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?

Unquietdad, your die with the 5 ones and the 6 only works if you can actually define "God" and therefore have some way of assessing the probability of the existence of such an entity. (Mr RB is this right?). Can you do this?

Oh, just seen the cannibal avocado thing - never mind.

Well, at least they are not vomiting simultaneously.

Skelmersdale levitators: TM brigade. For some reason there are many in Skelmersdale. I once hired a birth pool from one who is probably reading right now tried to persuade me. Clearly they don't have any particular hotline to the big guy in the sky (or whatever they believe) since I only got in for 10 mins before being whizzed to hosp in a nee-naw for an Emergency Section.

Do all statisticians turn to the lurid and fantastical whenever they stop their fiendish calculations?

He's got bored with the Avocado Jungle now, and says you don't know how many faces the die has got. He also thinks you can't define God, which though possibly true is probably not helpful....

IB - DH says 'Probably'

Presumably in order to believe in god you are defining it, otherwise you are just believing in some nebulous load of shite. So we'll use the same definition believers do. Thanks.

But which believer, UQD?

Unquiet dad, there is a huge range of things that "believers" believe in. Even within a single congregation you would have a variety of concepts of "God".

Or what rusty bear said.

Which is all terribly convenient.

There have to be gods you don't believe in if you do believe in one or a type of one. There are gods you have "discounted". As in left aside, not as in got 10% off.

I mean - look at 'em all

Atheists just go one step further and discount the whole damn lot. It's not hard. Anything else is just special pleading.

Do we need to define "dragons" in order to know that "dragons" are mythical?

I know I'm never going to convince anyone through the force of my reasoned argument, and that "faith" is this nebulous and woolly thing which has no truck with logic, so I am on a hiding to nothing. I just like to keep making it clear that I'm being rational.

Convenient for whom?

Well, yes. You do have to define dragons to decide they are mythical. As explorers and biologists could tell you.

It's convenient for believers, because they always have an answer: "oh, well, my god is special, my god is different, you can't prove MY god doesn't exist, yah boo sucks."

It's all made up, you know.

DH has gone off to 'think about it'

Which on past experience means that he will ponder for about 3 days and then come up with a very detailed explanation, which I will pretend to understand, by which time this thread will have hit 1000 posts and expired, unless anyone on it knows the secret of life-after-death for threads.

In the meantime, he has gone away and left the TV on movies4men with the remote out of reach, and I am immobilised by my laptop. It is currently showing an unidentified fantasy film featuring monkeys in orange monks' robes, dodgy 80's hairstyles and Dorothy Stratton.

Luckily the sound is off.

Unquietdad, just out of interest, have you ever read any theology?

lol at rustybear's dh

What do you mean by "theology"? That is a serious question. I've read the Bible. Would you ask someone who didn't believe in fairies if they had studied "fairy-ology" in order to reach this conclusion?

If there a broad serious discourse on the subject had been running for several hundred years, then yes, of course.

I'm sorry it was probably a fairly pointless question to ask. It's just that you seem to be arguing against a very particular, rather unsophisticated version of faith - perhaps one which you believe you have encountered amongst your own Christian acquaintances - and then assuming that all people who identify themselves as religious think in this same way. You are arguing against one thing, but calling it by a name that encompasses a whole range of things which are not relevant to your argument.

there

[that's what RD does too]

It seems very disingenous to call my "version" of faith "unsophisticated". This implies that I have failed to grasp the nuances and complexities of something people have been studying all their lives. But my basic tenet undermines the very foundation of studying theology. For me, it's another branch of literary criticism, as religion is basically founded on fictions.

This is what I find so frustrating - that as an intelligent person I am permanently decried as being not well-read enough in the subject. What's the "whole range of things which are not relevant to my argument"?

The fact that a "discourse" has been running on something doesn't validate it to the slightest degree. People had "discourses" for years about the Sun going round the Earth. It didn't stop them being wrong. People have "discourses" today about crystal healing and David Icke's theories. Funnily enough, that's all made-up too.