How many people believe in GOD.

[Prospero]

So you better start attending the church of your choice.

[muh_muh]

Agnosticism seems to me to be the only viable position.

i highly doubt that there is anyone who truely doesnt lean one way or the other
even if they are agnostic and not opposed to the idea that they could be wrong

[trish]

Ah, but the rewards of non-belief outweigh the gains belief (an immortal life of servitude in heaven); I get to stay in my warm bed on Sunday mornings...or sit by my window, watching ducks on the lake while I sip my coffee and contemplate the riddles of the universe and the pleasures that preceded the day.

[martin48]

Ah, but the rewards of non-belief outweigh the gains belief (an immortal life of servitude in heaven); I get to stay in my warm bed on Sunday mornings...or sit by my window, watching ducks on the lake while I sip my coffee and contemplate the riddles of the universe and the pleasures that preceded the day.

I'm sure you can do all that with a religion - here's one for you http://www.venganza.org/2011/06/billboard


If you wish to hear a robust and reasoned argument against religion, play this.

The Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens debate.



Here's a little of Hitchens's opening piece


Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. I’ll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent, greedy for uncritical phrase from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original since with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place.
However, let no one say there’s no cure, salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said, it must be said, would have to admit makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims.
Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I’m asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our scepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal?
To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. To say that certain books of legend and myth, man-made and primitive, are revealed not man-made code.
Religion forces nice people to do unkind things, and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, beautiful, almost perfect, now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord. No, it is — as the great physicist Stephen Weinberg has aptly put it, in the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

[Prospero]

i highly doubt that there is anyone who truely doesnt lean one way or the other
even if they are agnostic and not opposed to the idea that they could be wrong

You are probably right. I was a catholic as a child and I am sure there is a god shaped hole left there when I fell out of faith. Give me a child until the age of five as the Jesuits say....

[Prospero]

I would take issue with Hitchens. The Christian faith dictates that we are created sick and then made well (the idea of the fall) but I don't think Hinduism, as one example, does this.

[trish]

Speaking of servitude in Heaven, I’ve been wondering what sort of government they’ve got up there. Is it a democracy based on a free-market based economy? Is there a parliament as well as a King of kings? How easy is it to set up a small business there? Are there any pesky governmental regulations? Could I, for example, barter for souls up there, or would there be a regulation for that? I was thinking I could escort up there. Advertise the best piece of ass in an lifetime (an eternal lifetime) for one single soul. Sounds fair, right? I should be able to make a small profit. Oh wait, as I remember the Old Fart in Heaven was never to hip on sodomy. Damn, I bet there’s a regulation against it. Man, don’t you just hate BIG GOVERNMENT?

[Prospero]

Well God forbid you'd meet people like Glenn Beck, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, The Reverend Jim Jones, Jessie Helms, Ann Coulter, Billy Graham and all those ghastly tele-evangelists etc etc... that's oe reason to hope to go to the other place (though in truth I suspect that would really be where they are bound.)

[martin48]

Speaking of servitude in Heaven, I’ve been wondering what sort of government they’ve got up there. Is it a democracy based on a free-market based economy? Is there a parliament as well as a King of kings? How easy is it to set up a small business there? Are there any pesky governmental regulations? Could I, for example, barter for souls up there, or would there be a regulation for that? I was thinking I could escort up there. Advertise the best piece of ass in an lifetime (an eternal lifetime) for one single soul. Sounds fair, right? I should be able to make a small profit. Oh wait, as I remember the Old Fart in Heaven was never to hip on sodomy. Damn, I bet there’s a regulation against it. Man, don’t you just hate BIG GOVERNMENT?

I like this joke - it was in a cartoon.

Man arrives at Heaven's Gate and St. Peter says "where's all your stuff?"

"What stuff?" says the man.

"You are empty-handed," says St. Peter

"Well, they said I couldn't take it with me."

"A common misconception," replies St. Peter

[trish]

Good one, martin.
I just came across an amusing algorithm for scoring the worth of scientific papers and their authors

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html

.