"That there is no God" must be what all Banjo Paterson's think. bravo.

To Peter Sellick...advice, if I may...if you use Jesus in a sentence...his relationship to the Holy Trinity must be implicit and message of your sentence must reflect it...father son holyspirit...or in common language father_god the singular and eternal...son_god on earth in physical form, holyghost_intelligent energy that's god in all of us intertwined with our own soul...I believe this way you'll disconnect yourself from commercial churches and their blab seeking to create mindless cash cow for their benefit...and less flack from readers...
To the question does god exist? I found that people approach it two different extremes and everything inbetween...pure faith to pure logic...both lead to no and yes...hahah ya I know...
Personally...my correct question...'why this God'...this initiates immediate dialogue with the source(yep...power of prayer) or logic of if I had supreme ability to convert pure energy into functional thinking energy+matter intermix what will I do and why would I...
sam
To my funeral...please feed me to the fishes...I've found joy and solace in the water...and waters is everywhere to everybody...so I may still be connects to the whole

But, George, if the 'God that contemporary educated Christians believe in is something quite different', then by what right do you call yourselves 'Christians'? If you don't believe in, say, the Nicene Creed, then I don't see that you have any more right to call yourself 'Christian' than Sikhs or Buddhists do. As far as I can tell, your 'contemporary educated Christians' are merely stuck in a transitional phase, unable to stomach the convoluted nonsense of traditional beliefs but unwilling to grasp the nettle of atheism; so you say 'God' when you mean 'physics', and 'Heaven' when you mean 'happiness'. But at least 90% of Western Christians have enough common sense to realise that if you are going to give up the Big Daddy in the sky you might as well go all the way.

Dear Jon,

A Christian is a follower of Christ.
That has nothing to do with belief,
but rather in the willingness to go on the cross, or endure equivalent pains as necessary, for the love of others.
This is Jesus' TradeMark, not the Nicean creed.

If you successfully make it to become a Christian,
then you may also call yourself a Sikh or a Buddhist,
and vice versa.

We all scale the same mountain from different angles.
On the top of this mountain is unselfishness.
Once there is no selfishness, nothing separates us from God.

If you feel more inspired to call God 'physics', then so be it,
but can Physics inspire you to give up your selfishness?
If your heaven is happiness, then would you give it up for the love of others in the name of Physics?
A true Christian would give up heaven for the love of others, which is ultimately the same as the love of God.

Yuyutsu: 'unselfishness'? Really, is that all? It's a bit of a negative virtue, don't you think? Certainly not worth climbing a mountain for. Maybe a molehill. In fact, it sounds like sour grapes to me: "I may not be clever, or brave, or sexually attractive, but gee, I'm unselfish!" I would trade it for any of the others in a heartbeat.

But Christianity clearly has to do with belief; that's why only people with certain beliefs call themselves Christian. If you want to define it otherwise you'll have to take it up with the various established churches. While you're at it you can check with the Muslims whether they also consider themselves to be climbing the mountain of 'unselfishness'. My impression is that their proclaimed goals are quite otherwise.

Would I give up happiness for the love of others? Only if their condition was making me unhappy -- in which case I wouldn't be giving up happiness, would I? What I'd much rather do, however, is to plan and work for a world in which NOBODY has to suffer, rather than picking out scapegoats for religious-style glorification. Can't we get past this theological obsession with pain?

Well said, JonJ.

..Or, not to put too fine a point on it, Yuyutsu, what a load of sanctimonious crap!