They/them.
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I salute your orthodox trinitarianism.
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Very important public service announcement:
Check that survey twice before answering!
Could be Gallup.
Could be Gozer.
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So, which are the “great faiths” and which are the terrible ones?
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Pascal’s wager in a nutshell.
@teknocholer , @the_borderer, & @Loudmouth beat me to it. Time to pick up a case of coke…
Yet, the Texas GOP is barreling headlong into establishing Gilead.
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The former is hard atheism, the latter is over complex way of putting soft atheism.
Hard atheism is the assertion that god does not exist, and it is possible to demonstrate that god does not exist.
Soft atheism is simply the lack of an active belief in god. A rock is a soft atheist, some religions are soft atheist.
Agnosticism is the philosophical position that it is not possible to know. In any way. If god exists or not. And does not really bear on belief. One can be agnostic but believe fully in God and be quite religious. I’ve met more than a few Episcopalian priests in that mold.
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It’s funny you mention weak atheism, but forget there’s weak agnosticism, which is what I exhibit:
Weak agnosticism, or empirical agnosticism (also negative agnosticism), according to Graham Oppy, is “the view which is sustained by the thesis that it is permissible for reasonable persons to suspend judgement on the question of God’s existence.”
Atheism is disbelief, but I neither believe nor disbelieve, therefore I do not identify as an atheist as far as belief is concerned.
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…Yes. They are more entranced by the idea of looking down from heaven saying “I told you so,” than by the idea of having more time to bring people to Jesus and saving their souls.
Assholes always make a disproportionate amount of noise.
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I consider my self a solid agnostic.
Proving or not proving the existence of some deity is impossible either way.
So why the fuck does it matter?
Just do the best you can with the time you have in this earth-timeline.
Nobody is anywhere near perfect, least of all me. Let’s just lay the deities to rest and look out for each other.
ETA: Perfect World Scenario, I know.
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Isn’t there already a hard cap in the mid-200ks? Pretty sure there is, but don’t feel like Googling the exact number
My Jehovah Wittness friends have tried explaining to me the 144,000 deal. The conversation usually goes downhill when I ask if there’s a cap aren’t you working against your interests.
Something something 144,000 get into heaven something something everybody else wanders around a perfect earth for eternity in perfect flesh bodies.
It easier contemplating God than it is me in a perfect body wandering around earth for eternity.
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I have been doing it for 58 years already and I am getting tired of it!
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There are two variations on this story. One I recall from a disgraced comedian* who compared Adam and Eve to children:
Hey! Didn’t I just tell you not to eat that fruit? Didn’t I just, tell, you!?!
Yes…
AND WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?!?
I don’t know…
*It was Bill Cosby, by the way.
The other story is the older version, that the Tree of Knowledge was not forbidden, but that the first humans had a choice. Either remain ignorant and happy, or gain knowledge, but lost ignorance would not be regained. It was a choice, not a punishment.
I point this out because we keep forgetting that these myths evolve out of older, oral traditions. That no story is static.
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Some believe that. Some believe that since God is omniscient, he obviously KNOWS who he is picking and therefore nothing that you can do will affect whether you are one of His chosen. At some level the idea of God is the philosophical equivalent of “multiplying by infinity,” which gives you all kinds of wacky results when you try to apply logic to Him.
And the people that wrote them were not stupid, in the way that people that insist on taking every word literally seem to be. When they said that “Got created man in his image,” they were fully aware that not everybody looks the same. And that an omnipotent God is not limited to any particular appearance. Indeed we do not particularly resemble burning bushes, one of the forms He is purported to take. So I have to believe that what was meant was that people were given free will.
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I consider the original tree, or trees, neither choice, nor punishment.
Seems to me more like a trap.
ETA. I do not take this shit seriously, BTW. (just trying to avoid a dust-up, here) 
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Reading the stories, the older stories are more of a metaphor for how gaining knowledge cost humanity the innocent ignorance of animals. They were an attempt by Sumerians and their forbears to explain how knowledge comes with a price. Scholars are still arguing, but I recall back when I was studying mythology that it was suggested that the Hebrews in Babylon adopted it to their motif of humanity being punished.
I think we all see the stories in the Bible as myths, which became calcified. Stuck. No wonder the druids refused to let their mythology be written down.
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Agreed, Man in control of fire controls the less-intelligent ones, the followers.
I think just about every religious origin story would start this way.
Apologies if I have over-simplified that.
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Well the one that has Jesus is the greatest (because of him, not because of his followers). But of course I am not using the word like that. Think “Great War”, if it helps.
According to you. Not everyone agrees with that, because they are not Christians. This is the right faith FOR YOU, but you don’t get to make that decision for others.
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