"Secularism is a religion...Atheism is a religion"

[eFestivals]

One can never totally rule anything out untill it's 100% provable one way or another...

you keep 100% proving your small mind but nothing gets you to accept that as true.

[feral chile]

You are rambling a bit here...

I don't really expect much to be extended to myself regarding my "faith"...

[sifi]

You know the time before you were born? That's what it's like after you've died.

[eFestivals]

You know the time before you were born? That's what it's like after you've died.

i think I've just found god.

[fred quimby]

You know the time before you were born? That's what it's like after you've died.

[eFestivals]

What you mean in my mothers womb.

Blimey that's going to be weird considering my brother will be there and then my mum will be in her mums womb and so on. Gotta be the oddist russian doll ever.

Or do you mean become sperm and egg again.

Or are you talking about being reincarnated into the millions of other objects in our universe, as I was before, until they all died and those atoms assembled to become me.

So many options, which one to Believe, and these beliefs don't start with the bible.

your last line gets to prove that they do

.... cos all that you laid out above are ideas you're able to have because of pre-existing ideas that have been suggested to you, no different to how an idea of god first comes to you (specifically you; there will have been someone somewhen with the original thought) because of the existence of the bible.

There has to be an existing idea for that idea to be accepted or rejected, and if rejected for other opposing ideas to be formed. An atheist is no less dependent on the bible for their atheism as a Christian is for their belief in god.

Without their first being something to suggest an idea of a god there can be no god, or even no no-god..

Edited February 29, 2012 by eFestivals

[fred quimby]

your last line gets to prove that they do

[eFestivals]

No it doesn't

yes it does, because.....

If you really think that someone has suggested that I will end up in my mums womb you is smoking to much. Perhaps I am blessed with original thought.

Someone has suggested to you that that's where you came from (because that's the fact of the matter).

So when sifi said you end up where you started (or whatever it was) he suggested to you that you'll go back into your mothers womb.

See, I'm actually spot on, and not wrong.

If you're not getting that you mind must be either closed off to the logical or in denial to support whatever religious beliefs you might hold (the denial becomes necessary to cling onto your faith).

[fred quimby]

Someone has suggested to you that that's where you came from (because that's the fact of the matter).

So when sifi said you end up where you started (or whatever it was) he suggested to you that you'll go back into your mothers womb.

See, I'm actually spot on, and not wrong.

[eFestivals]

unless sifi's suggestion actual comes from a suggestion I made some time back

whatever it is, it's all from what you already know and not purely original thought.

I see exactly what you mean and I agree to some degree, although it does not have to come from a religious focal point at all, well I don't think (I have no faith by the way)

the point is that if no one had any idea around the idea of a god, then no one is likely to come up with the idea of a god in today's world.

What remains unexplained today sits within a larger pool of thought that everything can be explained eventually.

The idea of a god is from as time when very little was explainable, so standard human action was applied to those things - the idea of a man pushing the sun up into the sky, etc. Of course, a man who could do that would have to be a special sort of man - and so the concept of god was born.

so are you suggesting there is no original thought? and everything is pre-defined for us

No original though, but nothing about that is pre-defined.

There is no such thing as genius, there are only ideas whose time has come. Everything piggybacks off something else, with one idea suggesting other further ideas.

I actually independently came up with the idea that commonly gets called 'the selfish gene' at about the same time that it became a part of formal academic knowledge in the 70s*. That wasn't me being a genius, that was me sat in a pool of knowledge which allowed me to have other thoughts around that pool of knowledge.

(*I was too young to know of that formal channel, and while I don't rule out the possibility that I saw something about it on TV, I really don't think i did).

Or something more provable: the idea of the screw propeller is credited in this country to an engineer from this country (I forget who). But if you go to other countries - Sweden is certainly one of them - they have their own 'genius' who came up with the idea, completely independently of all the others who had the same idea at around the same time.

Or television. Credited to Logie Baird, a German had the same idea and success via a different method (and it's that German idea that is used around the world, while Logie Baird's idea was never implemented on any scale and was abandoned).

Etc, etc, etc.

[feral chile]

I wonder if we would invent God in a scientific world? He'd be a lot different, surely? Some kind of extra terrestrial terraformer with superpowers, who used his DNA to seed the planet using genetic engineering?

It depends really whether you think that superstitious/spiritual/mystic side of humans is an essential part of us, or whether God could only have been invented in a prescientific world as a form of magic, to explain the inexplicable?

Out of interest, I'd like to know how believers think they could have got to know of God's existence independent of hearsay, since the last contact he's supposed to have communicated with humans was during biblical times and reported in the Bible, which has been disallowed as evidence since it's not accurate?

The most you could have is a vague feeling of something more.

Edited February 29, 2012 by feral chile

[fred quimby]

since the last contact he's supposed to have communicated with humans was during biblical times and reported in the Bible, which has been disallowed as evidence since it's not accurate?

[feral chile]

I reckon Muslims would dispute that.

[kaosmark2]

Well I was talking about Christians, and the Christian version of God. I'm slightly more familiar with Christianity, since I'm not familiar at all with the Muslim faith.

Would you like to expand on your remark please, as I think I've missed your point?

[lost]

Yep, think thats right, Jesus was a prophet but kings and the church rewrote some of his words afterwards to suit themselves so God had to send Mohammed with the real word to sort things out. The bits that are in both the bible and the koran are the word of God whilst the bits that are missing or in the bible but not the Koran are the parts we fucked about with.

I wonder if we would invent God in a scientific world? He'd be a lot different, surely? Some kind of extra terrestrial terraformer with superpowers, who used his DNA to seed the planet using genetic engineering?

Edited February 29, 2012 by lost

[feral chile]

Yep, think thats right, Jesus was a prophet but kings and the church rewrote some of his words afterwards to suit themselves so God had to send Mohammed with the real word to sort things out. The bits that are in both the bible and the koran are the word of God whilst the bits that are missing or in the bible but not the Koran are the parts we fucked about with.

Scientology

[feral chile]

What you mean in my mothers womb.

Blimey that's going to be weird considering my brother will be there and then my mum will be in her mums womb and so on. Gotta be the oddist russian doll ever.

Or do you mean become sperm and egg again.

Or are you talking about being reincarnated into the millions of other objects in our universe, as I was before, until they all died and those atoms assembled to become me.

So many options, which one to Believe, and these beliefs don't start with the bible.

[sifi]

Correct. I wasn't making some kind of red dwarf joke. I think our experiences after we exist will be the same as before we exist. The whole immortal soul thing is a lie. Animals don't have a soul. We are animals. Go figure.

Edit : enjoy it while it lasts kids.

Edited February 29, 2012 by sifi

[eFestivals]

I came across this article this morning....

Church schools shun poorest pupils

Most Catholic and Church of England school have a higher proportion of middle-class children than the local population

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/mar/05/church-schools-shun-poorest-pupils?INTCMP=SRCH

Which gets to prove that, contrary to the claims of Barry in this thread, it's not faith that causes faith schools to produce better results from their pupils, but that it's the result of discrimination by faiths who like to believe that they're somehow better people because of their faith.

Edited March 6, 2012 by eFestivals

[The Nal]

[worm]

This doesn't require an answer as it's contained in the question, which is a leading one. The answer is undoubtedly yes, and I'll explain why.....

All 'isms' refer to a school of thought based upon a core assumption. All religions refer to the strict accordance of an assumption or belief. Therefore, both secularism and atheism are religions when followed in strict accordance to their core assumptions.

However.....

It should be pointed out that it is misleading to label something that ignores theism as athiest. A perfect example of this would be science. Science is not an atheist school of thought, as it does not start with an assumption that there is no God. It is, by it's own definition, completely indifferent to the theist/athiest dichotomy.

Atheists are just as religious as Theists and both seem to use science and logic to put forward their point without acknowledging the utter futility in doing so. Only when they suspend their assumptions (beliefs) do I begin to find time for them.

Edited March 24, 2012 by worm

[worm]

Minorities have rights too.

Edited March 24, 2012 by worm

[worm]

Democracy doesn't mean the majority can decide to fuck the minorities over.

[eFestivals]

Rights based upon what the majority decide for everyone, which often overlooks the particular needs of a minority group.

whooooosh

[The Nal]