Quote - > Quote - > Quote - there is no hell. No heaven either.

While the man known popularly as Jesus Christ may have existed, and while he was likely an exceptional figure, he was nothing more than a teacher and a "missionary" of sorts. An exceptionally intelligent and brave teacher no doubt, but very human and there was nothing godlike or metaphysical about him.

No salvation, no Creator, no messiah... just space, matter, energy, chemistry and the laws of physics that all eventually led to an intelligence so consumed with its own self-importance that it invented gods, heaven and salvation to ease its troubled mind and make its existence more bearable...

I guess you have your work cut out for you to prove all this.

I wouldn't even try.
That's the conclusion I've come to after 35 years of learning about religion and science and overall human society, culture and nature. And half that amount of time regularly actively debating it both with many other people as well as myself.
I would have to write an entire book explaining how I came to that conclusion and I'm not about to do that, especially since so many others already have.

Besides, it's an opinion, which should be pretty obvious, and opinions don't demand "proof".

Just lettin' you know it wasn't "Obvious" it was just an opinion since it wasn't stated that it was an opinion. It was framed as a fact gramatically.

Quote - > Quote - I think that some of the conclusions being jumped to on both sides of the coin are...well, at best, demeaning.  People of faith are not inherently followers any more than atheists are inherently amoral.

There is part of the above statement that I find hard to understand. I thought (rightly or wrongly) that the essence of a religious faith was that you followed the teaching of some prophet (Mohamed, Jesus, Moses, etc), or the teaching of some some religious leader (Gandhi, Billy Graham, Kohmani, the Pope, etc), or some religious text (Bhavagad Gita, Torah, Qur'an, etc).

If people of religious faith are not inherently followers (and I'm not knocking being a follower of something), then what are they? I am not asking out of a desire to be argumentative, I really want to know. It has always seemed to me that being of a religious faith is synonymous with following some religious teaching. If I am mistaken, could someone please set me straight?

Well most Christians I know tend to consider themselves to be "Believers" as their whole salvation is based on the "Belief" that Jesus is the living word of God and that he is what he said he is. The doorway to our salvation. You can follow anyone you want to follow, even Christ, and still be lost to God if you don't truely believe. The bible says without faith it's impossible to please God.