Poll: My religious beliefs are best summarized by...
Let's just get this out of the way. I'm interested in an approximate distribution even as I'm okay in the minority.
- 33 points
Atheist!
- 4 points
Agnostic?
- 18 points
Theist.
- 2 points
Cookie monster/Werewolf
- 3 points
42
Comments
How about adding "the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question" as an option?
I dunno, is that really analogous? The werewolf question would barely alter your behavior even if you did believe in them.
If you're saying that you do not act as if a God existed, I call that atheism. To me belief isn't a matter of profession, it's a matter of altered behavior. By this standard a lot of so-called believers actually aren't, so this is perhaps controversial, but I think this clarifies things.
I really don't see the common analytic framework there - but sure, you can vote on the werewolf/cookie monster option. :)
- one true K&R brace style
- 4 space indentation, no tabs
Amen
0 religious beliefs, but "There exists a benevolent (albeit highly ironic and humorous) higher power in the (uni|multi)verse.", taken as a working hypothesis, seems to be useful. YMMV
Agnostic theism? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theist)
(The question was "best summarized by", so I assume the idea is to check only one, even though this spans two of the choices.)
I tend toward atheism, but I still have trouble with the fact that we don't know why or how the universe was created, or how space was created.
That said, I also have faith (ironic, right?) that science will figure it out - they figured out gravity, calculus, relativity, etc. so why not this?
Not knowing why something happened is not enough for me to say "God exists." It means we need to keep looking for a reason.
If you consider how much we don't know, the "creation story" just happens to be a very small fraction of that.
Religious people put a lot of weight on the creation story. It's not important. It's perhaps one of those things that people tend to wonder about, but in terms of scientific knowledge and the benefit of doing science to make the world better, figuring out exactly how the universe created is pretty much a useless undertaking.
The important fact is that the universe exists and has properties that can be understood through science. It is not even relevant whether it ever did not exist. It simply does, and for human purposes it always will.
The idea of the universe not existing is borrowed from religion. Scientists have come up with some fun theories, but there are a lot more useful/practical/interesting areas of science to think about than trying to come up with a scientific alternative to religious cosmogenesis myths.
Interesting site: http://godisimaginary.com/
what?! no great, green occal seizure?! thats just offensive.
You must be a fan of the radio or TV series? It was 'Arkleseizure' in the books. I suppose it does sound just like 'Occal', with the Brit accent.
http://hhgproject.org/entries/greatgreenarkleseizure.html
FSM
Vim.