littleyellowbirdie

No. You go away,. You stop answering you vile little hypocritical Jew-hating bigot. How dare you call me a hypocrite after YOU completely dismissed all of the Jews who had to flee in the Middle East and the 6,000,000 killed in the holocaust.

After you'd descended to throwing insults. and continuing again and again. If my mocking you after your insults was why it was pulled rather than you banding about the 'hyposcrite' and the like while you equate 6,000,000 Jews executed in concentration camps to 30,000 killed in a war situation, while at the same time somehow suspending that 'logic' to consider 30,000 worse than 1,200 Jews on October 7th then that's a disgrace.

What? No more insults? You were pretty keen to take things to the gutter weren't you? After all the sanctimony you've given in the past.

Thank God for that; the thread might get deleted otherwise.

The lower part of his body was on fire? Seems a bit extreme. Couldn't he have just shouted 'liar, liar, pants on fire' to get the message across?

No, that was me, but Horsefly's point is a bit vapid seeing as that's merely a reflection of social attitudes when they were written, so more a reflection of that than the religions themselves. Misogyny is not inherently built-in to religion, nor shoud it be considered a part of it The C of E has reformed to include women priests and I'm sure other religions will adapt as well. In fact, it's unhelpful to women to insist on bundling in misogyny with religion; that's the whole reason we have misguided lefties acting as apologists for misogyny in Islam by declaring criticism as 'Islamophobic', basically leaving Women's rights in Islam in the hands of the Islamic communities in the hands of religious conservatives. Religion must adapt to fit into wider society, but it's stupid and futile to try and push it out.

Our own birth rate is about 1.5. All else being equal, population should be shrinking, easing strain on infrastructure, resources and biodiversity in an overpopulated country, but instead everyone's topping up with immigrants for economic reasons creating a more fragmented society in the process. In Gillingham, you'll hear more foreign languages on the high street than English. The Japanese are tackling population shrinkage with automation.

Mansfield Town v Gillingham: Home win Our bet: BTTS no; Sara to score from outside the box. Good luck, PUPs!

So how do you explain Europe being one of the most war-torn continents of the early 20th century when almost everyone was Christian if getting rid of religion is a magic bullet for peace and prosperity?

I was actually quite amazed that I'd finally managed to post something with no dissent whatsoever. 😂 Really added the icing to the cake for @GodlyOtsemobor picking me for his team the other day. 🙂

You're right; the religion's just a pretext for a conflict, just like politics and race can be. But you're all deluding yourselves anyway. The vast majority of the world is religious, and what's more, your laissez faire attitude to uncontrolled immigration and not deporting undocumented migrants will ensure that the atheists like yourself will be replaced by believers of some variety or other, because they also tend to breed more.

You're suggesting religion causes child abuse, which is ridiculous. You telling me there have been no deaths in the world because of politics, race, supporting different football teams? Should we get rid of those as well?

No it hasn't; people arguing about it has. And people argue and kill each other over all sorts of things, including politics, resources, skin colour, you name it. Hitler wasn't religious, but criticised lots of religion and killed off 6,000,000 Jews in the name of disliking that one in particular, so that clearly wasn't actually about the existence or non-existence of a deity. The mistreatment of women in Islam is more to do with culture than religion. A friend remarked of a giant poster of a smiling female fighter pilot at Jordan airport (Princess Salma apparently), underlining that misogyny and mistreatment of women is a bolt on to the religion rather than a core part of it and some Muslim countries don't force women to wear niqabs, burqas or head wear. A growing number of Muslims support secularity and feminism; oddly, Western liberal progressives pay them little heed, in favour of generally favouring the rights of Islamic Conservatives. And much more sexual abuse happens that has nothing to do with religion. It happens in families, with carers, all over the place.

Having posted a thread about this on the football side by mistake which I quickly edited to simply say 'ignore' and went on to create this one in non-football, since I shared it on Tuesday the thread entitled 'ignore' on the football side has about seven times more views than Antonio Guterres' appeal on behalf of Sudan.

Politics is divisive. Should that be banned? Kids are being brainwashed to entertain left wing ideology that their birth sex might be 'wrong'. Religion seems harmless in comparison.

Did you check with your MP what you should think about it?

More and more, the approach throughout politics is to discredit the source rather than tackle the arguments.

I used to watch it religiously, but haven't watched it in about five years now.

All you've got to do to prove there's no God is come up with a scientifically verifiable explanation for our conscious existence in this universe that excludes the possibility that no conscious entity actively brought about what we perceive as existence.

Sciencism was something I made up on the spot to express an idea of using science as an all-inclusive philosophy to exclude other reasoning. If scientism is an existing term for the same idea then thanks for the info. I think @ron obvious is right that it would be great to have a pure philosophy thread. Getting back to the social, to me, religion is far more important in the social, cultural, and philosophical elements regarding human behaviour than what it may or may not have to say about the existence of an all-encompassing consciousness that was responsible for our existence. Fundamentally, if a group is getting so aggressively hostile to all religion that you would seek to oppress expression of religion simply for objection to the idea that the idea of a conscious entity may have been involved in our creation, , as some self-proclaimed atheists clearly are, then it's starting to display the sort of toxic behaviour that religions are often criticised for; it's going beyond secularism into what becomes ideologically-based oppression in its own right.

Atheism makes a specific unfalsiable claim: 'no conscious entity was responsible for the creation of us and our universe'. Would you agree or disagree with that statement?

Bearded guys on clouds are just an expression of the idea. In a way, it does exactly what you favour doing with Hitchen's razor, namely using it as a tool to put the stuff you can't explain in a box and not worry about it. When you get down to it, all religions really come down to the philosophical ideas of people about building societies and how to behave. 'God' is just a way of putting in a box all the unexplainable to focus on what they think they have explained.

It's not a twist. Science can't exist without unsubstantiated claims. Every new model in science is an unsubstantiated claim until it has been substantiated. You can't use it or apply it without substantiating it in a scientific context, but that doesn't amount to dismissing the idea itself, only dismissing it as an idea to use within the context of existing scientific models as 'true'. Dark matter is a recognised scientific term for something that has been inferred must be there but to this date hasn't been observed. The scientific conclusion of that is either we just can't see it or there's something fundamentally wrong/incomplete with our models. People continue to search for dark matter to vindicate scientific models Either way, the anomaly that it seeks to resolve can't and isn't dismissed as something to expend considerable thought on. Hitchen's razor would dictate to simply forget about Dark Matter and carry on regardless, killing a whole area of legitimate, and possibly important, scientific inquiry.

I'd suggest that if you're presenting Hitchen's razor as the ultimate definitive approach to reasoning, then the onus of evidence is on you to show that's correct.

Science is a subset of philosophy. There are assumptions in the scientific method itself that we are required to make for the scientific model to work. Science is good, functional, and useful. I love science; that's why I studied it at uni. Hitchen's razor takes the principles of science of working with what you can establish scientifically as a complete philosophy, which maybe could be regarded as sciencism.