The only reason religion is clinging to its "position" in public life is it's a self-interested pressure group interested in its own perks.
Yet, of course, the religious self-interest group is desperate for it to continue - to maintain their "status" and preferential treatment.
It's time everyone stopped indulging them. One thing is certain - if all the nonsense was stopped nobody would suggest restarting it again - and everyone would wonder why so much time had been wasted on it all.
Yet pretty much every country grows less religious once it becomes rich. This is now becoming true in the United States. China is still only middle income - I suspect when it starts hitting $30k a year in GDP per capita it will become less religious like all the other nations that have done that have done.
FFS. Where to begin??? China is atheist NOW. A communist atheist country. It's the one country that keeps the global numbers of atheists/non-religious anywhere respectable. Yet as China gets richer it gets MORE religious.
"It is impossible to say how many Christians there are in China today, but no-one denies the numbers are exploding."
"There are already more Chinese at church on a Sunday than in the whole of Europe.
The new converts can be found from peasants in the remote rural villages to the sophisticated young middle class in the booming cities."
Like every other atheist on this site, you really - in all politeness - do not have a f*cking clue what you are talking about, from the basic stats to the higher theoretics. It's like discussing the virtues of Raphael versus Caravaggio with a blind person. Pointless.
You seemed to entirely miss my argument. I accept that China is getting more religious at the moment. As the constraints of totalitarian communism are lifted, it is moving back towards the more expected level of religiosity for a developing country at its income level. My argument was that at a higher income level, the greater effect of wealth will come in, and it will go back the other way. This is the case with the largely Chinese culture Singapore, where the irreligious are increasing. I specifically mentioned a level of around $30k per capita GDP. Either you are too ignorant to know that China is nowhere near that income level, or, like many religious people, you only hear what you want to hear.
And, for the record, I am an agnostic, not an atheist. I also used to be a true believing Christian, and so know the experience well.
Thanks SeanT, money not really an issue so do you recommend the York and Albany or head for a restaurant? Advice much appreciated as a West London boy!
Those who do not believe in a divine being often have something they're equally zealous about, be it their vision of the perfect society, a master race, a personality cult, the planet etc. It could be argued that greatest humanitarian disasters usually occur when God is substituted for something else. Communism and Nazism being two recent examples. When you see the preservation of all human life as secondary to your goal, you open the door to genocide.
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton
This is a pure tautology, and could be said about any belief system. That people who do not believe in one thing are capable of believing in anything else is not a profound insight.
It's not really a tautology.
It's saying that people who have a core belief system have a framework which they can judge other concepts and ideas. This core belief could be God, or it could be a philosophically-based ethical framework, or whatever.
It's essentially an argument about the vulnerability of relatively / multi-culturalism ;-)
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again, a complete misunderstanding of religious faith. I do not and did not choose to believe, I did not need a deity; God came to me. Religious faith chose ME. Turned out I was one of the lucky ones with the faculty for faith.
And it really is a tremendous solace, and I feel tremendous pity for those who do not share it. But there's not much I can do about your predicament.
But if you, as an atheist, are *laughing*, then you are the eunuch in the brothel laughing at the funny noises coming from the bedroom.
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
since most of humanity is religious has it struck you, that you might have the aberration ?
Those who do not believe in a divine being often have something they're equally zealous about, be it their vision of the perfect society, a master race, a personality cult, the planet etc. It could be argued that greatest humanitarian disasters usually occur when God is substituted for something else. Communism and Nazism being two recent examples. When you see the preservation of all human life as secondary to your goal, you open the door to genocide.
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton
Patronising bollocks. I am quite happy believing in nothing, in the sense Chesterton meant (and I know the context of the quotation. Do you?)
The unarguable case against religion is this: you have an omnipotent being who loves people in the way that a parent loves a child, and you have a world in which people torturing babies to death is a commonplace occurrence. He could stop this, but doesn't. Why not? And religion hardly even pretends to have an answer to this. Oooh yes, they say, that's a really interesting theological problem, or oooh, we don't know, but it's a Mystery and we have Faith. Bollocks.
Because he gave us the gift of free will.
There are some people that will do evil, there are others that will strive for good. And there are plenty that will muddle along somewhere in the middle
Multiculturalism has died as finally the left has to make a choice between foreign religions and the illiberal society those religions want to impose (example: segregation and slavery).
I think this is an incredibly interesting paradox - and the question is what is everyone (not just the left but all politicians) actually going to do?
If, say, the % of British people wanting to impose sharia law in the UK rises significantly, what are politicians (of all parties) actually going to do?
If the trend becomes quite significant it would surely require very radical action to stop it.
There is some theory that when Muslims reach 20-25% of a country's population then civil strife is inevitable, as Islam refuses to assimilate, demands special treatment, and the host culture is forced into violent defense of its own beliefs.
Sadly, I believe the theory is not entirely nonsensical.
We need to do a combination of:
(1) heavily reducing unskilled, uneducated migration, and so decrease how many conservative Muslims are coming to this country, and
(2) loudly condemning the uglier beliefs of conservative Islam so that the more decent people from Muslim families either reject the faith entirely, or construct a clearly defined separate version of it that is hostile to the conservative form of the faith - see Reform Judaism.
"Exactly right. An omnipotent all-good being that let's horrific things happen to the innocent."
It's one of the great misunderstandings among the "religious", God gave us the free will to make the world what we want. In general we allow it to be made into a hell. Atheists are no better, or worse.
Giving us free will was surely the ultimate act of evil.
Spoken like a true Labour authoritarian. The man on Primrose Hill knows best.
Why give people the power to inflict pain and suffering on earth and in doing so consign them to spend eternity in hell?
Because free will is what makes us human. Without it we would be no better than the angels. And a damn sight less cool than the Cherubim*
* who, incidentally, are most definitely not little boys with wings and chubby cheeks, despite various attempts to portray them as such...
I like my historical documentaries. Helen Castor's done a couple a of good ones recently. The last episode of her latest series is on iplayer now.
I haven't seen any of her television work. I have come across her first monograph, The King, the Crown, and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and Private Power, 1399-1461, (Oxford, 2000), which was a competent survey, but far too indebted to the bastardised McFarlanism associated with John Watts and Christine Carpenter which fifteen to twenty years ago had no shortage of academic advocates, but now seems distinctly passé.
SeanT, sorry to interrupt your religious debate but I've got a meeting in Mornington Crescent in a couple of weeks. Afterwards I'm going out to dinner with a gorgeous member of the fairer sex. Can you please recommend somewhere fun to go. We both love good food and wine. Thanks!
I'd move on from Mornington, and try one of the gastropubs in posher end of Camden or Primrose hill.
The York and Albany is truly excellent but costs money The Engineer is good, medium range The Pembroke is cheaper and cheerful but still pukka tucker
There are lots of nice but pricey restaurants along Regent's Park Road. Sushiwaka on Parkway does good Japanese. Namaaste on Parkway does good intriguing Indian.
My, you've come a long way in the last couple of years - it was only then when you were still recommending budget plonk from Tesco!
Multiculturalism has died as finally the left has to make a choice between foreign religions and the illiberal society those religions want to impose (example: segregation and slavery).
I think this is an incredibly interesting paradox - and the question is what is everyone (not just the left but all politicians) actually going to do?
If, say, the % of British people wanting to impose sharia law in the UK rises significantly, what are politicians (of all parties) actually going to do?
If the trend becomes quite significant it would surely require very radical action to stop it.
There is some theory that when Muslims reach 20-25% of a country's population then civil strife is inevitable, as Islam refuses to assimilate, demands special treatment, and the host culture is forced into violent defense of its own beliefs.
Sadly, I believe the theory is not entirely nonsensical.
Have you read Enoch Powells Bimingham speech???
I read your quotes from it earlier on.
It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, and, yes, in many ways, Enoch was Right.
He really wasn't.
The only way you can find it at all convincing is by ignoring historical context and wanting it to be prescient.
"Exactly right. An omnipotent all-good being that let's horrific things happen to the innocent."
It's one of the great misunderstandings among the "religious", God gave us the free will to make the world what we want. In general we allow it to be made into a hell. Atheists are no better, or worse.
Giving us free will was surely the ultimate act of evil.
Spoken like a true Labour authoritarian. The man on Primrose Hill knows best.
Why give people the power to inflict pain and suffering on earth and in doing so consign them to spend eternity in hell?
Because free will is what makes us human. Without it we would be no better than the angels. And a damn sight less cool than the Cherubim*
* who, incidentally, are most definitely not little boys with wings and chubby cheeks, despite various attempts to portray them as such...
I thought Yahweh didn't plan for us to have free will. It was just because Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge...
"Exactly right. An omnipotent all-good being that let's horrific things happen to the innocent."
It's one of the great misunderstandings among the "religious", God gave us the free will to make the world what we want. In general we allow it to be made into a hell. Atheists are no better, or worse.
Giving us free will was surely the ultimate act of evil.
Spoken like a true Labour authoritarian. The man on Primrose Hill knows best.
Why give people the power to inflict pain and suffering on earth and in doing so consign them to spend eternity in hell?
Because free will is what makes us human. Without it we would be no better than the angels. And a damn sight less cool than the Cherubim*
* who, incidentally, are most definitely not little boys with wings and chubby cheeks, despite various attempts to portray them as such...
Free will is one thing but you'd hope God might step in with his pretty formidable countermeasures now and again.
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again,
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
The scientific evidence is that atheism is the aberration, and indeed not only is it an aberration - it is actually a mental affliction - shortening lifespans, reducing fertility, decreasing immunity etc.
I refer you to one of those most discussed British blogposts of the last 10 years:
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again,
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
The scientific evidence is that atheism is the aberration, and indeed not only is it an aberration - it is actually a mental affliction - shortening lifespans, reducing fertility, decreasing immunity etc.
I refer you to one of those most discussed British blogposts of the last 10 years:
Multiculturalism has died as finally the left has to make a choice between foreign religions and the illiberal society those religions want to impose (example: segregation and slavery).
I think this is an incredibly interesting paradox - and the question is what is everyone (not just the left but all politicians) actually going to do?
If, say, the % of British people wanting to impose sharia law in the UK rises significantly, what are politicians (of all parties) actually going to do?
If the trend becomes quite significant it would surely require very radical action to stop it.
There is some theory that when Muslims reach 20-25% of a country's population then civil strife is inevitable, as Islam refuses to assimilate, demands special treatment, and the host culture is forced into violent defense of its own beliefs.
Sadly, I believe the theory is not entirely nonsensical.
Have you read Enoch Powells Bimingham speech???
I read your quotes from it earlier on.
It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, and, yes, in many ways, Enoch was Right.
The tragedy is that this very bright, very insightful man chose to lace and envenom his speech with genuine and nasty raciness ("grinning piccaninnies") etc, which he must have known would be wildly provocative and allow liberals to ignore his more interesting, and crucial, observations, and dismiss him as a vile bigot.
It was a very smart speech yet ALSO an act of suicidal political self harm. Why did he do it?
I still can't work Powell out, whether he was an intellectual racist who let the mask slip, or a political narcissist who wanted too much attention, or he just made a couple of terrible errors that ruined his career.
His argument was that the "piccannies" part of the speech was a quote from a letter, not his words
If you havent watched it already, on youtube there is an fantastic interview with David Frost and Powell... incredible TV, a must for anyone interested in politics.. he explains why he said what he did. No one was listening to the feelings of the working class, affected by immigration... the sense of frustration had to be spelled out loud and clear to the political class who didnt believe what was going on
Multiculturalism has died as finally the left has to make a choice between foreign religions and the illiberal society those religions want to impose (example: segregation and slavery).
I think this is an incredibly interesting paradox - and the question is what is everyone (not just the left but all politicians) actually going to do?
If, say, the % of British people wanting to impose sharia law in the UK rises significantly, what are politicians (of all parties) actually going to do?
If the trend becomes quite significant it would surely require very radical action to stop it.
There is some theory that when Muslims reach 20-25% of a country's population then civil strife is inevitable, as Islam refuses to assimilate, demands special treatment, and the host culture is forced into violent defense of its own beliefs.
Sadly, I believe the theory is not entirely nonsensical.
Have you read Enoch Powells Bimingham speech???
I read your quotes from it earlier on.
It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, and, yes, in many ways, Enoch was Right.
The tragedy is that this very bright, very insightful man chose to lace and envenom his speech with genuine and nasty raciness ("grinning piccaninnies") etc, which he must have known would be wildly provocative and allow liberals to ignore his more interesting, and crucial, observations, and dismiss him as a vile bigot.
It was a very smart speech yet ALSO an act of suicidal political self harm. Why did he do it?
I still can't work Powell out, whether he was an intellectual racist who let the mask slip, or a political narcissist who wanted too much attention, or he just made a couple of terrible errors that ruined his career.
Also, let us not forget that Enoch Powell was talking about West Indians in the UK.
A group that are now well integrated.
So, when people say 'prescient', what they really mean is:
"Well, Enoch said that West Indian immigrants couldn't speak our language, couldn't integrate and didn't want to integrate. And this would cause 'rivers of blood'. Obviously that didn't happen. But if he had said it about Muslims, which he didn't, then he would have been right. He's so prescient is that Enoch."
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again,
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
The scientific evidence is that atheism is the aberration, and indeed not only is it an aberration - it is actually a mental affliction - shortening lifespans, reducing fertility, decreasing immunity etc.
I refer you to one of those most discussed British blogposts of the last 10 years:
The scientific evidence is nothing of the sort. And linking to one of your own poorly researched diatribes is hardly to be considered 'proof' of anything.
SeanT, sorry to interrupt your religious debate but I've got a meeting in Mornington Crescent in a couple of weeks. Afterwards I'm going out to dinner with a gorgeous member of the fairer sex. Can you please recommend somewhere fun to go. We both love good food and wine. Thanks!
I'd move on from Mornington, and try one of the gastropubs in posher end of Camden or Primrose hill.
The York and Albany is truly excellent but costs money The Engineer is good, medium range The Pembroke is cheaper and cheerful but still pukka tucker
There are lots of nice but pricey restaurants along Regent's Park Road. Sushiwaka on Parkway does good Japanese. Namaaste on Parkway does good intriguing Indian.
Namaaste is excellent. The Engineer is great if you want to hang around with the glitterati of Primrose Hill. The York & Albany is expensive and over-rated.
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again, a complete misunderstanding of religious faith. I do not and did not choose to believe, I did not need a deity; God came to me. Religious faith chose ME. Turned out I was one of the lucky ones with the faculty for faith.
And it really is a tremendous solace, and I feel tremendous pity for those who do not share it. But there's not much I can do about your predicament.
But if you, as an atheist, are *laughing*, then you are the eunuch in the brothel laughing at the funny noises coming from the bedroom.
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
since most of humanity is religious has it struck you, that you might have the aberration ?
Hi Alan, that doesn't necessarily follow, because one could say:
"Since most of humanity is non-Christian has it struck you, that you [Christians] might have the aberration ?"
SeanT, sorry to interrupt your religious debate but I've got a meeting in Mornington Crescent in a couple of weeks. Afterwards I'm going out to dinner with a gorgeous member of the fairer sex. Can you please recommend somewhere fun to go. We both love good food and wine. Thanks!
I'd move on from Mornington, and try one of the gastropubs in posher end of Camden or Primrose hill.
The York and Albany is truly excellent but costs money The Engineer is good, medium range The Pembroke is cheaper and cheerful but still pukka tucker
There are lots of nice but pricey restaurants along Regent's Park Road. Sushiwaka on Parkway does good Japanese. Namaaste on Parkway does good intriguing Indian.
My, you've come a long way in the last couple of years - it was only then when you were still recommending budget plonk from Tesco!
I think it's a bit more than a couple of years, but it is indeed quite startling to think how my life has changed from when I first started on pb. I was then, almost literally, penniless. A hand to mouth freelancer....
In the circumstances, given my outstanding good luck (which must surely end soon!) it would be rather churlish of me NOT to believe in God, wouldn't it?
And on that note I really must go drink Perrier Jouet in the Groucho.
Anon.
Perhaps the One True God is actually Our Genial Host?
Those who do not believe in a divine being often have something they're equally zealous about, be it their vision of the perfect society, a master race, a personality cult, the planet etc. It could be argued that greatest humanitarian disasters usually occur when God is substituted for something else. Communism and Nazism being two recent examples. When you see the preservation of all human life as secondary to your goal, you open the door to genocide.
the Atlantic slave trade ... all of which were carried out by God-fearing Christians.
Some used God as an excuse to carry out atrocities; that doesn't make them God-fearing Christians.
But it was a God-fearing Christian who fought to stop the slave trade whilst the rest of the world thought it perfectly fine.
Your examples do not work.
That would be the same god fearing Christian who sought to ridicule evolution (and got his backside handed to him on a plate for his troubles by Thomas Huxley).
Men of good heart do good things for many reasons, often completely unrelated to religion. Personally I find it strange to think that one should only help one's fellow man for fear that one might end up in the 'wrong place' when one dies.
On a point of interest, are we thinking of the same Wilberforce? I'm thinking Bishop Samuel 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce, he of the debate at the British Association meeting in the then very new University Museum at Oxford (itself very much a stone and iron psalm of praise to divine creation in nature, as the carving of Adam and Eve above the door shows).
Of course, Huxley himself was a great believer in morality and would very much be one of your men (and women) of good heart.
Soapy was WIlliam's son. Interestingly the agnostic/atheist streak seems to run in my family. Huxley was a member of the X-Club - a dining club whose purpose was "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas." Another of the 9 members was my Great (a few more greats) uncle John Tyndall.
Multiculturalism has died as finally the left has to make a choice between foreign religions and the illiberal society those religions want to impose (example: segregation and slavery).
If the trend becomes quite significant it would surely require very radical action to stop it.
There is some theory that when Muslims reach 20-25% of a country's population then civil strife is inevitable, as Islam refuses to assimilate, demands special treatment, and the host culture is forced into violent defense of its own beliefs.
Sadly, I believe the theory is not entirely nonsensical.
Have you read Enoch Powells Bimingham speech???
I read your quotes from it earlier on.
It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, and, yes, in many ways, Enoch was Right.
The tragedy is that this very bright, very insightful man chose to lace and envenom his speech with genuine and nasty raciness ("grinning piccaninnies") etc, which he must have known would be wildly provocative and allow liberals to ignore his more interesting, and crucial, observations, and dismiss him as a vile bigot.
It was a very smart speech yet ALSO an act of suicidal political self harm. Why did he do it?
I still can't work Powell out, whether he was an intellectual racist who let the mask slip, or a political narcissist who wanted too much attention, or he just made a couple of terrible errors that ruined his career.
Also, let us not forget that Enoch Powell was talking about West Indians in the UK.
A group that are now well integrated.
So, when people say 'prescient', what they really mean is:
"Well, Enoch said that West Indian immigrants couldn't speak our language, couldn't integrate and didn't want to integrate. And this would cause 'rivers of blood'. Obviously that didn't happen. But if he had said it about Muslims, which he didn't, then he would have been right. He's so prescient is that Enoch."
No you have that wrong, he didnt say that, the point was about immigration in general, not at all about West Indians in particular, far far from it
He said it would happen in areas where the immigrant population became the majority. He wasnt singling out West Indians, although I would argue that there is ghettoisation of carribean immigrants, and there has also been trouble on the back of that. In fact the speech was motivated by a Sikh bus conductor, and religious factions in India
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again, a complete misunderstanding of religious faith. I do not and did not choose to believe, I did not need a deity; God came to me. Religious faith chose ME. Turned out I was one of the lucky ones with the faculty for faith.
And it really is a tremendous solace, and I feel tremendous pity for those who do not share it. But there's not much I can do about your predicament.
But if you, as an atheist, are *laughing*, then you are the eunuch in the brothel laughing at the funny noises coming from the bedroom.
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
since most of humanity is religious has it struck you, that you might have the aberration ?
Hi Alan, that doesn't necessarily follow, because one could say:
"Since most of humanity is non-Christian has it struck you, that you [Christians] might have the aberration ?"
Actually that has struck me and I'm prepared to entertain the thought. "Scientists" tend to be more smug and closed-minded :-)
SeanT, sorry to interrupt your religious debate but I've got a meeting in Mornington Crescent in a couple of weeks. Afterwards I'm going out to dinner with a gorgeous member of the fairer sex. Can you please recommend somewhere fun to go. We both love good food and wine. Thanks!
I'd move on from Mornington, and try one of the gastropubs in posher end of Camden or Primrose hill.
The York and Albany is truly excellent but costs money The Engineer is good, medium range The Pembroke is cheaper and cheerful but still pukka tucker
There are lots of nice but pricey restaurants along Regent's Park Road. Sushiwaka on Parkway does good Japanese. Namaaste on Parkway does good intriguing Indian.
My, you've come a long way in the last couple of years - it was only then when you were still recommending budget plonk from Tesco!
I think it's a bit more than a couple of years, but it is indeed quite startling to think how my life has changed from when I first started on pb. I was then, almost literally, penniless. A hand to mouth freelancer....
In the circumstances, given my outstanding good luck (which must surely end soon!) it would be rather churlish of me NOT to believe in God, wouldn't it?
And on that note I really must go drink Perrier Jouet in the Groucho.
Anon.
Perhaps the One True God is actually Our Genial Host?
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again,
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
The scientific evidence is that atheism is the aberration, and indeed not only is it an aberration - it is actually a mental affliction - shortening lifespans, reducing fertility, decreasing immunity etc.
I refer you to one of those most discussed British blogposts of the last 10 years:
The scientific evidence is nothing of the sort. And linking to one of your own poorly researched diatribes is hardly to be considered 'proof' of anything.
Shares of a blog whilst good for presumably advertising revenue and shaping opinion are not scientific proof of much !
Isn't the story of religion a slow move from generalised ancestor worship through characteristic polytheism to monotheism. When characteristic polytheism predominated with gods for everything from weather to warfare the concept of a single God was aberrant. Look at the history of Armana period Egypt for evidence that the polytheism was pretty sticky as a socio-religious construct. Eventually monotheism prevailed but only really in the West. We are now slowly moving out if the realm of theism but naturally it is a sticky concept.
Those who do not believe in a divine being often have something they're equally zealous about, be it their vision of the perfect society, a master race, a personality cult, the planet etc. It could be argued that greatest humanitarian disasters usually occur when God is substituted for something else. Communism and Nazism being two recent examples. When you see the preservation of all human life as secondary to your goal, you open the door to genocide.
the Atlantic slave trade ... all of which were carried out by God-fearing Christians.
Some used God as an excuse to carry out atrocities; that doesn't make them God-fearing Christians.
But it was a God-fearing Christian who fought to stop the slave trade whilst the rest of the world thought it perfectly fine.
Your examples do not work.
That would be the same god fearing Christian who sought to ridicule evolution (and got his backside handed to him on a plate for his troubles by Thomas Huxley).
Men of good heart do good things for many reasons, often completely unrelated to religion. Personally I find it strange to think that one should only help one's fellow man for fear that one might end up in the 'wrong place' when one dies.
On a point of interest, are we thinking of the same Wilberforce? I'm thinking Bishop Samuel 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce, he of the debate at the British Association meeting in the then very new University Museum at Oxford (itself very much a stone and iron psalm of praise to divine creation in nature, as the carving of Adam and Eve above the door shows).
Of course, Huxley himself was a great believer in morality and would very much be one of your men (and women) of good heart.
Soapy was WIlliam's son. Interestingly the agnostic/atheist streak seems to run in my family. Huxley was a member of the X-Club - a dining club whose purpose was "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas." Another of the 9 members was my Great (a few more greats) uncle John Tyndall.
Ah! thank you. Not a bad relative to have at all, the glaciologist and agnostic. And a very interesting period, whether at Oxford, or more widely.
I went to my first Church of England funeral only very recently - at a village church in Stretton on Dunsmore in Warwickshire. I longed to feel the power of the Lord, but what I got instead was a communion with history. Sitting there in that building which had been in constant use for hundreds of years I got a direct connection with the past, with all the others that had sat in the same place since it had been built. There was a peace to it and it was good. It was a similar feeling to one you get sometimes when you walk in ancient landscapes that man has been working since the beginning of recorded time. From such a feeling to a firm faith and belief in God is, I guess, but a short step. But I just can't take it. I wish I could. Maybe one day ...
I know what you mean. I get that feeling of peace when I (rarely) visit St. Peter's in Stourton.
Isn't the story of religion a slow move from generalised ancestor worship through characteristic polytheism to monotheism. When characteristic polytheism predominated with gods for everything from weather to warfare the concept of a single God was aberrant. Look at the history of Armana period Egypt for evidence that the polytheism was pretty sticky as a socio-religious construct. Eventually monotheism prevailed but only really in the West. We are now slowly moving out if the realm of theism but naturally it is a sticky concept.
Tough one, I guess we'll only find out in the afterlife.
Isn't the story of religion a slow move from generalised ancestor worship through characteristic polytheism to monotheism. When characteristic polytheism predominated with gods for everything from weather to warfare the concept of a single God was aberrant. Look at the history of Armana period Egypt for evidence that the polytheism was pretty sticky as a socio-religious construct. Eventually monotheism prevailed but only really in the West. We are now slowly moving out if the realm of theism but naturally it is a sticky concept.
Tough one, I guess we'll only find out in the afterlife.
Isn't the story of religion a slow move from generalised ancestor worship through characteristic polytheism to monotheism. When characteristic polytheism predominated with gods for everything from weather to warfare the concept of a single God was aberrant. Look at the history of Armana period Egypt for evidence that the polytheism was pretty sticky as a socio-religious construct. Eventually monotheism prevailed but only really in the West. We are now slowly moving out if the realm of theism but naturally it is a sticky concept.
Tough one, I guess we'll only find out in the afterlife.
I suspect you'll be disappointed
Well if I'm disappointed, that means there is one :-)
Also, let us not forget that Enoch Powell was talking about West Indians in the UK.
A group that are now well integrated.
So, when people say 'prescient', what they really mean is:
"Well, Enoch said that West Indian immigrants couldn't speak our language, couldn't integrate and didn't want to integrate. And this would cause 'rivers of blood'. Obviously that didn't happen. But if he had said it about Muslims, which he didn't, then he would have been right. He's so prescient is that Enoch."
To be fair (and I am not inclined to be all that fair to Enoch as he was clearly a very bright man who knew what he was doing when he made his speech) those who point the finger saying he was wrong in the way you just have ignore the fact that he was taking at a time when there was very little in the way of effective immigration control.
It is conveniently forgotten that although Heath threw Powell out of the Shadow Cabinet, one of his first acts when he became PM two years later was to introduce a much stricter Immigration Bill which was the first to introduce a right of abode and which actually answered many of the criticisms Powell had been making of the system at the time.
Powell was wrong in many ways, not least because of the fear he engendered in immigrants who had legitimately come to settle in Britain. But to look back now and say he was wrong on the effects of uncontrolled immigration is clearly wrong given the history of immigration acts we have had since -and partly in response to - his speech.
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again, a complete misunderstanding of religious faith. I do not and did not choose to believe, I did not need a deity; God came to me. Religious faith chose ME. Turned out I was one of the lucky ones with the faculty for faith.
And it really is a tremendous solace, and I feel tremendous pity for those who do not share it. But there's not much I can do about your predicament.
But if you, as an atheist, are *laughing*, then you are the eunuch in the brothel laughing at the funny noises coming from the bedroom.
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
since most of humanity is religious has it struck you, that you might have the aberration ?
Hi Alan, that doesn't necessarily follow, because one could say:
"Since most of humanity is non-Christian has it struck you, that you [Christians] might have the aberration ?"
Actually that has struck me and I'm prepared to entertain the thought. "Scientists" tend to be more smug and closed-minded :-)
If I may say as someone of faith a lot of these arguments lack any substance purely because you are viewing religion through the prism of the book religions (christianity, judaism, and islam)
Not all religions advocate a beneficient god many in fact have a much more laissez faire attitude to humanity a "You have life now what you do with it is up to you" attitude.
Many religions have not urged their followers to go on a conversion rampage.
Many religions do not have a single god but many who are not all knowing and all seeing and work both with each other and against each other
Many religions don't have beardy people in the god position but curvy people who some might even refer to as female.
If you want to argue religion is bad because the crusades/jihad go ahead but argue christianity is bad because of the crusades or islam is bad because of jihad. Just because your only exposure to religion is to sunday school/madrassa etc does not mean all religions are the same as the book religions which is all that comes across in the "God is bad m'kay" rants
Religion like all ideologies has the ability to be warped, that includes political ideologies as well. If you want an example look no further than climate "science" where frankly the "science" has become a religion where no one is allowed to gainsay the high priest.
No belief system whether secular, god orientated or political is bad in and of itself it is when dogma is allowed to flourish under the umbrella of that belief system that everything goes a bit spoons
Twitter alexmassie @alexmassie 9m Magnificent work by The Scottish Sun today: pic.twitter.com/er5US9gJUY
At least the papacy now appears to acknowledge the right of the Scottish people to choose their future. In the bull Scimus fili of 1299, Boniface VIII claimed that Scotland was a papal fief, the nature of whose temporal government was a matter of the church.
Isn't the story of religion a slow move from generalised ancestor worship through characteristic polytheism to monotheism. When characteristic polytheism predominated with gods for everything from weather to warfare the concept of a single God was aberrant. Look at the history of Armana period Egypt for evidence that the polytheism was pretty sticky as a socio-religious construct. Eventually monotheism prevailed but only really in the West. We are now slowly moving out if the realm of theism but naturally it is a sticky concept.
Tough one, I guess we'll only find out in the afterlife.
I suspect you'll be disappointed
Well if I'm disappointed, that means there is one :-)
Ah apologies, I thought you were coming from a theistic stance
Isn't the story of religion a slow move from generalised ancestor worship through characteristic polytheism to monotheism. When characteristic polytheism predominated with gods for everything from weather to warfare the concept of a single God was aberrant. Look at the history of Armana period Egypt for evidence that the polytheism was pretty sticky as a socio-religious construct. Eventually monotheism prevailed but only really in the West. We are now slowly moving out if the realm of theism but naturally it is a sticky concept.
Tough one, I guess we'll only find out in the afterlife.
I suspect you'll be disappointed
Well if I'm disappointed, that means there is one :-)
Voltaire on his deathbed when asked if he renounced Satan and all his works
“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
Twitter alexmassie @alexmassie 9m Magnificent work by The Scottish Sun today: pic.twitter.com/er5US9gJUY
At least the papacy now appears to acknowledge the right of the Scottish people to choose their future. In the bull Scimus fili of 1299, Boniface VIII claimed that Scotland was a papal fief, the nature of whose temporal government was a matter of the church.
Was that not to keep it out of the paws of one E. Longshanks?
Isn't the story of religion a slow move from generalised ancestor worship through characteristic polytheism to monotheism. When characteristic polytheism predominated with gods for everything from weather to warfare the concept of a single God was aberrant. Look at the history of Armana period Egypt for evidence that the polytheism was pretty sticky as a socio-religious construct. Eventually monotheism prevailed but only really in the West. We are now slowly moving out if the realm of theism but naturally it is a sticky concept.
I wonder how many religious people are actually aware that there's a theory that religiosity likely began when our ancestors chanced upon psychotropic compounds (basically like those in magic mushrooms!) several tens of thousands of years ago. It's called the Neurochemical Model. It explains WHY people first began having 'visions' and 'encounters' with unexplained beings. Why they might have felt they were 'flying' and even why they might have felt themselves 'transforming' into animals (therianthropy). One of the strongest archaeological evidence for this model are the cave paintings in places as far apart as France, South Africa and Australia, dating back roughly 40,000 years.
I thought Yahweh didn't plan for us to have free will. It was just because Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge...
I'd have thought sticking a tree with a big shiny red apple on it and saying "don't eat it" would be a perfect test to see if humans were ready to be let out of the bio-engineering lab.
No you have that wrong, he didnt say that, the point was about immigration in general, not at all about West Indians in particular, far far from it
He said it would happen in areas where the immigrant population became the majority. He wasnt singling out West Indians, although I would argue that there is ghettoisation of carribean immigrants, and there has also been trouble on the back of that. In fact the speech was motivated by a Sikh bus conductor, and religious factions in India
But the Sikhs, and the Ugandan Asians, and (increasingly) people from the Caribbean *have* integrated.
When immigrants came to the UK - whether Jewish at the turn of the century, or the Hugenouts before them, or more recently from Bangladesh - they went to the cheapest places. They sought out the area around Brick Lane (which has moved from one immigrant community to the next over the last 500 years). And as the French Hugenots became richer, they moved out and assimilated. And then the poor Jews, with their clothing and textile sweat shops, came and dominated that same area of East London. Then as the Jews became wealthier they moved to Golders Green and Pinner. And in came the poor Bangladeshis, who've also started clothing sweat shops.
Ghettoization has always been the way with poor immigrants. Because they will always seek out the cheapest place they can to live.
Now: the case that is made that needs to be answered is, is there something special and unique about the poor Muslim immigration of the last 20 years that means there is no chance of assimilation and integration?
At opposite ends of the spectrum you have @Socrates and I. Personally, I believe that pretty much anyone, anywhere on earth wants almost exactly the same thing: a steady job, a loving wife, kids and a few home comforts.
I thought Yahweh didn't plan for us to have free will. It was just because Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge...
I'd have thought sticking a tree with a big shiny red apple on it and saying "don't eat it" would be a perfect test to see if humans were ready to be let out of the bio-engineering lab.
Was that not to keep it out of the paws of one E. Longshanks?
In part, but the papacy, as always, was concerned to enhance its own rights. Edward I claimed Scotland on the basis that he was the entitled to the kingdom of Britain, supposedly extant in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Brittaniae (c. 1136).* The Scots claimed that this was a misreading of history. The Egyptians had a greater claim to the Scottish crown than the English. Scotland's alleged status as a papal fief was strictly irrelevant (see R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343, (Oxford, 2000), p. 47).
*This was, of course, an unconscious abuse. Geoffrey, for all his faults, was a Welsh cultural nationalist and a staunch opponent of English hegemony.
No you have that wrong, he didnt say that, the point was about immigration in general, not at all about West Indians in particular, far far from it
He said it would happen in areas where the immigrant population became the majority. He wasnt singling out West Indians, although I would argue that there is ghettoisation of carribean immigrants, and there has also been trouble on the back of that. In fact the speech was motivated by a Sikh bus conductor, and religious factions in India
At opposite ends of the spectrum you have @Socrates and I. Personally, I believe that pretty much anyone, anywhere on earth wants almost exactly the same thing: a steady job, a loving wife, kids and a few home comforts.
Multiculturalism has died as finally the left has to make a choice between foreign religions and the illiberal society those religions want to impose (example: segregation and slavery).
I think this is an incredibly interesting paradox - and the question is what is everyone (not just the left but all politicians) actually going to do?
If, say, the % of British people wanting to impose sharia law in the UK rises significantly, what are politicians (of all parties) actually going to do?
If the trend becomes quite significant it would surely require very radical action to stop it.
There is some theory that when Muslims reach 20-25% of a country's population then civil strife is inevitable, as Islam refuses to assimilate, demands special treatment, and the host culture is forced into violent defense of its own beliefs.
Sadly, I believe the theory is not entirely nonsensical.
Have you read Enoch Powells Bimingham speech???
I read your quotes from it earlier on.
It was an extraordinarily prescient speech, and, yes, in many ways, Enoch was Right.
The tragedy is that this very bright, very insightful man chose to lace and envenom his speech with genuine and nasty raciness ("grinning piccaninnies") etc, which he must have known would be wildly provocative and allow liberals to ignore his more interesting, and crucial, observations, and dismiss him as a vile bigot.
It was a very smart speech yet ALSO an act of suicidal political self harm. Why did he do it?
I still can't work Powell out, whether he was an intellectual racist who let the mask slip, or a political narcissist who wanted too much attention, or he just made a couple of terrible errors that ruined his career.
Didn't he succeed in lowering the rate of immigration against the wishes of the political class at the time? If so then he probably did what he set out to do at the cost of his career.
Later the political class decided to try again and this time they succeeded.
Those who do not believe in a divine being often have something they're equally zealous about, be it their vision of the perfect society, a master race, a personality cult, the planet etc. It could be argued that greatest humanitarian disasters usually occur when God is substituted for something else. Communism and Nazism being two recent examples. When you see the preservation of all human life as secondary to your goal, you open the door to genocide.
This is a really weak argument. For a start, the Nazis were religious. Hitler believed in a Divine Providence that looked after the master race. Various other ones dabbled in the Occult. The only reason Communism has bigger death tolls than Naziism was because it happened to occur in countries with more people. Then we have things like King Leopold's brutal rape of the Congo, the Atlantic slave trade, the brutal conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas, all of which were carried out by God-fearing Christians.
It is democratic liberalism, with its belief in individual rights and constitutional governance, that has proven to be the philosophy that minimises harm and provides for the greatest human welfare. The presence or absence of religion is largely irrelevant. Where individual religions have turned into a positive force, it's because they have been tempered by the Enlightenment.
And this is an even weaker counter-argument. I spoke of replacing God, not of abandoning all belief in the supernatural -replacing him with the Occult, or indeed with Old Nick himself, self-evidently guarantees the type of disastrous outcome I refer to.
Terrible things have indeed been done in the name of Religion (though whether the perpetrators were themselves committed Christians is up for debate), but the fact remains that 'Godless' ideologies have lead to far worse, both in number and degree.
Was that not to keep it out of the paws of one E. Longshanks?
In part, but the papacy, as always, was concerned to enhance its own rights. Edward I claimed Scotland on the basis that he was the entitled to the kingdom of Britain, supposedly extant in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Brittaniae (c. 1136).* The Scots claimed that this was a misreading of history. The Egyptians had a greater claim to the Scottish crown than the English. Scotland's alleged status as a papal fief was strictly irrelevant (see R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343, (Oxford, 2000), p. 47).
*This was, of course, an unconscious abuse. Geoffrey, for all his faults, was a Welsh cultural nationalist and a staunch opponent of English hegemony.
Thank you - I did wonder about the Pope's own motives.
Also, let us not forget that Enoch Powell was talking about West Indians in the UK.
A group that are now well integrated.
So, when people say 'prescient', what they really mean is:
"Well, Enoch said that West Indian immigrants couldn't speak our language, couldn't integrate and didn't want to integrate. And this would cause 'rivers of blood'. Obviously that didn't happen. But if he had said it about Muslims, which he didn't, then he would have been right. He's so prescient is that Enoch."
To be fair (and I am not inclined to be all that fair to Enoch as he was clearly a very bright man who knew what he was doing when he made his speech) those who point the finger saying he was wrong in the way you just have ignore the fact that he was taking at a time when there was very little in the way of effective immigration control.
It is conveniently forgotten that although Heath threw Powell out of the Shadow Cabinet, one of his first acts when he became PM two years later was to introduce a much stricter Immigration Bill which was the first to introduce a right of abode and which actually answered many of the criticisms Powell had been making of the system at the time.
Powell was wrong in many ways, not least because of the fear he engendered in immigrants who had legitimately come to settle in Britain. But to look back now and say he was wrong on the effects of uncontrolled immigration is clearly wrong given the history of immigration acts we have had since -and partly in response to - his speech.
Well: the we invited people to come to the UK to work to help rebuild the damage done by six years of war. The people who boarded the Windrush were - basically - invited to come to the UK and work.
It is worth remembering that commonwealth immigration was restricted twice before Powell's speech: in 1962 and 1968, both of which severely limited the number of people who could come to the country. The 1971 act, IIRC (which I may well not) was only slightly more restrictive than the earlier two acts.
No you have that wrong, he didnt say that, the point was about immigration in general, not at all about West Indians in particular, far far from it
He said it would happen in areas where the immigrant population became the majority. He wasnt singling out West Indians, although I would argue that there is ghettoisation of carribean immigrants, and there has also been trouble on the back of that. In fact the speech was motivated by a Sikh bus conductor, and religious factions in India
At opposite ends of the spectrum you have @Socrates and I. Personally, I believe that pretty much anyone, anywhere on earth wants almost exactly the same thing: a steady job, a loving wife, kids and a few home comforts.
Wife or WIVES?
That reminds me of something my (Muslim, fwiw) colleague said:
"Marriage is shit. I don't see why homosexuals should get away with not getting married."
But the Sikhs, and the Ugandan Asians, and (increasingly) people from the Caribbean *have* integrated.
When immigrants came to the UK - whether Jewish at the turn of the century, or the Hugenouts before them, or more recently from Bangladesh - they went to the cheapest places. They sought out the area around Brick Lane (which has moved from one immigrant community to the next over the last 500 years). And as the French Hugenots became richer, they moved out and assimilated. And then the poor Jews, with their clothing and textile sweat shops, came and dominated that same area of East London. Then as the Jews became wealthier they moved to Golders Green and Pinner. And in came the poor Bangladeshis, who've also started clothing sweat shops.
Ghettoization has always been the way with poor immigrants. Because they will always seek out the cheapest place they can to live.
Now: the case that is made that needs to be answered is, is there something special and unique about the poor Muslim immigration of the last 20 years that means there is no chance of assimilation and integration?
At opposite ends of the spectrum you have @Socrates and I. Personally, I believe that pretty much anyone, anywhere on earth wants almost exactly the same thing: a steady job, a loving wife, kids and a few home comforts.
I'm not at the opposite end of the spectrum. I've said time and time again that I expect integration to happen with time, albeit at different speeds for different groups. It just needs an end to a constant influx of new people to do it. When half of Pakistani men are marrying girls from the subcontinent, it's obviously not going to happen.
As for poor immigrants always ghettoising, that's not true. Non-British whites are spread fairly evenly across London, unlike blacks and Asians:
As for Afro-Caribbean integration, it's certainly been a lot better than Muslims, but they still don't do very well educationally, and the UK's gun and knife crime epidemic is overwhelmingly concentrated in this group. Sikhs are small in number, so we don't notice them much, but intermarriage outside their group is very low, and that violent protest about that Sikh play a little while back shows there are still issues. Ugandan Asians have done extremely well, but that just proves my point about educated, high income migration being preferable.
Moreover, if atheism was such an appealing way of life, you would expect the children of atheists to be atheists themselves. They are not. Atheists are the LEAST likely of any parents to hand on their belief system to their offspring.
Think on that. Yr kids are gonna be Methodists, Muslims or Mormons.
Get on yr knees and pray, heathen, it's still not too late. Maybe.
Personally I just find it amusing that religious types are so sad and insecure that they need to believe in some all powerful deity to give meaning to their otherwise (as they must see it) pointless, insignificant lives.
You won't find us atheists on our knees, you'll find us sat in the bar, enjoying a drink whilst pointing at you and laughing.
Again,
Why should you be sorry for atheists? What makes you think that your particular mental aberration - which is very much how I view religious belief - should be the only one that can bring comfort to someone?
Lack of belief in an afterlife makes the joy of this one all the more satisfying.
The scientific evidence is that atheism is the aberration, and indeed not only is it an aberration - it is actually a mental affliction - shortening lifespans, reducing fertility, decreasing immunity etc.
I refer you to one of those most discussed British blogposts of the last 10 years:
1. Is there a God? 2. Is there a perfectly logical evolutionary explanation for why so many people are inclined to be religious?
If the answer to the second is yes then believing in God (for people so inclined) may be healthier for them in the same way eating salad is allegedly healthier for people whose ancestors were rabbits or raw meat is for normal people.
Those who do not believe in a divine being often have something they're equally zealous about, be it their vision of the perfect society, a master race, a personality cult, the planet etc. It could be argued that greatest humanitarian disasters usually occur when God is substituted for something else. Communism and Nazism being two recent examples. When you see the preservation of all human life as secondary to your goal, you open the door to genocide.
This is a really weak argument. For a start, the Nazis were religious. Hitler believed in a Divine Providence that looked after the master race. Various other ones dabbled in the Occult. The only reason Communism has bigger death tolls than Naziism was because it happened to occur in countries with more people. Then we have things like King Leopold's brutal rape of the Congo, the Atlantic slave trade, the brutal conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas, all of which were carried out by God-fearing Christians.
It is democratic liberalism, with its belief in individual rights and constitutional governance, that has proven to be the philosophy that minimises harm and provides for the greatest human welfare. The presence or absence of religion is largely irrelevant. Where individual religions have turned into a positive force, it's because they have been tempered by the Enlightenment.
And this is an even weaker counter-argument. I spoke of replacing God, not of abandoning all belief in the supernatural -replacing him with the Occult, or indeed with Old Nick himself, self-evidently guarantees the type of disastrous outcome I refer to.
Terrible things have indeed been done in the name of Religion (though whether the perpetrators were themselves committed Christians is up for debate), but the fact remains that 'Godless' ideologies have lead to far worse, both in number and degree.
Hitler believed in a Divine Providence. What is that if not God? And how on Earth was what was done by the Conquistadors in the Americas or in plantations in the southern US far better "in degree" than, say, Stalinism?
You are correct on numbers - although it's just one ideology - but that's just because the countries it happened in had more people.
Columbia Greece was 3:0 as forecast by foxinsox jr. 15/1 on that one, the boy done good ;-)
He now has had 3 of 5 scores exactly correct, of the other two he predicted a 1:1 draw for Spain Holland and 2:0 for Chile over Australia, so got the result and margin if not the exact score.
He is forecasting for tonight:
Uruguay 2 Costa Rica 0 England 1 Italy 1 Japan 1 Ivory Coast 1
I am well up on his predictions so far; PB take note!
To get back to the thread a little theological thought: Perhaps the future is predestined rather than a product of free will. We do tend to see others actions to be determined by their genetics, background and upbringing and our own as a product of free will.
I thought Yahweh didn't plan for us to have free will. It was just because Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge...
I'd have thought sticking a tree with a big shiny red apple on it and saying "don't eat it" would be a perfect test to see if humans were ready to be let out of the bio-engineering lab.
Bible never says it's an apple, just says fruit.
That's interesting. I wonder where the apple part came from.
Columbia Greece was 3:0 as forecast by foxinsox jr. 15/1 on that one, the boy done good ;-)
He now has had 3 of 5 scores exactly correct, of the other two he predicted a 1:1 draw for Spain Holland and 2:0 for Chile over Australia, so got the result and margin if not the exact score.
He is forecasting for tonight:
Uruguay 2 Costa Rica 0 England 1 Italy 1 Japan 1 Ivory Coast 1
I am well up on his predictions so far; PB take note!
To get back to the thread a little theological thought: Perhaps the future is predestined rather than a product of free will. We do tend to see others actions to be determined by their genetics, background and upbringing and our own as a product of free will.
He seems to be having a cracking tournament so far as a tipster!
N.B. Douglas Adams used the same logic to show that the existence of the Babel Fish proved that God did not exist. However, as the Babel Fish does not actual exist his argument can be dismissed as the load of old dingos' kidneys that it actually was.
Those who do not believe in a divine being often have something they're equally zealous about, be it their vision of the perfect society, a master race, a personality cult, the planet etc. It could be argued that greatest humanitarian disasters usually occur when God is substituted for something else. Communism and Nazism being two recent examples. When you see the preservation of all human life as secondary to your goal, you open the door to genocide.
This is a really weak argument. For a start, the Nazis were religious. Hitler believed in a Divine Providence that looked after the master race. Various other ones dabbled in the Occult. The only reason Communism has bigger death tolls than Naziism was because it happened to occur in countries with more people. Then we have things like King Leopold's brutal rape of the Congo, the Atlantic slave trade, the brutal conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas, all of which were carried out by God-fearing Christians.
It is democratic liberalism, with its belief in individual rights and constitutional governance, that has proven to be the philosophy that minimises harm and provides for the greatest human welfare. The presence or absence of religion is largely irrelevant. Where individual religions have turned into a positive force, it's because they have been tempered by the Enlightenment.
And this is an even weaker counter-argument. I spoke of replacing God, not of abandoning all belief in the supernatural -replacing him with the Occult, or indeed with Old Nick himself, self-evidently guarantees the type of disastrous outcome I refer to.
Terrible things have indeed been done in the name of Religion (though whether the perpetrators were themselves committed Christians is up for debate), but the fact remains that 'Godless' ideologies have lead to far worse, both in number and degree.
Hitler believed in a Divine Providence. What is that if not God? And how on Earth was what was done by the Conquistadors in the Americas or in plantations in the southern US far better "in degree" than, say, Stalinism?
You are correct on numbers - although it's just one ideology - but that's just because the countries it happened in had more people.
"Hitler believed in a Divine Providence. What is that if not God?"
Yeah but that's the point though. If most people are inclined to be religious then if you take the religion away they just get religious about something else.
Seems to me it would be better to just have a nice easy-going religion.
I thought Yahweh didn't plan for us to have free will. It was just because Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge...
I'd have thought sticking a tree with a big shiny red apple on it and saying "don't eat it" would be a perfect test to see if humans were ready to be let out of the bio-engineering lab.
Bible never says it's an apple, just says fruit.
That's interesting. I wonder where the apple part came from.
The Latin word for evil is malus for Apple is malum, consequently the tree of knowledge of good and evil in essence becomes an apple tree.
I thought Yahweh didn't plan for us to have free will. It was just because Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge...
I'd have thought sticking a tree with a big shiny red apple on it and saying "don't eat it" would be a perfect test to see if humans were ready to be let out of the bio-engineering lab.
Bible never says it's an apple, just says fruit.
That's interesting. I wonder where the apple part came from.
It's the same thing with Humpty Dumpty. The rhyme never mentions him being an egg.
Mr. Charles, angels have free will, hence Satan/Lucifer's rebellion.
Nah, that was pride. He objected to man being given free will, unlike the angels, and thought that it was the mark of God favouring man over his loyal servants. He dared to challenge God's will, and was cast down as a result.
"Exactly right. An omnipotent all-good being that let's horrific things happen to the innocent."
It's one of the great misunderstandings among the "religious", God gave us the free will to make the world what we want. In general we allow it to be made into a hell. Atheists are no better, or worse.
Giving us free will was surely the ultimate act of evil.
Spoken like a true Labour authoritarian. The man on Primrose Hill knows best.
Why give people the power to inflict pain and suffering on earth and in doing so consign them to spend eternity in hell?
Because free will is what makes us human. Without it we would be no better than the angels. And a damn sight less cool than the Cherubim*
* who, incidentally, are most definitely not little boys with wings and chubby cheeks, despite various attempts to portray them as such...
I thought Yahweh didn't plan for us to have free will. It was just because Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge...
Nah, that just gave us the awareness of good and evil. We had free will already - except in the matter of the Tree, which we were instructed not to eat from.
Personally, I think that there will be more goals in tonights game than he is predicting. The ball seems to shoot well from distance, possibly aided by the heat and humidity. I have backed the lads scores though!
Columbia Greece was 3:0 as forecast by foxinsox jr. 15/1 on that one, the boy done good ;-)
He now has had 3 of 5 scores exactly correct, of the other two he predicted a 1:1 draw for Spain Holland and 2:0 for Chile over Australia, so got the result and margin if not the exact score.
He is forecasting for tonight:
Uruguay 2 Costa Rica 0 England 1 Italy 1 Japan 1 Ivory Coast 1
I am well up on his predictions so far; PB take note!
To get back to the thread a little theological thought: Perhaps the future is predestined rather than a product of free will. We do tend to see others actions to be determined by their genetics, background and upbringing and our own as a product of free will.
He seems to be having a cracking tournament so far as a tipster!
"Exactly right. An omnipotent all-good being that let's horrific things happen to the innocent."
It's one of the great misunderstandings among the "religious", God gave us the free will to make the world what we want. In general we allow it to be made into a hell. Atheists are no better, or worse.
Giving us free will was surely the ultimate act of evil.
Spoken like a true Labour authoritarian. The man on Primrose Hill knows best.
Why give people the power to inflict pain and suffering on earth and in doing so consign them to spend eternity in hell?
Because free will is what makes us human. Without it we would be no better than the angels. And a damn sight less cool than the Cherubim*
* who, incidentally, are most definitely not little boys with wings and chubby cheeks, despite various attempts to portray them as such...
Free will is one thing but you'd hope God might step in with his pretty formidable countermeasures now and again.
Perhaps he does. It was quite lucky that Churchill existed at the time of Hitler's Germany. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
I went to my first Church of England funeral only very recently - at a village church in Stretton on Dunsmore in Warwickshire. I longed to feel the power of the Lord, but what I got instead was a communion with history. Sitting there in that building which had been in constant use for hundreds of years I got a direct connection with the past, with all the others that had sat in the same place since it had been built. There was a peace to it and it was good. It was a similar feeling to one you get sometimes when you walk in ancient landscapes that man has been working since the beginning of recorded time. From such a feeling to a firm faith and belief in God is, I guess, but a short step. But I just can't take it. I wish I could. Maybe one day ...
I know what you mean. I get that feeling of peace when I (rarely) visit St. Peter's in Stourton.
Yes good points. Maybe there is a god , but suppose there is not. Just how on earth do you explain the universe? I mean we can try to explain the big bang but what came before it? Cosmologists get round it by saying that its pointless since the laws of physics as we know them did not exists. So what did? And what did before that? You can understand why people turned to religion. Ho hum. Answers on a postcard please.
I've never really understood the UK immigration system. We make it hard for Americans, Australians, Canadians and Japanese to come to live, but have been waving in millions of unskilled workers from the third world. What rules exactly were in place that allowed that to happen?
The system should be changed right now to limit immigration from places where people haven't integrated very well in the past. Then we can start to deal with the problems of people who are already here. Of course that won't happen as it would be 'racist' or some rubbish.
I was wondering what would happen if the National Front got in in France and decided to boot out a load of Muslims. Would they all suddenly start flooding to nearby countries? What would the UK policy regarding that be?
I went to my first Church of England funeral only very recently - at a village church in Stretton on Dunsmore in Warwickshire. I longed to feel the power of the Lord, but what I got instead was a communion with history. Sitting there in that building which had been in constant use for hundreds of years I got a direct connection with the past, with all the others that had sat in the same place since it had been built. There was a peace to it and it was good. It was a similar feeling to one you get sometimes when you walk in ancient landscapes that man has been working since the beginning of recorded time. From such a feeling to a firm faith and belief in God is, I guess, but a short step. But I just can't take it. I wish I could. Maybe one day ...
I know what you mean. I get that feeling of peace when I (rarely) visit St. Peter's in Stourton.
Yes good points. Maybe there is a god , but suppose there is not. Just how on earth do you explain the universe? I mean we can try to explain the big bang but what came before it? Cosmologists get round it by saying that its pointless since the laws of physics as we know them did not exists. So what did? And what did before that? You can understand why people turned to religion. Ho hum. Answers on a postcard please.
Where did God live before he created the Universe? Why did he create the Universe? Who created God?
ComRes asked, “Please indicate whether you have a favourable or unfavourable view of each of the following.” The figures show the percentage replying “favourable”, and the net score, “favourable” minus “unfavourable”:
Prince William 68% +59 The Queen 63% +51 Prince Charles 43% +22 Boris Johnson 41% +13 David Cameron 28% -18 Nigel Farage 26% -18 William Hague 25% -10 George Osborne 19% -25 Ed Miliband 19% -30 Theresa May 16% -22 Nick Clegg 13% -41 Michael Gove 9% -38
After Michael Gove said this week that he wanted schools to “promote British values”, ComRes asked: “Which of the following would you say are the most important British values?” (Respondents could name up to three from a list of 12.)
Freedom of speech 48% Respect for the rule of law 34% Fairness 27% Tolerance 27% A sense of humour 26% Equality 24% Politeness 22% Political freedom 20% Responsibility 14% Religious freedom 12% Aspiration 3% Curiosity 2% Don’t know 7%
I went to my first Church of England funeral only very recently - at a village church in Stretton on Dunsmore in Warwickshire. I longed to feel the power of the Lord, but what I got instead was a communion with history. Sitting there in that building which had been in constant use for hundreds of years I got a direct connection with the past, with all the others that had sat in the same place since it had been built. There was a peace to it and it was good. It was a similar feeling to one you get sometimes when you walk in ancient landscapes that man has been working since the beginning of recorded time. From such a feeling to a firm faith and belief in God is, I guess, but a short step. But I just can't take it. I wish I could. Maybe one day ...
I know what you mean. I get that feeling of peace when I (rarely) visit St. Peter's in Stourton.
Yes good points. Maybe there is a god , but suppose there is not. Just how on earth do you explain the universe? I mean we can try to explain the big bang but what came before it? Cosmologists get round it by saying that its pointless since the laws of physics as we know them did not exists. So what did? And what did before that? You can understand why people turned to religion. Ho hum. Answers on a postcard please.
Who created the laws of physics? And who created the "space" for all these laws to exist in?
I think that was predestination, rather than free will. People like to believe that they have free will, and justify their actions, but maybe it is all laid out in advance. Perhaps as the predestined future is unknown our illusion of free will exists only in the mind.
The ancient theological discussion on predestination vs free will does have interesting parallells with modern genetics. For example is homosexuality genetic (predestined) or a product of free choice; or indeed a complex mixture of genetics and nurture (another more complex form of predetermination)?
"Exactly right. An omnipotent all-good being that let's horrific things happen to the innocent."
It's one of the great misunderstandings among the "religious", God gave us the free will to make the world what we want. In general we allow it to be made into a hell. Atheists are no better, or worse.
Giving us free will was surely the ultimate act of evil.
Spoken like a true Labour authoritarian. The man on Primrose Hill knows best.
Why give people the power to inflict pain and suffering on earth and in doing so consign them to spend eternity in hell?
Because free will is what makes us human. Without it we would be no better than the angels. And a damn sight less cool than the Cherubim*
* who, incidentally, are most definitely not little boys with wings and chubby cheeks, despite various attempts to portray them as such...
Free will is one thing but you'd hope God might step in with his pretty formidable countermeasures now and again.
Perhaps he does. It was quite lucky that Churchill existed at the time of Hitler's Germany. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.
I went to my first Church of England funeral only very recently - at a village church in Stretton on Dunsmore in Warwickshire. I longed to feel the power of the Lord, but what I got instead was a communion with history. Sitting there in that building which had been in constant use for hundreds of years I got a direct connection with the past, with all the others that had sat in the same place since it had been built. There was a peace to it and it was good. It was a similar feeling to one you get sometimes when you walk in ancient landscapes that man has been working since the beginning of recorded time. From such a feeling to a firm faith and belief in God is, I guess, but a short step. But I just can't take it. I wish I could. Maybe one day ...
I know what you mean. I get that feeling of peace when I (rarely) visit St. Peter's in Stourton.
Yes good points. Maybe there is a god , but suppose there is not. Just how on earth do you explain the universe? I mean we can try to explain the big bang but what came before it? Cosmologists get round it by saying that its pointless since the laws of physics as we know them did not exists. So what did? And what did before that? You can understand why people turned to religion. Ho hum. Answers on a postcard please.
Time is an inherent property of the universe. It makes about as much sense to ask what happened before it as it does to ask what colour a quark is.
I think free will is over-rated a bit, as it introduces a test; try to do good, or just don't bother. At one end a Saint, at the other "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
The ... What are we here for? Don't know, so let's not think about it is probably the most prevalent.
I visited a Greek Orthodox Monastery last week (on holiday) - definitely liked the atmosphere, but I'm a believer anyway.
Comments
And, for the record, I am an agnostic, not an atheist. I also used to be a true believing Christian, and so know the experience well.
It's saying that people who have a core belief system have a framework which they can judge other concepts and ideas. This core belief could be God, or it could be a philosophically-based ethical framework, or whatever.
It's essentially an argument about the vulnerability of relatively / multi-culturalism ;-)
(1) heavily reducing unskilled, uneducated migration, and so decrease how many conservative Muslims are coming to this country, and
(2) loudly condemning the uglier beliefs of conservative Islam so that the more decent people from Muslim families either reject the faith entirely, or construct a clearly defined separate version of it that is hostile to the conservative form of the faith - see Reform Judaism.
* who, incidentally, are most definitely not little boys with wings and chubby cheeks, despite various attempts to portray them as such...
The only way you can find it at all convincing is by ignoring historical context and wanting it to be prescient.
If you havent watched it already, on youtube there is an fantastic interview with David Frost and Powell... incredible TV, a must for anyone interested in politics.. he explains why he said what he did. No one was listening to the feelings of the working class, affected by immigration... the sense of frustration had to be spelled out loud and clear to the political class who didnt believe what was going on
Sounds familiar!!
Have a watch of it
A group that are now well integrated.
So, when people say 'prescient', what they really mean is:
"Well, Enoch said that West Indian immigrants couldn't speak our language, couldn't integrate and didn't want to integrate. And this would cause 'rivers of blood'. Obviously that didn't happen. But if he had said it about Muslims, which he didn't, then he would have been right. He's so prescient is that Enoch."
The Engineer is great if you want to hang around with the glitterati of Primrose Hill.
The York & Albany is expensive and over-rated.
"Since most of humanity is non-Christian has it struck you, that you [Christians] might have the aberration ?"
For the night is dark. And full of bettors.
He said it would happen in areas where the immigrant population became the majority. He wasnt singling out West Indians, although I would argue that there is ghettoisation of carribean immigrants, and there has also been trouble on the back of that. In fact the speech was motivated by a Sikh bus conductor, and religious factions in India
Post of the year for my money.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100231060/are-atheists-mentally-ill/
Lord Haw Haw had a lot of listeners.
Crackpots generally attract the curious.
alexmassie @alexmassie 9m
Magnificent work by The Scottish Sun today: pic.twitter.com/er5US9gJUY
It is conveniently forgotten that although Heath threw Powell out of the Shadow Cabinet, one of his first acts when he became PM two years later was to introduce a much stricter Immigration Bill which was the first to introduce a right of abode and which actually answered many of the criticisms Powell had been making of the system at the time.
Powell was wrong in many ways, not least because of the fear he engendered in immigrants who had legitimately come to settle in Britain. But to look back now and say he was wrong on the effects of uncontrolled immigration is clearly wrong given the history of immigration acts we have had since -and partly in response to - his speech.
And I'm more closet-minded than closed-minded
Not all religions advocate a beneficient god many in fact have a much more laissez faire attitude to humanity a "You have life now what you do with it is up to you" attitude.
Many religions have not urged their followers to go on a conversion rampage.
Many religions do not have a single god but many who are not all knowing and all seeing and work both with each other and against each other
Many religions don't have beardy people in the god position but curvy people who some might even refer to as female.
If you want to argue religion is bad because the crusades/jihad go ahead but argue christianity is bad because of the crusades or islam is bad because of jihad. Just because your only exposure to religion is to sunday school/madrassa etc does not mean all religions are the same as the book religions which is all that comes across in the "God is bad m'kay" rants
Religion like all ideologies has the ability to be warped, that includes political ideologies as well. If you want an example look no further than climate "science" where frankly the "science" has become a religion where no one is allowed to gainsay the high priest.
No belief system whether secular, god orientated or political is bad in and of itself it is when dogma is allowed to flourish under the umbrella of that belief system that everything goes a bit spoons
“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
It is an unscripted answer to a very leading question by a right-wing newspaper.
Recognise that pattern of late? I do.
http://weegingerdug.wordpress.com/ [edit: forgot URL, sorry]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology
Jamaica is decriminalizing "ganja", so perhaps other substances will have a revival?
When immigrants came to the UK - whether Jewish at the turn of the century, or the Hugenouts before them, or more recently from Bangladesh - they went to the cheapest places. They sought out the area around Brick Lane (which has moved from one immigrant community to the next over the last 500 years). And as the French Hugenots became richer, they moved out and assimilated. And then the poor Jews, with their clothing and textile sweat shops, came and dominated that same area of East London. Then as the Jews became wealthier they moved to Golders Green and Pinner. And in came the poor Bangladeshis, who've also started clothing sweat shops.
Ghettoization has always been the way with poor immigrants. Because they will always seek out the cheapest place they can to live.
Now: the case that is made that needs to be answered is, is there something special and unique about the poor Muslim immigration of the last 20 years that means there is no chance of assimilation and integration?
At opposite ends of the spectrum you have @Socrates and I. Personally, I believe that pretty much anyone, anywhere on earth wants almost exactly the same thing: a steady job, a loving wife, kids and a few home comforts.
*This was, of course, an unconscious abuse. Geoffrey, for all his faults, was a Welsh cultural nationalist and a staunch opponent of English hegemony.
Later the political class decided to try again and this time they succeeded.
It is democratic liberalism, with its belief in individual rights and constitutional governance, that has proven to be the philosophy that minimises harm and provides for the greatest human welfare. The presence or absence of religion is largely irrelevant. Where individual religions have turned into a positive force, it's because they have been tempered by the Enlightenment.
And this is an even weaker counter-argument. I spoke of replacing God, not of abandoning all belief in the supernatural -replacing him with the Occult, or indeed with Old Nick himself, self-evidently guarantees the type of disastrous outcome I refer to.
Terrible things have indeed been done in the name of Religion (though whether the perpetrators were themselves committed Christians is up for debate), but the fact remains that 'Godless' ideologies have lead to far worse, both in number and degree.
Thank you - I did wonder about the Pope's own motives.
It is worth remembering that commonwealth immigration was restricted twice before Powell's speech: in 1962 and 1968, both of which severely limited the number of people who could come to the country. The 1971 act, IIRC (which I may well not) was only slightly more restrictive than the earlier two acts.
"Marriage is shit. I don't see why homosexuals should get away with not getting married."
As for poor immigrants always ghettoising, that's not true. Non-British whites are spread fairly evenly across London, unlike blacks and Asians:
http://now-here-this.timeout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/ethnic_density1.jpg
As for Afro-Caribbean integration, it's certainly been a lot better than Muslims, but they still don't do very well educationally, and the UK's gun and knife crime epidemic is overwhelmingly concentrated in this group. Sikhs are small in number, so we don't notice them much, but intermarriage outside their group is very low, and that violent protest about that Sikh play a little while back shows there are still issues. Ugandan Asians have done extremely well, but that just proves my point about educated, high income migration being preferable.
1. Is there a God?
2. Is there a perfectly logical evolutionary explanation for why so many people are inclined to be religious?
If the answer to the second is yes then believing in God (for people so inclined) may be healthier for them in the same way eating salad is allegedly healthier for people whose ancestors were rabbits or raw meat is for normal people.
Terrible things have indeed been done in the name of Religion (though whether the perpetrators were themselves committed Christians is up for debate), but the fact remains that 'Godless' ideologies have lead to far worse, both in number and degree.
Hitler believed in a Divine Providence. What is that if not God? And how on Earth was what was done by the Conquistadors in the Americas or in plantations in the southern US far better "in degree" than, say, Stalinism?
You are correct on numbers - although it's just one ideology - but that's just because the countries it happened in had more people.
He now has had 3 of 5 scores exactly correct, of the other two he predicted a 1:1 draw for Spain Holland and 2:0 for Chile over Australia, so got the result and margin if not the exact score.
He is forecasting for tonight:
Uruguay 2 Costa Rica 0
England 1 Italy 1
Japan 1 Ivory Coast 1
I am well up on his predictions so far; PB take note!
To get back to the thread a little theological thought: Perhaps the future is predestined rather than a product of free will. We do tend to see others actions to be determined by their genetics, background and upbringing and our own as a product of free will.
N.B. Douglas Adams used the same logic to show that the existence of the Babel Fish proved that God did not exist. However, as the Babel Fish does not actual exist his argument can be dismissed as the load of old dingos' kidneys that it actually was.
You are correct on numbers - although it's just one ideology - but that's just because the countries it happened in had more people.
"Hitler believed in a Divine Providence. What is that if not God?"
Yeah but that's the point though. If most people are inclined to be religious then if you take the religion away they just get religious about something else.
Seems to me it would be better to just have a nice easy-going religion.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10900132/First-fake-voters-now-police-look-into-bogus-councillors-in-Tower-Hamlets.html?utm_content=buffere2ccb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
So what did? And what did before that? You can understand why people turned to religion.
Ho hum.
Answers on a postcard please.
The system should be changed right now to limit immigration from places where people haven't integrated very well in the past. Then we can start to deal with the problems of people who are already here. Of course that won't happen as it would be 'racist' or some rubbish.
I was wondering what would happen if the National Front got in in France and decided to boot out a load of Muslims. Would they all suddenly start flooding to nearby countries? What would the UK policy regarding that be?
Con 32% (+3)
Lab 34% (+1)
LD 7% (-1)
UKIP 18% (-1)
Green 4% (0)
Other 5% (-2)
http://comres.co.uk/poll/1203/sunday-mirror-independent-on-sunday-political-poll.htm
Why did he create the Universe?
Who created God?
ComRes asked, “Please indicate whether you have a favourable or unfavourable view of each of the following.” The figures show the percentage replying “favourable”, and the net score, “favourable” minus “unfavourable”:
Prince William 68% +59
The Queen 63% +51
Prince Charles 43% +22
Boris Johnson 41% +13
David Cameron 28% -18
Nigel Farage 26% -18
William Hague 25% -10
George Osborne 19% -25
Ed Miliband 19% -30
Theresa May 16% -22
Nick Clegg 13% -41
Michael Gove 9% -38
After Michael Gove said this week that he wanted schools to “promote British values”, ComRes asked: “Which of the following would you say are the most important British values?” (Respondents could name up to three from a list of 12.)
Freedom of speech 48%
Respect for the rule of law 34%
Fairness 27%
Tolerance 27%
A sense of humour 26%
Equality 24%
Politeness 22%
Political freedom 20%
Responsibility 14%
Religious freedom 12%
Aspiration 3%
Curiosity 2%
Don’t know 7%
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2014/06/14/prince-william-more-popular-than-queen/
Very good poll for Con after the recent widening of the Lab lead post euros.
The ancient theological discussion on predestination vs free will does have interesting parallells with modern genetics. For example is homosexuality genetic (predestined) or a product of free choice; or indeed a complex mixture of genetics and nurture (another more complex form of predetermination)?
The ... What are we here for? Don't know, so let's not think about it is probably the most prevalent.
I visited a Greek Orthodox Monastery last week (on holiday) - definitely liked the atmosphere, but I'm a believer anyway.