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I assume you are at the very least, a doctor then? Lawyer at worst...?
England and Wales are no longer Christian nations...
- Thread starter VincentHanna
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I assume you are at the very least, a doctor then? Lawyer at worst...?
The complete breakdown is in the article isn't it?
Christian - 46.2%
No religion - 37.2%
Muslim - 6.5%
Hindu - 1.7%
Sikh - 0.9%
Other religion - 0.6%
Buddhist - 0.5%
Jewish - 0.5%
Religion not stated - 6%
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i didnt click on the article. op is as far as i go.
i hear elon musk is starting his own religion.......Do you really think the non religious majority will suddenly covert to Islam?
I'm dreadfully offended by your language. People with no religion are infidels, not heretics! You're denying them personal agency, oppressing them! You should be paraded through the streets while people shout "Shame!". Or the modern equivalent, using antisocial media and maybe a story in the "newspapers" (which are often neither papers nor about news) about how dreadful you are.
Joking aside, there is a difference. A heretic believes in a religion but with a difference to orthodoxy that the orthodox consider serious. So a person with no religion can't be a heretic. We're infidels. Unbelievers. And obviously demons, but that goes without saying.
Soldato
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My point is there not much difference between believing in God and trying to get your head around something like thisAnyway, sorry to jump all over your post. Please don't take it personally!
If anything, believing God is the logical choice because it at least makes a little sense and offers people comfort, whereas the fact we're all made up of quantum clouds and trying to visualise it is literally mind blowing
Now I don't believe in any God written about by men, but I believe there could be some kind of powerful being that would resemble a God but there's no evidence to prove it either way, so I'm sort of Atheist and Agnostic
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Luckily, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us. Yes, the quantum world and the physical underpinnings of the building blocks of our reality are difficult for us to visualise, as is the sheer size and enormity of the universe as a whole, where even the distance to the nearest star is almost incomprehensible on a human scale, in a similar way as it’s current age and our predictions of what happens in the future.
The reason? Our primitive mine key brains have evolved to live on the plains of Africa, hunting for food and smashing rocks together to make fire. We are simply not equipped in our day to day lives to deal with these things so they just seem unbelievable.
More believable than a god though, and I’ve yet to understand how anyone can get any sort of comfort or Hope out of believing one exists given the state of the world around us and the eventual destruction of our planet through the natural life cycle of our sun, if it even makes it that far and we aren’t wiped out by an asteroid, or our own technological ambitions.
Soldato
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I used to tick the Christian box because that was what I identify closest too. These days though I pick the no religion box unless Jedi is an option.
Belief isn't a choice. You've either been convinced that something is true, or you haven't.
To be convinced of something on logical grounds, requires that you've been convinced based upon some form of evidence.
Whether that evidence is good evidence or not is another matter, and everyone will have different thresholds of evidence that they require for belief.
But if no evidence has informed your belief at all, then holding that belief is by definition, not logical.
The word that we use instead for that, is faith. i.e a held belief that is not based upon evidence.
If my aim is to hold as many true beliefs as possible and as few false beliefs as possible, then the only rational and logical approach to doing so is to withhold belief until such time as any claim has met it's burden of proof. Holding beliefs without evidence would be counter to that, and doing so consistently would logically lead to me holding an infinite number of false beliefs, most of which would be completely contradictory.
i.e. If I don't require evidence of something being true, then I would believe anything and everything; including things that contradict one another.
Something's existence is not determined by the level of comfort someone derives from the thought of it.
I find the thought of a totalitarian, genocidal, celestial dictator, like the one described in most Abrahamic religions quite terrifying, but my dislike of the idea has no bearing upon whether or not I believe one to exist; and neither would it have any bearing upon whether or not it would make sense for one to exist.
Again, something's existence is not determined by your level of understanding of it.
The Ancient Romans didn't have an understanding of electricity, yet here you are today using a device that relies upon it.
The position you're describing would technically make you an Atheist, but you're slightly hinting at a Deistic position.
I've highlighted part in your comment that I take slight umbrage with because you're still painting a false equivalence between the two positions.
Saying that you cannot prove it either way makes no sense. Not believing in something does not require you to believe in or to prove the opposite.
Here's an analogy that might help:
- If I have a jar of marbles and I ask you if you believe that there is an odd number of marbles in it, then until such time that they have been counted, the rational answer is no, you do not hold that belief.
- But the fact that you didn't hold a belief that there was an odd number, does not mean that you believed that there was an even number.
As I mentioned above, the default position for any claim is one of non-belief, until enough evidence has been presented for the claim to meet it's burden of proof.
If we started from a position of belief for any given claim, then we would logically be required to hold all sorts of contradictory beliefs, which is of course, utterly irrational.
If you do not hold a positive belief that a god exists, then you are an Atheist. You are not required to prove that a god doesn't exist in the same way that you're not required to prove that the Flying Spaghetti monster or Santa Clause exist.
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Soldato
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Because otherwise our existence is completely pointless created by chance & chaos and that nothing we do matters, being part of God's plan is obviously comforting for the vast majority of people on the planet, we who do not find solace in God are the minority, so it doesn't matter if we/you don't understand it
What ? no, it simply means I do not know, there could be a God, there could not be, I'm 99% certain there's no God as describe by books of men though, so I'm atheist to man made religion, but Agnostic to God/Gods because I simply don't know
And belief is most definitely a choice
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Why would you think anything has to matter? The use of the word itself is a poisoning of the well.
By injecting the idea of a purpose you're putting a specifically human centred context on to the very fabric of existence and there is zero logical justification for that.
I understand your position, but that's not really what I was trying to get at. You don't need to prove either way because atheism is a rejection of one claim. If that claim has not been proven to be true, then that's job done; you don't believe it, you don't have to then go on to prove the opposite.
The word choice implies that there are alternative options. It is impossible to choose to believe in something knowing that it is false, just as it is impossible to reject a belief that you know to be true.
Belief is something that we have no control over; it is simply a stance taken by our brains after having considered the available evidence.
If you're able to name a single belief that you choose to hold, even though you know it to be false; then I'm happy to retract that claim.
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Soldato
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I have to say one of the funniest things about this is that it is probably africans and other non white brits that make up and have stopped the even faster decline of christianity.
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Going black on white again Tony? AFAIK Christianity is not white. And yes there are probably more Africans worldwide (not just brits) who are in the Anglican church than there are British followers of the religion. Hilarious what?
Soldato
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Im just saying for the racists going on about Islam it must be annoying. personaly I hope for the day when peoples belief in gods is gone.
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That's some dumb thinking.Do you really think the non religious majority will suddenly covert to Islam?
No of course not. They simply will say live and let live, religion hahaha, I'm an atheist I don't care.
Then those with the strong culture religion will start to dictate more need for their religious nonsense, which they'll get because I'm an atheist I don't care, then you culturally shift to that. No bacon.
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Soldato
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If that means an end to Christmas pop songs, I'm with you.