'Actually, the difference between and Atheism and Agnosticism is that Atheism deals with belief and Agnosticism deals with knowledge. So all Atheists are also Agnostics - as no one can know if a God of any sort actually exists - and most Agnostics are Atheists since they don’t believe in any particular God.'
AJ Philips

Again, what rubbish. This is not the position of agnostics at all.

Religion is BS. In this I (as an agnostic) I concur with the Atheists. But just because religion is BS that does not mean that God is BS. The Atheists seem to be continually making the mistake of pointing out the ridiculous nature of religion and ascribing this ridiculousness to God when God (if it exists) has nothing to do with religion.

As an agnostic I reject both the religious and atheist dogmas. I reject the religious as purveyors of ignorance and BS. I reject the atheist position for confusing religion with God.

Is there a God? I don't know. Yes, agnostics do deal in knowledge and if the knowledge is not available they say 'I do not know.' This is a rejection of both religious and atheist thinking because both claim to have knowledge they do not have.

No Celivia, I did not say that Jesus was taken out of context. I said that the words you had attributed to him were not his, except in the one case where they don't refer to slavery.

I wonder why you are so concerned to lumber Jesus with views you don't like on slavery? To the extent where the fact he said nothing about slavery becomes to you proof that he must have approved of it!

Anyway, it sent me off to do some useful research on first century slavery in Palestine. Turns out it was something fairly different from what we think of as slavery, based on the North American model. This page seems to give a fair summary http://www.bga.com/~wdoud/topics/servant.html. And that summary means that the slave trade would have been disapproved by first century Jewish teaching. Their slavery was more a form of indentured labour.

One of the things that strikes me about the militant atheists like Dawkins is that they have a poor understanding of what they are criticising. There appears to be an a priori decision that religion is an evil, and then everything must be twisted to fit that thesis.

Pelican, there is a good reason why we devote time to '"Atheists bad, Christians good" type articles'. That is what people are arguing about. Look at the length of this thread and the publicity that Dawkins has gained while he's been over here.

What with him and Monckton, we've had a couple of months of dotty condescening poms monopolising the airwaves!

"There appears to be an a priori decision that religion is an evil, and then everything must be twisted to fit that thesis."

There is also a similar view that lack of belief in a supreme being is evil or somehow found wanting. I guess these discussions are inevitable given the new found voice of non-believers in a world that has up until modern times been dominated by religious righteousness.

I don't believe Dawkin's actually extends the idea of evil done in the name of Religion to express the idea that all Christians or theists are evil. Dawkins expresses the view that religion is a by-product of evolution. Dawkins is an individual he does not represent the views of all atheists in totality.

It seems as if believer and non-believer alike are destined to continue the same old meaningless battles to prove their worldviewse. This, despite the fact we are all whistling in the wind about matters which we cannot possibly 'know' only that we all in one way or another seek explanations or purpse for existence.

I suspect the length of religious threads is purely due to sensitivities on both 'sides' of the debate.

>> There’s a strong case to be made that it’s the atheists who get too much attention in our society.

trav, you're a scream.

>> Hook, line and sinker. You fell for it

as others have pointed out, you've only succeeded in hooking yourself. mass belief is proof of nothing.

>> it doesn't make much sense to look for atheistic charities in an essentially Christian country.

and which essentially christian country would you be referring to, graham? uganda?

>> However, China, Russia, Cuba and a number of other countries have in recent times been ideologically atheistic,

whatever "ideologically atheistic" means.

>> so it should be possible to do a comparison between them and Christian countries

no. the natural comparison is between theocracies and secular states.

>> One of the things that strikes me about the militant atheists like Dawkins ...

one of the thing that strikes me about smug religious creeps is how disgusting is their use of "militant" to label speakers such as dawkins, when militant religion actually involves people being murdered.

Want to know what gives 'religion' such a good name with non-believers?

Take a look at this crackpot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM0oBuhTLRI

It doesn't cover every angle I do realise, but it's hard to imagine the AFA people handing out thousands of Dawkins/Hitchens/Onfrey/Darwin books in a mad and desperate effort to 'convert' people to 'the truth', isn't it?

In fact, it looks like a very militant view from the fellow in the chair, not the sort of slouch I've seen Dawkins adopt on Q&A.

And here is a journal article for those who scrabbled about to find 'proof' that Christians give more then atheists, particularly when there is a tax deduction in the offing:
http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP073984414.pdf

It concerns higher levels of crime where religion is to the fore.

Naturally, its findings are contested, particularly by US Christians...but also by 'ordinary' researchers. I've lost the list of articles but it would be easy enough for others to google them up.

Coupled with some of the Pew survey work showing religious countries to be, generally, poorer countries, it does make sense.

The US, of course, is both rich and poor, clever and ignorant at the same time as being overtly 'religious' across all categories, but it is something of an exception to the rule.

The 'new' Darwin book on the utube film really is a classic piece of 'religious porn', and just the sort of tripe non-believers do not want to be used in schools, as Christians want to do.

At least in the US they have the right idea of 'church and state' issues, and ban Gideons, prayers and the 10 Commandments from their public schools.

Here teachers, principals, chaplains and education ministers, to say nothing of premiers, fall over themselves trying to appease the religious extremists who want to poison children's minds with this 'religious porn'.

Bring on the High Court challenge to funding religion in state schools: http://highcourtchallenge.com/

A strawman argument, coupled with the ‘Argument from Authority’ fallacy. A nice start to your response to me, Trav.

<<You talk about Dawkins like he’s some kind of authority on the topic of religion.>>

No. I used him as an example of who your God could convert because he’s a well-known and outspoken Atheist.

<<Numerous atheist philosophers have pointed out how weak his arguments against God are (Ruse, for example)...>>

Ruse’s main beef with Dawkins is that he thinks that Dawkins isn’t taking his opponents seriously enough. The irony here is that Ruse is making exactly the same mistake he accuses Dawkins of.

<<...not to mention all the Christian ones who’ve done the same (Plantinga, Craig etc).>>

Oh, such shining examples of intelligentsia.

The problem with Christian apologetics is that the arguments fall down at their premises.

A classic example is the ‘Kalam Cosmological Argument’ that Craig uses...

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

We don’t know that the universe has a cause, particularly now that quantum physics is starting to challenge what we know about cause and effect.

Craig also wrongly claims that moral standards require God. Mind you, this is the same God that intelligently designed childhood cancers.

Then there’s Matthew Slick’s ‘Transcendental Argument’ (http://www.carm.org/transcendental-argument), which starts off nice, then falls down at 6-A, because Slick makes the fallacious argument that logical absolutes are "conceptual by nature". He does this by talking about ‘logical absolutes’, then switching to just ‘logic’.

But my favourite is the ‘Ontological Argument’, which after wading through the obfuscation is simply: “I can conceive God, therefore he exists.”

I can conceive Santa, but that doesn’t mean he exists.

<<Just to repeat: I’m pointing out things that his fellow atheists have said- Dawkins level of reflection on religion is surprisingly shallow...>>

I don't care about what Dawkins has said. It was you who asserted that I saw him as “some kind of authority on the topic of religion”.

Continued...