Honest question. Is this site a religious site?

[follderol]

It seems to me there's a large amount of Christian posts. I've also noticed a fair amount of disapproval for other religions.

I am an atheist. I don't really want to be part of a christian site posing as a parenting site.

So is this actually a Christian place?

hi justabout! you were always rather good at luring the vulnerable handing out biscuits on the RW threads...

you know I heart you and am joking btw don't you....

i'll make it 4 in a row and bugger orff.

Well I've had great fun catching up and will get my coffee ready to watch the next round

As for biscuits, I really love dark chocolate digestives, but like so many things they are hard to swallow on their own.

I think if someone has the thought that there might be a greater power that is perfectly ok. If they decide to search for this power then that is ok too. That's not an unworthy cause even if they are wrong.

I think the problem I have as an atheist is when the searcher for truth comes back and claims to have found it. That's where it all goes wrong.

All of a sudden they know all kinds of detailed stuff about this force. His name, his rules, his parents, his plans for the future etc, You ask them how they know they have found it and they say that one of his rules is that there mustn't be any proof you can examine.

We don't have biscuits at our church - we have doughnuts (and apples for the health conscious)

OP, you know, after all my years here, I can honestly say that I have never come across a thread that I would say contain "religious intolerance". Religous "un-informedness", yes, but not intolerance. I think most bump along rather tolerantly, from a religious perspective.

Having said that, there can be a lot of intolerance here in respect of other topics, but most people are threading carefully regards religion. I have come across atheists, agnostics, christians, muslims, jews, pagan, and a few other less mainstream faiths.

Iorek

We've offered Athena a variety of biscuity snacks, but the preferred variety is the Bath Oliver.

Oh, and trifle...

Bath Olivers! Of course. No sweetening for the ancients.

Trifle??

never really noticed...but i think i'm the only good catholic girl on here.

ruty - What on earth is a "Christian Agnostic"?

Isn't belief in God a prerequisite for Christianity?

I thought Christian Agnostic was another term for CofE

Yes Effie quite.

Faith is a complex thing Cote - doubt being an inevitable part of it IMHO.

Cotedazur - thank you. You illustrate a common misconception and give me the opportunity to point this out.

"There is no proof either way." Correct.

"That is why atheism is as indefensible a position as belief in God." Debatable. You don't need proof to believe something is hugely unlikely, i.e. as far as is humanly possible you can exclude the possibility.

Even Dawkins says this. This is why the Atheist Buses had the word "probably" on them.

I love the biscuit digressions. If only they offered Bahlsen or something instead of communion wafers I might have carried on pretending to believe in God.

UD - We have talked about this before, and I have told you before that there is no way anyone can know the probability of a God existing as defined by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

You know throwing a 6 on a die is 1/6 because you know for a fact that there are six sides to it. You know drawing a Queen in a deck of cards is 4/52 = 1/13 because you know for a fact that there are 4 Queens and 52 cards in total in that deck.

We don't know all the variables in this case. - If we knew of 10 other universes and 9 of them came to being without a creator God, I would agree with you that very probably no God created our universe, either.

As things stand, you can't even say that.

ruty - I'm intrigued. What part of Christianity do you believe in if you doubt the existence of God?

Not the God itself. Not Jesus as the son of God. Obviously not the Holy Spirit. Presumably, you don't pray (to whom?).

I agree with that cote. You can't attach any probability value to 'God exists', not least because we haven't really settled on what we mean by 'god exists', and what would count as evidence for it or against it.

But that in turn suggests that 'God exists' is pretty meaningless, and since a meaningless claim can't be a true one, its meaninglessness is grounds for atheism.

of course i pray. But i can't know as an absolute that God exists. I believe Christ's teachings, if we all followed them, could create 'heaven on earth' and would revolutionise society and our personal lives. So in that sense i believe he was the Messiah. I also believe that eventually science will reveal to us the face of our creator, metapohorically speaking.

The Holy Spirit again is a metaphor for something felt but inexplicable. I have experienced it myself.

Details notwithstanding, everybody here pretty much agrees on what we mean by "God" - creator of the universe & all life in it, benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient.

"God exists" isn't a meaningless statement, it is just an unfounded one.

And so is "God does not exist".

ruty - You have felt the thing that impregnated Mary with God's child?

I made an ontological disproof of the Devil once. It was a moment of intellectual glory.

Churches won't have kitkats because they're Nestle, surely?

I'm partial to a Cafe Noir biscuit.

Can this thread go in classics, please?

yep, obviously how my children were conceived...

'The Holy Spirit' is a metaphor for many powerful, transformative experiences during prayer. I have experienced it physically and emotionally. I don't claim to know what caused it.

But the concept of god is arguably too vague for us to decide on any state of affairs that we would recognise as being one in which god exists.

What does it mean to say that someone created the universe, that someone is omnipresent?

Some concepts of god eg the god whose existence would be proved if the argument from design was well-founded are just entirely abstract.The conclusion of the argument from design is the exixtence of a God conceived as nothing more than 'that which designed the universe', which does nothing more than reassert the alleged fact of design.

fuck the fuck off threadie

(she TOLD me to say it if I saw her here. Honestly!)