kaelcarp

Limiting speech doesn't necessarily get rid of problems. It buries them and drives them underground. Letting neo-nazis march in the full light of day where everyone can see them is probably better than them congregating in secret, angry at a society that tells them they are wrong.

Sorry for the long quote, but the post is pretty far back. For the record, I am an atheist, and I do reject the many specific ideas of god put forth by religions like Christianity or Hinduism or, for that matter, the Ancient Greeks. To me, there is too much specificity in their god ideas that is unsupported. However, the idea of the existence of a god, something very unspecific, is not something I'd be willing to rule out given the current evidence. If asked to make a choice one way or the other, I'll say that there's probably not one, but I can't say that with 100% confidence because I truly don't know. I was thinking really of the common usage of the word "irrational" meaning that it is not just without reason, but against it. Yes, technically anything not rational is irrational, but that word does carry some weight that I think obscures other meanings. Of course, one could say the same about the common use of the word "atheist," which I use in a sense not everyone would agree with. I'm an atheist. I don't have any beliefs regarding a general "god" idea. However, I think making a positive affirmation that no god of any kind exists is premature.

There is no way one can logically conclude that god exists, since we don't have enough evidence one way or the other. Nor can one make a logical conclusion that god does not exist. Any statement for or against the existence of a deity is made entirely based on faith.

Theism is non-rational, but I wouldn't call it irrational. It doesn't necessarily contradict reason, but it doesn't use reason as a means for acquiring knowledge. It uses faith.

It seems as though you and I travel in opposite circles. :) I don't think having time to think about deeper issues inevitably leads one to come to theistic belief over nonbelief. People go both ways throughout their lives. Older people are generally more religious, but I think it's only because there has been a general decline in religiosity over time, and younger generations are growing up with that.

Most people I have known have gravitated away from religious belief as they've gotten older. From what I've seen, people become more skeptical as they get older. This is by no means an absolute, just a general impression.

The Christian God is either not all-loving or not omnipotent. If it were all-loving and omnipotent, it would stop pain and suffering, or at least make it so that we didn't feel those sensations, and would align the universe so that there would not be a need for them. Either it is not actually all-loving, or it is not omnipotent enough to do that. There's an interesting little deity contrstuction test here: http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/whatisgod.htm

There has never been a very good logical, rational argument for the existence of any kind of deity. Now, I don't have a problem with someone believing in one. I believe lots of things without a logical, rational argument for them. That's faith. When people start to treat faith as science, however, it bothers me. Science is skepticism, the opposite of faith. It makes very few assumptions, whereas faith is based upon assumption. This is something I really dislike about current movements in the United States to present fundamentalist religious belief as science.

The people may not have been, but the structure of the country and government were certainly much more secular than other countries. Consider that all those countries had official state religions at the time. It was a novel idea to have a country with no state religion and a thoroughly secular government. It's fairly clear from various sources that most of the founding fathers were in favor of more than just not having a state religion. They wanted no involvement of the government in religion at all. Now, you could say that not allowing displays of any religious affinity at all is stretching that, but they certainly didn't want to see religion and government together. As James Madison said, "...religion & Govt will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together."

http://franciscan-anglican.com/Panentheism.htm

I think it's on the borderline. For one, all private businesses are free to consider Christamas a holiday or not. I know someone who had to work Christmas and didn't get paid extra for it. For another, they try to equalize it by giving people "floating" holidays sometimes. I don't know how government institutions handle it, but I'd imagine that they use the whole "floating holiday" thing for compensation.

I don't think you can get anything like valid data from this. For one, you're not getting a representative sample. For another, there's nothing to control how many times one person takes the survey. The data you'll get will be nearly useless, really, except possibly as a curiosity.

America hasn't always been the "Christian Nation" people are trying to make it now. It started off as a much more secular nation than any of the European countries. A lot of the ties probably aren't as strong because of that, and because the US basically hasn't had them as strongly rooted in its traditions. The European countries had some of those holidays from back in the days when Christianity literally ran the countries. There hasn't been too much of a call to get rid of them, since people like to celebrate. Of course, no one liked to celebrate like the Romans. Something like 1/3 of the calendar days were holidays at one point in ancient Rome.

Funny, there's this atheist activist I know who is trying to start a movement to have the day a man set foot on the moon be day 1 of year 0 and base the year naming on that, making this the year 35.

I call myself an atheist, but I specify it as either "weak" or "negative" atheism. That is something commonly called agnostic, but agnosticism is really a lack of a belief in the ability to form true knowledge (about a deity), rather than a lack of belief in a deity. Negative atheism is the assertion that one does not currently possess enough evidence one way or the other regarding whether there is a deity. It is called "negative" because it is a lack of belief. This contrasts with "strong" or "positive" atheism, also called "antitheism", which states a positive belief that there is no deity. I have a 2-year-old son, and when he gets older, I plan to teach him how to view the world with a critical eye and think for himself, how to reason and form opinions. What conclusions he comes to from that will be his own. I would never take him to a church that taught things I specifically disagree with, but I don't mind exposing him to a variety of belief systems.