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?

Yes that's true, ruty, he is a bit bonkers I think. Really though, the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is great. Although if there's anything that will turn an agnostic back into a proper hardcore atheist this film is it (the German title is "Every man for himself and God against all"). Hope it's not dubbed horribly like tonight's was.

i'll try to persuade dh Iorek....

Ok - haven't had time to read the whole thread - but I wouldn't say that MN discussions are generally based upon religion. I read one recently - and I can't remember exactly which one, which I found really irritating because a particular poster was representing her religious views as fact - she also had an irritating manner of saying 'yea' instead of 'yes'.

In the words of my DH, I am clearly easily irritated.

But no, I wouldn't have thought MN was particularly Christian. I feel more comfortable here saying I am completely aetheist than I do in RL (in fact I haven't in RL).

Ok, have now managed about 75% of the thread, and feel very wanting that I have made no mention of baked goods. I am a cherry bakewell girl. Hence me being on all the weight loss threads.

Ummm, I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but the OP seems to have disappeared - we have proably convinced him / her that we are all completely bonkers.

I don't really like biscuits. dh buys nasty American ones and when I do go to the cupboard all there are are Oreos (yuk). If all I was offered was a biscuit I guess I like gingernuts, dark chocolate digestives or raisin and oatmeal cookies (but only really nice ones).

Conversations like these make me miss being in the UK, as my time zone is so completely out of synch. Half of my family is very religious (my sister is a chaplain and my mother is a lay preacher) some are uninterested and I am an aetheist. Not in an evangelical sense, more in a you either have faith or not, and I don't sort of way. To me it just seems totally irrelevant. From a historical point of view I can appreciate that there are great things created by people experiencing religious ecstasy or inspiration, but then there are plenty of bad things too (many in the mundane and saccharine sphere as well as those that are more terrible). I am perfectly happy to ascribe both the good and the bad to human nature. I don't see that faith created great religious works, but that a person (who happened to have faith) did.

I've never quite understood the need for religion, and have seen first hand some of the pain it can cause, and not really been able to see that it provided much comfort. I don't feel any space in my life, or that I would benefit in any way from becoming religious, although I know that my big sister would utterly disagree. I guess I see that as her quirk not mine.

I live in an incredibly beautiful part of the world, and rejoice in that most days, as well as the love of my family and other good things. I do think it is perfectly possible to have a profound sense of wonder about the world without feeling the need for a creator.

There clearly is some part of humanity that enjoys creator myths, because it is so prevalent, but I don't see that as a validation of a universal truth of "something out there". The idea that everyone of any faith is really feeling the same faith seems to me to denigrate other people's different faiths rather more than the aetheist view to be honest. It's a bit well my beliefs are right and everyone else if only they knew it has the same faith too. A bit CS Lewis Last Battle - oh you Muslims you've just got it a bit wrong you know, missed in translation sort of stuff.

Sorry, I'm going to ignore all the recent posts and go straight back to what UQD was asking me just about the point when my casserole was ready. And I think we need to expand the category of "baked goods" to include suet dumplings, because I'd sooner go without all biscuits than have to give those up....

UQD "but how and why do you perceive it as "god"? Why not the Great Green Arkleseizure or the Invisible Pink Unicorn? Or is the name irrelevant? Would you have perceived it had you not been culturally conditioned to "look for something"?"

The name is irrelevant. I call it "God" because I live in an English-speaking country which is traditionally Christian. If I lived in another place and time I would probably call it "Thor". If I was one of the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI then I'd call it the Great Green Arkleseizure. As I explained earlier, I believe that all faith/spirituality/religion is a search for understanding of the same thing. If there is/was a place where people felt genuine belief in an Invisible Pink Unicorn, I would no doubt call it that.

I do not think that I experienced it because of any cultural conditioning - in fact it was a long time after I began to experience it that I was able to have a broad enough view of religion to realise there was any overlap between my experience and "religion". Church of Scotland Sunday School and school RE lessons had given me no reason to believe that God was something I could actually encounter and relate to. My cultural understanding was that God (if there was such a thing, which I would not have put money on) was something remote and authoritarian. And that religion was something you do not something you feel. It was therefore a surprise to me to experience something which I had no cultural reference for, and many years before I learned a much broader definition of God to realise there was any connection.

Oh and yes, cargo cults are interesting. But for me there is a big difference between what I define as "faith" - ie the belief in a deity - and "religion" - a set of agreed characteristics of a deity, and practices about how we should respond and relate to it.

Lots of aspects of religion are ones which have accreted over time. Now and then most religions will have themselves a good old clearout, and make an effort to redefine the core of their belief system to shake off the things which have built up. This often leads to offended comments from atheists that we are "changing our beliefs", as if this was completely forbidden by religion...

I think atheists actually often complain about the complete opposite, AMum - that people's faith remains unswerving in the face of facts which might contradict it. So if religions actually do change over the course of time then that is to be welcomed. My experience, though, has been that science evolves and adapts to new evidence, whereas religion does not. (One of the key complaints which, from the other side, is levelled at science is that it "claims to know everything", which is one of the most profound misunderstandings of science that it is possible to have. Scientists are constantly updating and refining their theories in the light of new evidence.)

I understand that, if you want to give this feeling the name of a deity, you would call it "god" (and not, say "Brahma or "Allah"") because that's the name given to the deity of choice in English-speaking, culturally Christian, Western world. But I perhaps wasn't clear above. I still don't see that there is necessarily a connection between "a vague feeling that there is something beyond us/ that there is something spiritual" and "god" - i.e. why it has to be a deity of any sort at all. I'm not denying that people "have the feeling" - or think they do - but there could be any number of explanations for it. It seems that people rush to ascribe it to "god" because that is the main package on offer on the market, with a ready-made cookie-cutter set of beliefs and explanations. It's a bit like going for the brand which is the most heavily advertised.

I don't know if it's got a prevalent religion but I do notice and enjoy a fair number of Jewish references on MN. I like it, not sure why

Probably Lulumama's pervasive niceness!!

Oh, I get you now. That would be "because it says it is" . If you think I'm describing a vague feeling, then perhaps I haven't explained myself very clearly. It is a presence, with which I am able to communicate to some degree. I talk to it (internally) and I get answers to some degree - usually a sense of agreement, or disagreement, encouragement or discouragement, but occasionally something much more precise.

When I ask it "Are you a manifestation of God, the creator and sustainer of the universe? (though I'm not usually that precise and wordy about it, I just ask "?" if you get me) I get a positive reply. Actually I just did and I get a "positive and amused" reply.

This of course is the point where you decide your previous attempts to discuss this with me have been a waste of time because I am a nutter.

Or else you ask me to ask it the winner of the 3:30 at Chepstow, because you would trust that as some form of proof, but take the obvious answer "it won't tell me that" as proof that it is actually just my imagination.

UQD, I don't know who on this thread said that religion is 'just a feeling'. It wasn't me though, because I said that there might be true, objective religious thoughts about something real that exists in the relationship between out perceptual and intellectual capacities on the one hand, and the wolrd on the other.

Not everything (and possibly not anything) 'real' has to exixt in super-independence of our awareness of it. The example I gave earlier is colour, which philosophers a few hundred years ago struggled with because it wasn't 'really' in the world but essentially involved our perecptual apparatus. A more relevant example is value -- moral value, aesthetic value. We ascribe value but it is not thereby shown to be 'just subjective'. There can be discussions, with determinate conclusions, about value.

(No matter how much we disagree about moral value the nature of our discission of it usually implies the possibility of reaching the truth.)

To me the idea of religious truth is more or less the idea of there being certain spiritual values that we can discuss with a view to (ultimately) reaching the truth about them.

That is why is is a good thing that religious belief evolves (as of course it does). It shows that we are seeking truth. Religion has changed massivly in the face of science, moral progress, and exposure to diverse faiths.

What we are left with might seem to be something small in comparison with the early idea of a mutiplicity of embodied deities capering about the place, or in comparison to one wise bearded man. But it is a kind of beautiful compression, like coal to diamond. We might end up with something of immense value, difficult to state well, but nonetheless wonderful.

Not stated well, and wouldn't be even without the typos. Too compressed, but never mind. If I said it at more length I would be an absolute wanker in pursuit of the Absolute.Prob am anyway, ah well.

let start a church threadie. Or at least a society. AWSA.

or AWPA ['in pursuit of' instead of 'in search of']

I dislike any form of intolerance. This is why I've no sympathy with Dawkins. He is so frequently red-facedly intolerant whilst complaining about religions that are ..... intolerant.

I remember him once rather agressively interviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury and Dawkins was scoring what I thought were horribly cheap points. It was ugly and he came off the lesser man actually.

So, if I want to read some theology - what should I start with?
Is there a Theology for dummies?

I don't think that you can substitute different faiths so easily. The gods of Norse mythology (and Greek/Roman to some extent) were capricious and absorbed in their own lives and feuds. Their impact on humanity was direct (Odin fathered many children, as did various other gods) and generally not positive. They were a way to explain the vagaries of life, when there were few other explanations around. They are also very much products of their cultures and geographies (I really don't think if you compare pantheistic faiths you will find much in common with monotheistic faiths). The spiritual concept of something greater than me that created the world is only a small part of most religions. It might be the bit they have in common, but really Thor is not at all similar to the Christian concept of God (I don't think that there is any evidence that Thor cared much about people for example).

I also don't think that there are any great "Truths" or that seeking them is necessarily a good thing. I firmly think that morality is relative, culturally and personally formed. I suspect that is part of what makes me an aetheist, the idea of an absolute truth is to me slightly abhorrent, I am much more comfortable with shades of grey. History shows those that think they are right are much more dangerous than those who are not sure.

Ruty, AWPA sounds good -- so long as we can decide on the right biscuits.

ok, what is the most wankery biscuit available? [is wankery only a noun? Quite like it as an adjective]

Madeleines, surely?

They are certainly pretty wanky.