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?

Don't worry onebat, that is just post modern irony. Particularly if it is to something by Bonnie Tyler or Meatloaf.

wouldn't you shout 'key change' just before you put on your serious face and told them you thought the relationship had 'run its course - it's not you, it's me etc'

Then they could respond with a minor plaint..

Oh yes, meaninglessness is different to uncertainty.

I kind of think agnostics are rather at the sharp end of things, actually. Finding some sort of peace with reality does seem harder if you are in the middle, not sure if there is a God or there just isn't. Kind of like perpetually waiting for the diagnosis.

Iorek it would have been futile to do so.

My dh you see is one of those who is musical at heart but didn't know it. He professed to be tone deaf, but actually just thought singing was too gay.

The Key Change person does actually talk all the way through movies, too.

Actually, excuse me...

hmm. re uncertainty vs meaningless. I suppose I simply don't believe an uncertain world with no driving hand is a meaningless one, because of my interest (and faith, in the broadest sense) in the human enterprise...

Fundamentally I believe that all meaning is manufactured and ascribed, not inherent and objective.

yes I agree with you about meaning being manufactured and ascribed. The extraordinary thing to me is that we should be here at all to manufacture and ascribe meaning, and that there should be anything to ascribe meaning to.

Actually I'm probably a pantheist at heart, but I've heard their biscuits are awful.

have to go and inter-relate now. I like these eclectic discussions, it suits my attention span eclectic interests.

lol thought singing was too gay.

pantheists have a selection box, no?

OBM, yes, I'm short-handing, but when I use 'meaningless', I'm using it to denote 'no inherent meaning'. I'm frankly in awe of people who can acknowledge that and impose their own meanings on their existence. I'd very much like to be able to do it, actually.

Yes, I know a Christian who very happily calls himself a god-botherer. I think it's quite funny.

UQD - We had this conversation before and I explained to you before that lack of evidence for either side does not mean low probability.

Example: You throw a die in a totally dark room where you can't see the outcome. Therefore, you have no evidence as to the outcome. Still, the probability of any outcome is 1/6, just as it was if the lights were on.

"One can say that God "very probably" doesn't exist without having to use a mathematical sense of the word "probability"."

No you can't, because there is only one "sense" of the word 'probability'. And that is mathematical.

"you can't prove something doesn't exist"

Yes, you can, actually. If you know all the variables. You can prove that 7 doesn't exist on a die.

The problem here is that you don't know all the variables, so you don't really know if the God of major monotheist religions exists or not. You don't have any evidence that he doesn't exist, either.

So, as I said, your position ("There is no God") is indefensible. Agnosticism is the only rational position - if one day I see evidence that God exists, I will believe it. Until then, I have no idea if he exists or not.

D'you know, I feel huge guilt (now that's an interesting emotion/synaptic response/spiritual burden to discuss, wrt god/no god. Do atheists feel more, or less guilt?) about forcing Threadie to fark orf. I'm going to email her and tell her to come back.

She does have by far the most interesting and perspicacious things to say, and it would be nice for the rest of us if she could be persuaded back for the evening, but I don't think you should feel guilty. It is the most wretched feeling to realise that once again you have left undone everything that should have been done because you've pissed the day away talking about biscuit denominations.

cote, do you apply the same argument to the Easter Bunny?

I must say that when UQD says things like this I have a tendency to roll my eyes. This is, I think, rather unfair of me, since it is, bottom line, the obvious response to your argument.

I'd also take issue with your die in a darkened room argument, since it seems to me that the room is only dark for you. For me, it is quite brightly-lit.

Was that post meant to be serious?

i think though, onebat, whilst the origins of our universe still create so many unanswered questions, and whilst science digs deeper and deeper into how we were created [think Stephen Hawking had a mathematical model for a purposeful creator or am i talking shit?] the idea of a creator, or of a purposeful creation, is a more pertinent idea than that of the Easter Bunny. Also, for me at least, JC seemed to hit the nail on the head in so many ways for humanity, and he kept rabbiting on about this God business so i have to keep an open mind...

I mean Jesus Christ, not a particular MN poster [now see if Jesus had posted on MN he could have cleared so many things up...]

The Easter Bunny (like all of unquietdad's hilarious examples) is rather specific and easily defined though isn't it, so it's not so hard estimate the probability of its existence. "God" on the other hand could mean anything from a very abstract sense of an unseen ideal to an old man with a beard and a thunderbolt depending on who you ask. Unless we can all agree on what we mean by God (which is never going to happen), probability doesn't enter into it.