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?

I do agree that the definition of God can become so vague it's meaningless, if we try to find one we can all agree on. But at the same time, I think that deciding all the different definitions are different gods makes it impossible to have a general discussion about belief vs atheism vs agnosticism etc..... and I do genuinely believe that we're all strugging to comprehend the same incomprehensible thing.

Yes, it's all about trying to eff the effing ineffable, I suppose.

I think that's just about everything there is to be said on the subject, no?

and at Iorek's pith and perspicacity - try saying that when you're drunk.

I think it's hilarious that this made it into classics!

I'm away for a couple of days doing Life and am the subject of more patronising than I can shake a stick at. Rest assured that I will be back later.

there there UD, don't worry your pretty little head about it.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

heh-heh...

Okay. I don't want to address individual people because I don't want to sound as if I am getting at anyone.

But these are a few of the points that have been sent my way, plus some other thoughts. Fairly randomly structured, I'm afraid - I don't have time to put all of this together into any kind of essay, but each bit makes sense in itself.

• The Spaghetti Monster does not come from Dawkins. He just cited it. It's just one example of a made-up god. It's meant to make people think about how and why that god is made up, and how and why (if at all - hint: not at all) that god differs from anyone else's.

• We can also talk about the Invisible Pink Unicorn if you like, staple of the old alt.atheism boards. Or the Celestial Teapot. Or we can make one up and call it the Spurgelflodge. All hail the Spurgelflodge. It can't be proved, it exists beyond human understanding (all go "ooooooo" like when you have seen a pretty firework) and its special power is turning base metals into chocolate.

• I don't just "regurgitate" Dawkins. A lot of atheists use similar vocabulary. It's inevitable. It's like criticising bike-enthusiasts for all talking about gears and chains and pedals. If we appear to use similar phrases it's because it's a very straightforward idea. That doesn't mean it is one for intellectual pygmies, or people who have somehow failed to grasp the "sophisticated" nuances of faith because they haven't read up on their theological philsosophy. I don't need to have read any studies of Greek mythology to know that Zeus is a mythological being. We can agree that dragons are mythical beings without getting into the precise minutiae of scale thickness, breath-intensity or wingspan.

• If you believe in "one single supernatural presence", I'm sure that's lovely for you. Just don't expect anyone else to do so without some form of evidence. Otherwise any wild claim you like is able to be supported, in theory - viz. David Icke.

• Consider Scientology. No, let's. Because it seems to be a "religion" about which a lot of Christians and atheists actually agree - they agree that it's basically a load of dangerous, overblown rubbish made up by a misoynist, wacko novelist with delusions of grandeur. But don't try telling Tom Cruise that. He is totally convinced of its absolute "truth", just as many fundamentalists of other religions are. So yes, poke fun at Scientology by all means. It's baloney. But remember that this is how some people may see your religion. And you have to try and explain why yours isn't similarly wacko. (By which I don't mean "nicer".)

• I have given up with the whole dice/probability argument (for now) because I have been through it before and those who get it already have and those who haven't never will.

• The "definition" thing is an interesting one, and here I just come back to what I said before - the burden of definition rests with the believer. Tell me what kind of god you are referring to and I'll tell you why I don't believe in it. Simple. And it is simple, I'm afraid - attempts to over-complexify and intellectualise faith are always going to be that, attempts, and they always feel wrong. If you want to tell me you believe in a god because, despite my sound intellectual and rational reasons for not doing so, you still do because you "feel" it or think there "must be something out there", as a lot of people do, then fine - I think we can agree we are coming from totally different places, will never agree, and can move on. But don't try and tell me I'm wrong because it passes my limited understanding. That way lies madness.

And no, in answer to the OP... this isn't a religious place!!

So I wasn't going to get drawn into this again, but just for the hell of it must come back on a couple of those points.

"The Spaghetti Monster does not come from Dawkins. He just cited it." - cited it from where? Are you saying he got it from you rather than the other way round?

"I don't just "regurgitate" Dawkins. A lot of atheists use similar vocabulary. It's inevitable." - Just not true - there are lots of people who call themselves atheists on this thread alone who use quite different language and arguments and have never resorted to spaghetti monster type arguments.

"I have given up with the whole dice/probability argument (for now) because I have been through it before and those who get it already have and those who haven't never will." - are you sure we're all not getting it or is it possible that this model doesn't actually work? You've had a statistician on here who knows about Bayesian probability, not to mention Cote who seems knowledgeable on the subject. Is it possible that people do understand, but just don't believe?

"the burden of definition rests with the believer" - certainly in the context of believers trying to convince others that their particular belief is right and others are wrong. But that's not what is happening here: you are the one trying to convince others that all religious belief is nonsensical, so I would say that the burden of definition lies very clearly with you. You can't say it's nonsensical and then say you don't actually know what it is.

It seems to me that religious faith varies hugely in its forms - just as any other kind of belief - by culture, personality and experience. The philosophical thinking of an liberal anglican, say, is likely to be very much closer to that of a liberal atheist than to a creationist for example. It makes no sense to just group together all the people who are happy to include the word God in their vocabulary and say they are all wrong without enquiring into what they actually believe and what these beliefs have in common. If all people of faith believed what you seem to think they do then I wouldn't hesitate to join you on the top of the atheist bus and have Dawkins' face tattooed on my tit.

Origins of the spaghetti monster

I've been accused of using the same language, not the same arguments. Essentially, all atheists use the same "argument" - we don't have enough reasons to believe in a god.

I'm surprised you haven't come across the Spaghetti Monster before: here Yes, it's silly. It's meant to be.

I think the whole probability thing got sidetracked into a mathematical discussion when it was actually a linguistic one about the use of the word "probably" and whether that was agnostic or atheist. You can still be an atheist and use it. God very probably doesn't exist.

I'm not trying to convince anyone. I don't know of anyone who has been convinced by rational thought from theism into atheism. I fully realise that one can't reason someone out of a position they haven't reasoned themselves into in the first place.

You use the same language and the same arguments as Dawkins. Not only "spaghetti monster" but also stuff like "you discredit n-1 gods, we discredit the whole lot". Read Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World" for fresh inspiration.

You never answered dice/probability argument, possibly because you never understood it. The point there is that Evidence (or its lack thereof) Does Not Affect Probability - i.e. the fact that there is no real evidence for the existence of God does not mean that probability of his existence is super low.

I actually studied this stuff, and would really appreciate it if you would stop pretending that it is somehow me who doesn't "get it"

Carl Sagan's "Dragon" is a better argument than Dawkins' "Spaghetti Monster", imo. And much less quoted (if at all) by the atheists du jour.

The Dragon In My Garage
by Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?

I like that a lot, cote. The final sentence ('Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?') is my worry that the apparent idea of god that we have is actually no idea at all, because we have no 'operational definition' -- no way of seeing what might count as making it true.

I am an atheist in the sense that I think we can safely say that 'There is a god' is not a true statement.

But I am also aware of the possibly many ways in which that observation misses the point. I think that there might be such a thing as religious truth, and that is more interesting than making a fetish of the existence/non-existence of God. After all, there is moral truth without us having to substantiate that there is some objective something-or-other out there.

I just find it very hard to progress with that idea -- and to comprehend the religious perceptions of the believers here. That's why I keep chatting about it. I wonder why UQD bothers, since he plainly thinks believers are incredibly stupid and irrational.

And absolute lol at Iorek getting Dawkins tatooed on her tit. UQD, keep on trying. I'd like to see Iorek's tatoo.

Threadworm - That was from "The Demon-Haunted World", Carl Sagan's last book. Written in 1990 or so. It bludgeons quite a few indefensible beliefs other than God, such as astrology. Quite a gem

I don't agree that "we can safely say that 'There is a god' is not a true statement". I think we can safely say that religions are all bogus and based on silly stories that god sillier through generations of Chinese whispers.

However, there might very well be a Creator. A "watchmaker" who set things in motion, whether that be a super duper deity or aliens conducting an experiment in a lab (Actually, I remember reading a quite convincing paper written by a philosopher, which argued that we are living in a simulation)

For the last bloody time, the Spaghetti Monster is one of many examples of "stupid" gods and was not invented by Dawkins. Am I speaking Swahili?

I don't think believers are stupid. Some I've met are obviously extremely intelligent in the academic sense - but I do wonder how that intelligence can be reconciled with belief in fairies.

I can see how the pursuit of faith can be an interesting intellectual exercise, in the same way that studying the languages of Middle-Earth can be. But ultimately, studying Elvish is pointless as it is a made-up language for a fantasy world, and the study of theology is pointless as the basic underlying assumption - that there is a god or gods - is a flawed one.

Cote, I think you could be a little less patronising. "you never understood it" is very We have to assume a correlation between evidence for something and the likelihood of something existing, otherwise what is the point of collating evidence? Surely the more evidence one collects for the Loch Ness Monster, the higher we have to assume the likelihood of its existence is? At the moment, the evidence is there, but sparse and debatable, so the likelihood is low.

Threadworm Dawkins tackles the thing in human beings which seems to go against the 'selfish gene' advancing self preservation
here

What some may call 'compassion' or 'unconditional love' etc he calls 'super niceness'

''The singularity is a product of blind evolution itself, not the creation of any unevolved intelligence. It resulted from the natural evolution of the human brain which, under the blind forces of natural selection, expanded to the point where, all unforeseen, it over-reached itself and started to behave insanely from the selfish gene's point of view. The most transparently un-Darwinian misfiring is contraception, which divorces sexual pleasure from its natural function of gene-propagation. More subtle over-reachings include intellectual and artistic pursuits which squander, by the selfish genes' lights, time and energy that should be devoted to surviving and reproducing. The big brain achieved the evolutionarily unprecedented feat of genuine foresight: became capable of calculating long-term consequences beyond short-term selfish gain. And, at least in some individuals, the brain over-reached itself to the extent of indulging in that super niceness whose singular existence is the central paradox of my thesis. Big brains can take the driving, goal-seeking mechanisms that were originally favoured for selfish gene reasons, and divert (subvert? pervert?) them away from their Darwinian goals and into other paths. ''

LOL UQD about Cote being patronising. Pot calling kettle....

I'm not saying Dawkins coined the term "Spaghetti Monster". I'm saying he popularised it. And that it is only one example where you use his arguments.

Re Loch Ness Monster - Obviously there is no real evidence, otherwise nobody would doubt it. But I do realize I confused the issue with that statement, so consider this simpler one:

Lack Of Evidence Does Not Affect Probability.

Probability of an outcome is different than our realization of it ("Oh yes, I see the monster! There he is!"). Flipping heads on a coin has 50% probability. This probability does not decrease to near-zero if we can't at the time see the coin. The point is that you cannot assign probability unless you know how many sides the coin (or the die) has in advance.

That is, if you knew many universes, knew how many were created and how many just came into being, then you can say the probability of a universe being created by a god is high or low.

Sorry you feel I am being patronising. I would think believers on this thread and elsewhere would think the same of you. And anyway, I have been quite patient with your insistence on "No evidence so low probability of God" argument you made on every single thread on the subject, despite having been told over and over why that is not true. Most recently, you said "those who get it already have and those who haven't never will", which is rather patronising, wouldn't you say? People living in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones outside and all that.

ruty - Quite

I thought it may have been a compliment, actually.