HereNow,

<<Religion is all about lies. It's a manipulative con job>>

You have given us a red herring logical fallacy. You have attempted to move right away from Bill O'Chee's argument that school children have a right to discuss their religious beliefs and speak about Jesus in the playground.

What did you do? You redirected the argument to your presupposition that religion is about lies and is a con job designed to manipulate. If that's the topic you want to discuss, write an article that provides evidence for "Christianity is a lying, manipulative, con job on the ignorant". Then we can discuss your evidence. Here you have avoided the issue Bill wrote about - how the Qld Education Dept tells students what they can and cannot say and think.

Who is doing the manipulation here?

But you want to talk about religion as lies and a con job. That's the fallacious reasoning of a red herring and we can't have a rational discussion when you use this kind of illogic. You have abandoned discussion on Bill's topic to push your bandwagon. You have deliberately diverted attention away from the article about which we are discussing.

Dear Spencer,

Not all atheists follow Mano Singham's ideas, only some.
Those who do, obviously form a creed, but not a religion.
- unless following these 10 principles somehow helps them to come closer to God: I don't discard that theoretical possibility, but I don't see how it would work, so I think it's unlikely.

'My response to this Creed is in, "Does atheism have a creed or a system of beliefs?"'

good question Ozspen although it must take much faith to believe such irrational dogma. Atheist certainly must walk around with their eyes shut. A simpleton knows that design demands a Designer, laws need a Lawmaker and that believing order comes from chaos is nonsense.

Yuyutsu,

One of the definitions of 'religion' given by Oxford Dictionaries online is: 'A pursuit or interest followed with great devotion'. Surely that is what is done by activist atheists.

Yet, you want to associate Mano Singham's An Atheist's Creed with, <<unless following these 10 principles somehow helps them to come closer to God>>. The seems to be your presupposition about religion, but the dictionaries (including Merriam-Webster) refute this as the only definition of religion.

To help people come closer to God is a definition of religion, but it's not the only definition. In fact, the New Testament defines 'pure religion' as 'when widows are in trouble, take care of them. Do the same for children who have no parents. And don’t let the world make you impure' (James 1:27).

Dear Spencer,

The New Testament is correct: the mentioned guidelines indeed brings one closer to God (with rare exceptions that are not worth entering into).

Modern dictionaries were written by those of the sciencist persuasion who wish to denigrate religion. Their aim is to present religion as merely a social phenomena, mock it to consist of certain behaviours of a relative nature, including the entertainment of particular fleeting mental ideas - this is in order to strip the concept of religion from all consistent, real and lasting content.

We know that religion is real, not just a whim, that there are in fact practices that bring one closer to God while other practices take one away from God. While we might not always agree and can debate, for God's sake, which practices achieve this aim and which do not, all lovers of God must rebuke this mockery by dictionaries.

runner,

Thanks for the bogus Teleological argument. That one always draw a little snigger from me.

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Yuyutsu,

Dictionaries do not determine how we use words; they’re not authorities dictating to us how we must use any given word. Dictionaries merely describe how words are used. That’s it.

But we went through this in excruciating detail at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=6579&page=0, where you failed to support this paranoid assertion of yours that dictionaries were/are written by godless heathens plotting to distort the definition of 'religion'.

It’s disheartening to see that you learned absolutely nothing from that discussion. It's as though people around here think that an argument grows its credibility back if you just shelve it for a little while.

Your argument, with regards to the definition of religion, is one big Etymological fallacy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy