to think we no longer live in a Christian country

[orlantina]

More than 53% of people have no faith - according to a recent survey.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41150792

That figure changes to 71% amongst 18-25 yr olds.

It surveyed 3000 adults - so it would be interesting to look behind the stats but it seems that more than half the country have no religion.

Christianity is still probably the most common religion out there.

Should this have implications for areas of national life?

And akkakk you use a lot of words to try to hide the fact you have no idea what youre talking about and disguise youre just wrong

Intriguing view ;) it appears that you use very few words to avoid having to substantiate your claims please feel free to disprove anything I am saying in as few or as many words as you wish!

I can just use all your words to substantiate the fact that youre talking nonsense.

Me adding more is superfluous

And lets be clear - Atheists have a positive belief in the absence / non-existence of God

But that's a very simplistic view.

Atheism can be the rejection of the idea of a deity, but it can also be the absence of the whole idea.

So babies are all born atheist, many young children who have never been exposed to the idea are atheists.
Some cultures may have no concept of god.

I have recently moved. Every primary in a 5 mile radius is a church of england school

Is that purely a statement of fact, or an underlying dissatisfaction with school provision? Do you have children and wish to send them to a non-denominational school? Did you choose where you would live, or were you forced to move there without other options? Would you like to abolish those faith schools (I use faith school in the loosest possible term; many CofE primaries pay lip service to the church)? How would you feel if a Christian moved in to your area of all non-faith schools and insisted on imposing their wishes for a faith school on your non-den school?

666 can you name one entire culture that has no concept of a God?

On the evolution argument which seems to have began, this idea of Evolution vs Speciation is completely false. 1) the line between species is a completely arbitrary one that we have drawn. It's easy to say a bird and a dog are different species, but a dog and a wolf, harder. Secondly by the rules we use we have seen speciation regularly. Obviously there's bacteria evolving all around us. That's what antibiotic resistance is, hell thats what biological weapons are.

Then if you want an example in bigger animals dogs are good. Dingos were introduced as dogs to Australia, and are now considered to be genitically distinct.

The evolution is a theory argument is just cr*p spouted by imbeciles who are aiming to win an argument in semantics rather than science.

Also a misuderstanding of the difference between a theory and a scientific theory- like the theory of gravity

I can just use all your words to substantiate the fact that youre talking nonsense.

Please do - I am always willing to learn...

Me adding more is superfluous
Not quite sure why you posted then I am sure that mumsnet can cope with a few extra characters stored in its servers, so don't be shy - if you believe that every I have put is nonsense, demonstrate it - illustrate from first principles, and show the logic behind your view... otherwise there is not much credibility to your claim is there?

Then if you want an example in bigger animals dogs are good. Dingos were introduced as dogs to Australia, and are now considered to be genitically distinct.

I suspect that you and I are genetically distinct - but I don't think that we would be classified as different species

of course some of the lines between classifications are man-made, but some are not - go out into the streets with a goldfish, a parrot and a dog and ask whether all three are man-made constructs or different...

now show how any two different things have evolved one to another... protozoa to fish / fish to amphibian / amphibian to ape / ape to human...

similarities don't mean a link...

I'm also quite happy if they get rid of Christmas. It's too expensive, financially and ecologically. It's 95% materialism now anyway.

I see religion as a throwback to a more ignorant time. It's no wonder that people in the past were religious, because they didn't have scientific explanations for so many scary things. Believing in a god gave them something to do to try and have a bit of illusory control over their lives. Imagine not knowing when a hurricane was coming, or what thunder and lightning is, or what causes illness and pestilence? It must have been so frightening back then. Now we have science and reason, medicine and satellites - we are enlightened. It makes sense that fewer people cling to superstition and belief in modern times.

"Science is a discipline of hypothesis - assumed to be correct unless proven otherwise."

Thats just simply incorrect. They have a hypothesis. Then they find an experiment to check the hypotheses. Then they run the experiment or variations of it thousands of times to test the hypotheses. Then other scientists do experiments to check the original work to test it or find flaws.

A hypothesis starts as an unknown and then people try to prove it or disprove it. Only with overwhelmin evidence built up by many scientists over much time does it become known as correct.

Any scientist who could disprove the theory of evolution would become famous overnight. Yet in the hundreds of years and millions of experiments later, noone has, all theyve done is add the to the mountain of evidence that the theory of evolution is true and correct.

So thats just one example of you being wrong. Most of the rest is nonsense and if you actually believe any of it, it just shows you havent read or understood anything about so me correcting the many errors you have written is a waste of my time as you will not read or understand the corrections

Would you like to abolish those faith schools

No. But they should be in no way funded especially when a number are selective on faith grounds

In no way state funded rather

NameChanger22 you are perfectly at liberty to get rid of Christmas. To non-Christians it has become a secular celebration, so you can choose to celebrate it or not as you wish. No-one is forcing it on you. Alternatively, do you celebrate Eid or Passover? Why celebrate Christmas then?

OvariesBeforeBrovaries I'm honestly not trying to deny or negate your experience, but I've never come across such fundamentalism either in my schooling or my childrens'. You are the only person who has given a concrete example of what everyone else seems to be up in arms about. I suspect my experiences are rather closer to the norm than yours that's all.

I see religion as a throwback to a more ignorant time. It's no wonder that people in the past were religious, because they didn't have scientific explanations for so many scary things. Believing in a god gave them something to do to try and have a bit of illusory control over their lives. Imagine not knowing when a hurricane was coming, or what thunder and lightning is, or what causes illness and pestilence? It must have been so frightening back then. Now we have science and reason, medicine and satellites - we are enlightened. It makes sense that fewer people cling to superstition and belief in modern times.

The bible speaks about light, you are describing a false light. Eating from the tree of knowledge lead to sin.

NameChanger22 you are perfectly at liberty to get rid of Christmas. To non-Christians it has become a secular celebration, so you can choose to celebrate it or not as you wish. No-one is forcing it on you. Alternatively, do you celebrate Eid or Passover? Why celebrate Christmas then?

I intend to, when my child is old enough to not feel left out by not celebrating it. She'd still have it pushed on her at school though. Probably, I should have been stronger and resisted it all along. I still regret that.

Why celebrate Christmas then?

Because that's when the lovely long school holidays are and I like sparkly Xmas shit

Christmas means nothing to me spiritually. It just means all my family have time off at the same time and Cheese Footballs are in the shops!

"now show how any two different things have evolved one to another... fish to amphibian"

Thats easy. Fish to amphibian would require a fish to be able to move outside of the water, and also breathe outside of it. We already have fish that can do these things. All it takes is for one of these to evolve the other ability as well, and boom. It would probably be the lungfish, since that can move by crawling already.

fish -> lungfish (can breathe in air or water) -> amphibian.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik - a fish where the front fins have "arm-like skeletal structures including a shoulder, elbow, and wrist"

news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/photogalleries/100524-new-species-handfish-walk-science-pictures/ - uses its fins to "walk" along the ocean floor rather than swim.

I see why eating from the tree of knowledge was a sin.

The more you know, the easier it is to see what nonsense the bible is and what horrific content it contains.

Although I implied upthread that Christmas is a good thing, I would prefer that it was possible to be more optional. At the moment, the way things are set up, it's impossible not to be affected by it- or inconvenienced by it, if you're not a fan. I would prefer that it not be a public holiday, so that if you didn't want to "do" Christmas you could just get on with your normal life instead. I hate the way the whole country goes into lockdown over Christmas- no public transport etc.

I quite like Christmas because its mandated synchronised time off, I dont know when I would see my parents and brother without all of our jobs having that joint time off.

Don't people get het up about God, and whether or not their precious darlings might be affected by learning about him in school. Guess what, i learned about him, my children did and now my grandchildren are, not one of them is fanatical, screwed up or damaged by it. I'd say Christian values has done them no harm at all. They're all well adjusted decent human beings. You could probably do more damage if you confuse them and make a big issue out of it. Chill out and let them decide for themselves when they're old enough.

Don't people get het up about God, and whether or not their precious darlings might be affected by learning about him in school

I dunno, you were pretty het up about Islam.

Guess what, i learned about him, my children did and now my grandchildren are, not one of them is fanatical, screwed up or damaged by it

Absolutely fine - your choice

I'd say Christian values has done them no harm at all. They're all well adjusted decent human beings

That isn't the sole preserve of being a Christian

You could probably do more damage if you confuse them and make a big issue out of it. Chill out and let them decide for themselves when they're old enough

That's exactly what we are doing. My 10 year old DD thinks god doesn't exist and has no religious beliefs. She doesn't get confused by people that are.

IMO religion has no place in schools in terms of anything other than a learning tool from a historical/ethical/philosophical stance and any other religious learning should be dealt with at home.

Actually the eating from the tree of knowledge is often thought to refer to sex.

It's a creative act... we became like God. Creators.