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?

Bartholomew

I have Huguenot ancestry. It provokes a craving for a Proustian Madelaine(sp) biscuit, but it is overwhelmed by my peasant ancestry, which just shovels in whichever vile child-biscuit is in the cupboard.

Mu aunt is a Unitarian and makes the best ever Yorkshire Pud.

This thread has been v busy this morning.

We could rename Custard Creams Calvinist Creams? It seems more apt?

(btw ruty, thanks for quote -- will look at it properly later. Busy right now. Got to go shoe-shopping[groan])

I suppse we would have to get rid of the cream filling though as it might be a little too indulgent?

shoe shopping threadie? For children? Shudder.

Ah now there is a worthy Calvinist pursuit Swedes. Scraping the cream out of the custard creams for after church. What though, could you call them? Custardless creamless?

Custardless Creamless are ineffable biscuits, favoured by incorporeal dragons.

Tesco now.

Whereof we cannot eat thereof we must remain silent.

If a Lion Bar were to speak, we would not understand it.

Typical of this thread - I just manage to catch up with the philosophy, and we've wandered back to biscuits

Well, the biscuits are probably more interesting...

(I can't believe sometimes how the same old stuff which people were arguing against on alt.atheism - back in 1994 when I first got on to the internet - still gets churned out here. At least the semantics over "probably" are vaguely new, but not much else.)

Well, most of us probably didn't get involved in that discussion - I'm not sure how you think such a big topic is going to reach a conclusion, with either side saying "Oh, now I see your point - we are all daft aren't we?"

I know - I'm not criticising people for not having been involved in discussions 15 years ago, but I do find it amusing to be to be told by some people that I am just parroting Dawkins when I was discussing atheism years before I'd even heard of him.

I've seen rebuttals of most of the god arguments before, and so it inevitably gets a bit "same old" - because those are the atheist answers. It's like being told "but you said the earth went round the Sun the last time this came up. When I say no, the Sun goes round the earth, can't you come up with anything better?"

UQD I think that's ungracious of you. I think you need to start thinking of God as a feeling rather than as something tangible. Do you know what a feeling is or do you need evidence?

UQD, I started off as an atheist who was convinced that belief in God was irrational, unscientific, and wrongheaded. But surely, past adolescence, it is quite easy to see that the mere scientific discrediting of God is only a small part of the story.

Ruty has said that she regards God as a metaphor, I think. And even David Attenborough this morning on the Today Programme said that it was wrong to regard him as an atheist rather than an agnostic. He was very open to God.

I want more than a metaphor from God. And I think I might be able to find a bit, a little bit more than a metaphor, maybe.

I want the assertion of God to be just a way, a very precious way, of stating the very special status we assign to all of the yearning thoughts that we associate with the dilemma of being a conscious mind in a material universe, seeking meaning, and seeking union with other minds.

It is like the very best painting, or piece of music, or whatever. One that has ben filtered through all the hundreds of years of seeking after meaning, so that it captures universal ideas -- like fairy stories capture the universal anxieties of childhood.

It captures truth, in a beautiful way. Rather than asserting a truth which might be shot down on a scientific model. The scientific model is as relevant to religion as the chemical analysis of paint is to art appreciation.

I'm a tad pissed on the Pale Ale I drank while unpacking my Tesco loot, so perhaps not making sense.

that's kind of what i was trying to say Threadie without your pith and perthpacity....

perthpicacity.

Oh, plenty of evidence for feelings Swedes!

Da was paraphrasing Carl Sagan I think. Being 'open' to god is no where near saying you believe in god. I think mostly this means, if there were robust evidence to be discovered the existance of a god, science (and scienticts) would be open to that - as that is the nature of science. He's being a bit sneaky saying that really, the old rascal!

There is plenty of awe to be had in science too.

Ruty

Threadworm - Managing such pith and perthpicathity whilthst pithsed on Pale Ale is impressive.

Swedes - you may have missed when I said above that if people believe in god '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.'

Threadworm, I appreciate your analogies, but I don't think they work. The chemical analysis of paint is indeed irrelevant to the appreciation of art - but that's because nobody is doubting the existence of the painting, for one thing.

I also feel there is often a false equivalence being made between "the evidence that something exists" and "the lack of evidence that it doesn't". The two are weighed against each other in arguments as if they cancel each other out on the scales and should lead to a default position of "we can't know." But they don't. If you want to assert the existence of something positively - a god, a demon, crystal healing, the Easter Bunny - you need to provide some kind of objective indication that it exists, otherwise you could make up any old rubbish. As David Icke and L Ron Hubbard have done. There has to be an understanding that people won't just take it on trust, which is why most people see through these two charlatans and others.

I can't provide evidence that God doesn't exist, that's true - but that's not my role. I can't provide evidence that the Loch Ness Monster, the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas, leprechauns, Thetans and the Invisible Levitating Pink Dragon don't exist either. But somewhere along the line, there is a sensible grown-up consensus on the grounds of likelihood that these mythical things "probably" don't. I'm genuinely interested in how and why we reach that sensible grown-up consensus, and what prevents us reaching a similar one about god(s)?

you have much luthidity and inthight rev. [cracks open second bottle of cider]