Dear Sam:
You deliberately misconstrue religion in order to ask for an odd proof of God. Neither Christ, nor Mohammed, nor the Buddha (nor Jupiter, Mars, Athena, and the list goes on), said, "Here is a black stone, but truly I say, when you see it, call it white."
The great texts teach people how to relate to each other and invite them to an understanding of their life. Tell me, how does that relate to discerning a number that you have hidden (and, if you got it, would you then become a literalist fundamentalist or something more tempered or a fanatic or a Saint?)
You insist that a justification is required for this, and, for some reason, you demand a physical one. Yet, many find that the proof is in living out the truth of these texts.
And don't tell me that they are lying to themselves in doing so. Most athiests are actively engaged in trying to reconstruct the very same ethical axioms and more besides, and they have a desperately hard time making them convincing or self-evident. What's more, they smugly think that they aren't lying to themselves in doing so, that they really have a moral order of their own that they can apprehend (by science? by moments of selfless conciousness?) and teach.
Here is an interesting quote, from experience, not from your circumscribed bag of proofs:
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
Last, at the end, you seem to be hung up on the notion that an end of religion is what is best or required to greatly end the amount of hatred in the hearts of mankind. All one can say is that there is no evidence of that.
sullylink
