luther King or the many black and white Christians who played a leading part in overthrowing the repulsive race laws that had been established by the Dutch Reform Church and justified by their distorted theology. We saw much the same thing with slavery. Christians, even Quakers, could justify the slave trade. Nonetheless, Christians following Wilberforce worked mightily to destroy it.

Atheists, finally, don't believe. But that doesn't make us better or nobler or finer people. At least, not necessarily. Many of the great crimes of the 20th century can be laid as much at our door as at the doors of the churches. Atheists, like Christians, can be the best or worst of people. We do not have a monopoly on intelligence, on ethics or decency. Yes, their beliefs - whether New Age nonsense or full blown Catholicism - range from the ludicrous to the loathsome. Yes, the Catholic Church's sickening attitude to human sexuality leads to paedophilia on a monstrous scale.

Its nonsense about virgin births and immaculate conceptions and the superiority of celibacy so distorts the human psyche that, decades ago, when making a film on prostitution and the sex industry, I discovered an overwhelming majority of prostitutes had had convent educations. And when I pointed this out in a series of newspaper columns, linking it to similar findings in the UK, which found that a remarkably high percentage of men and women in the sex trades were Roman Catholics, led to me being the target of a Catholic fatwah. On one particular Sunday an edict was read out from every Catholic pulpit in this country saying that it was a sin to read any newspaper that printed me or to listen to any radio station that broadcast me. And I hadn't even mentioned the paedophilia problem because, at the time, I didn't know it existed.

But when I look at these phenomena I am not moved to hate Roman Catholics so much as I am to pity them. And I want atheists to view these people, dragooned into belief since childhood, or coming upon them later in life as a consequence of the most profound of fears, the fear of death, with a degree of understanding and compassion.

It's true that such tolerance has never been extended to us and remains singularly absent in most major religions. The atheist remains an ultimate outsider, someone to be demonised, feared and detested. But that's their problem, not ours.

The current frenzy for faith, and fundamentalism, may be as I've occasionally speculated, the storm before the lull. The last gasp of religion as it yields to the mighty analysis and discoveries of science. That might be the case. But the confidence that I had in my teens - that religion would be dead by the end of the 20th century - that the synagogues, cathedrals and mosques would be museums - was foolhardy in the extreme. Indeed, while the religious monoliths did seem to be crumbling, the spontaneous combustion of ever more foolish faiths in the supernatural smorgasbord of cults, largely created in California, and in the tenacity of superstition to remain alive and well even in its trickle-down form of those astrological features in daily newspapers, remains awesome.

Furthermore I'm assailed by people who argue that while God didn't exist, doesn't exist, he she or it is coming into existence through the new technologies. That the internet is the harbinger of a vast new form of consciousness that will fill the galaxies and will, in some strange way, neutralise the second law of thermo-dynamics. Now I think this is twaddle. But it shows that even amongst people who claim to be totally secular, who would see themselves as being atheists of some degree, there's always a danger of creating a new ism or ology that, like communism at its worst, may have a disastrous impact.

Yes, we must rage against religious extremism. But we must also be intelligent enough to understand its origins, in the individual and in society. We are not strong enough, we don't have sufficient numbers to change the balance of power. The fact that religious belief may have evaporated in western Europe, that it really ceased to exist in Japan, that does not mean that we've won. It simply means that in many areas religion has lost. But giving up on religious belief is not the same as becoming a thoughtful, highly rational atheist. There may be 2,500 of us here today but we are still a tiny minority.

Most people who've abandoned religion have not embraced the thoughts and values we might try and articulate. They've taken up shopping. They are dulling the pain of existence in the mall, by buying things they don't need with the credit cards they can't afford. Or they're dulling the pain in alcohol or narcosis. Or they're just sitting in front of the telly or the computer screen bathing themselves in violent drama or hyper violent games. In pornography or the pornographies of violence.

Don't be fooled into thinking that we're at the edge of victory. That would be a delusion. It concerns me that by becoming too arrogant, too strident, too aggressive we will stultify rather than intensify debate. I've known Christopher Hitchens for decades and know how he operates. In any area, on no matter what he's tackling, he has two positions. On or off. And when he's on he can be absolutely exhilarating.

I remember chortling with delight at his attacks on Mother Theresa - when he called for Henry Kissinger to be tried as a war criminal. But I was horrified when he threw his lot in with the Bush administration and the neo cons. Mind you, many of the neo cons started their intellectual life as Christopher did, as Trotskyites. In other words whenever Christopher is writing something he cannot help but pound the keyboard like a pianist playing one of the noisier works of Rachmaninoff. His response to what he correctly sees as Islamist fascism brooks no argument and takes no prisoners. It goes straight to shock and awe, to the botched invasion of Iraq and ends up with up to a million dead (Not that we'll ever know the figure because a body count has always been studiously avoided) and Abu Ghraib. And Christopher remains unapologetic. Because that's the way he thinks and that's the way he writes. And nobody does that sort of thing better. Much of what Richard writes and says and broadcasts has the same... energy.

I propose, if you like, a third way while recognising how devalued that notion has become in politics. But a willingness to sit down and talk to these people who are not necessarily our enemies and who may, on a raft of issues, be our friends. Sometimes their efforts to be our friends are grotesque and ludicrous. I think of the Templeton prizewinners, the long list of scientists, almost all of whom I have either known or interviewed at length, cop a million dollars for building bridges of understanding - usually misunderstandings between science and Christian beliefs. But when it comes to human suffering, whilst I can see that much of it has been exacerbated by religion, we must accept the reality that we need 'em on our side if we are to effect social change.

There was a time when, for example, the Christian world seemed wholly unsympathetic to the climate change crisis. But there is now a strong movement, within Christianity, to see the destruction of the planet as a form of blasphemy.

People of religious faith are, in my view, more to be pitied than blamed. They are, I believe, victims of the faiths they profess. But there are countless millions of them who are decent human beings. As decent as the 2,500 gathered here today. And I return to that notion of the atheist as honest broker. Of the atheist as go-between. Of the atheist who can sit down with Protestant, Catholic, Sunni and Shiia, Muslim and Hindu and try to talk some sense into them.

And I've done it. I've conducted little experiments along these lines by getting myself invited to some very strange places. For example, Australia's leading Pentecostal ministers - running vast churches - had me along to talk to them about atheism. I described myself as a mangy old lion in a den of Christians and got a very good hearing. And by the end of the discussion I like to think that they would not be so quick to condemn, demonise of vilify atheists in the future.

In running this line at this conference I realise that it will not be popular, that it's much more fun to shake the fist and pound the table. But in a world where the religious have done so much of that for millennia, and continue to do it in the 21st century, somebody's got to be sane. And sanity is, or should be, a characteristic of atheism.

And may the blessings of Bertrand Russell rain down upon you.

Footnote

While I do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ I'm here to tell you that other apparent corpses have a remarkable ability to resurrect themselves. Only moments ago Obama's victory signalled the end of the Republican Party. Now, a little over a year after his inauguration day, the Republicans are reviving. Not by compromising, not by changing the packaging, but by becoming even madder than ever. The Rush Limbaughs, Sarah Palins, Tea Parties, Fox News and its loony luminaries, are looking forward to the mid-terms where there will be a bounce back. The pundits, as ever, were totally unreliable. Ditto for the death of religion. It rises like Lazarus, like the phoenix from the ashes. In some cases it does some repackaging. So that Creationism is slightly redefined as intelligent design. But much of it goes in the opposite direction, becoming even more reckless and Fundamentalist, more mediaeval. Faith, blind faith in all its forms, in all its weird and wacky variations, behaves like a virus. Just when you think you've got it on the run it mutates into something even more infectious, even deadlier. And the immune system of human societies isn't getting significantly stronger.

In the last century 150 million people died in wars and genocides. We would argue that religion played a major role in those statistics. There's little evidence of it ameliorated fanaticism and much that exacerbated it.

How will we fare in the 21st century? It certainly not off to an encouraging start. Truly world wars may be fading but the intensification of local, nationalist, civil and other forms of conflict are on the increase. And we have yet to see what will happen when, inevitably, terrorist groups, motivated by religion, get their hands on biological or nuclear weapons. When one or more of scores of would-be Saddam Husseins really do get weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, there are pockets of progress. But they're offset by black holes of brutal beliefs. It's a fight that's been going on for centuries, millennia. And it's not over yet.

This is an edited version of a speech Phillip Adams gave last weekend at the 2010 Global Atheist Convention.