ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

Having a self-confessed believer like Tony Blair as Prime Minister was considered weird in the UK. No idea who the last openly religious PM we had before that? Possibly in the 19th century.

i do understand if (reasonable) religious people feel a bit put out with the prickliness of a large segment of the atheist population.

i dunno about it being a 'large segment of' really.

unless you'd contend that reasonable religious people by % is somehow higher than reasonable atheist people by %, which I don't know how you'd measure.

Cake or death?

admitting atheism where i am was essentially tantamount to saying "i eat babies" until prob the last 30 years or so. and still like o_O

i do understand if (reasonable) religious people feel a bit put out with the prickliness of a large segment of the atheist population lots of vocal atheists

I don't generally hand out the pricklies unless someone of faith says something really dumb or emotional-blackmaily to me about my lack of faith. My favourite response is generally 'according to your religion it's blasphemy to use God as an inducement like that. Am I worth BLASPHEMY?'

i've not been harassed recently for my atheism, but then again I don't actively advertise it either. I will say in my life I've been persecuted more by religious sects than I've ever done persecuting.

I think that much of Britain is so far the other way that pretty much admitting anything beyond "yeah, I go to Church on Christmas/Easter, for the kids, really, you understand, but I'm not *overtly* religious" is viewed on with - not so much suspicion, but some kind of "tall poppies" in reverse thing. We don't really want to be seen as too much, too emotional, extraordinary in any way, it's viewed with the same mistrust as showing off, really.

I find that it's much easier to tell white-ish lies and nod and smile than to actually engage casual acquaintances in religious conversation. I've rarely had anyone get pushy about the topic, if ever. Among friends, it's still kind of a non-issue. On the scale of intimate things that friends talk about, there are usually more interesting things than our ill-defined, non-standard religious beliefs. I have religious conversations with my very closest friends and ILX. And that's it. Apart from that, nobody asks and I don't tell.

Yes, considered all a bit "American" or "European/Catholic" (xp)

I suppose it can come up awkwardly in the office sometimes. "So, do you have any plans for Easter?" This is where I would tell a really vague lie. "I'm going to wear a suit, I think."

i don't think 'any plans for easter?' is necessarily a leading question on religion, but tthat's maybe because we get a long weekend, so 'any plans for easter' is just basically 'are you doing anything with these bonus three days hurrah'

It could be a trap, though.

Is "Eating chocolate" considered an acceptable response?

xpost yea "any plans for easter?" isn't quite the same as "so how do you plan on worshipping our Lord this weekend? That is unless you're a disgusting savage who won't be doing that..."

we get a long weekend

We do?

http://www.unscrewingtheinscrutable.com/images/atheisttrap.jpg

Easter isn't a federal holiday here. There's no long weekend and if you have a job where yr scheduled to work on Easter Sunday, for instance, yr employer doesn't have to ask for volunteers and/or pay extra. Have always found that confusing, considering...America.

Yeah, it's really hard for me (admittedly as a Britisher) to imagine anyone asking "what are you doing for Easter?" and it not being followed by the casual terms of "are you going anywhere nice?" as would be asked of any other bank holiday weekend.

(Lone exception being my mum, who will go into great detail about some amazing new surplice she's ordered from the South African Orphans Association Of Making Glittery Things For Priests For Charity and fussing about how much bread and wine to consecrate because her church will be filled with people who just come for Easter and don't actually come up and receive communion, and she doesn't want to have to end up drinking the remains of the wine herself because you can't throw it away once it's been blessed, but she doesn't drink, so half a chalice of wine will have her waltzing down the aisles and unable to remember the blessing and she's afraid she'll be all "Go in peace to love and serve the owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful sea green boat... wah-hey!" which would be the talk of the Episcopalian community for years to come, etc. etc. etc.)

Obviously the response would be tailored to the coworker. People I work with every day, tell them about dinner plans. The receptionist on a floor you don't work on, be vague.

However, because I feel the need to be vague about my religiosity does not fill me with the righteous desire to stand up for atheist's rights or anything. I just want to not be bothered.

LOOOOOOL Kate, I did not know that the priest had to drink the leftover wine due to consecration issues. Could she not use it in a pasta sauce later?

Good lord, no!

We're Episcopalian, we believe in Consubstantiation!

The fundamental "substance" of the body and blood of Christ are present alongside the substance of the bread and wine, which remain present. Thou shalt not make a pasta sauce of The Lord! Fie!

Did the Lord not say, "Keep tossing this pasta with my blood in remembrance of me, maybe with a little olive oil and parm"?

you kind of implied yr mum was a deist upthread? is that not true, or is she just buying into the ceremony without the beliefs?

I don't share anything with coworkers. If they ask me how the lunch I just ate tasted, I say "what lunch" and deny ever having eaten.

*I'm* a deist. I don't know what my mum actually believes with regards to the substance of the sacrament. I'm just quoting the stuff I was taught in Sunday School with the consubstantiation stuff, which was a way of keeping both high church ex catholics and raving Protestants from killing each other over theology during the infancy of the Anglican church.

We do?

― kenan, Friday, September 10, 2010 2:43 PM

sorry, 'we' do

Actually, I should really ask my mum to bring over my old high school religion textbooks, because we had a really good one on Anglican theology which I'd like to re-read, because this stuff obviously interests me. Or indeed, if she found any better ones at Yale.

Easter isn't a federal holiday here.

Which, it weirds me out that in spite of this, "Good Friday" is one of the days on which the US securities markets are closed.

Part of what is frustrating about the new fundamentalism in the US is their assumption that this is what Christians have always been like. It's probably impossible for us to understand how, say, 10th century Christians understood their faith (finally got around to reading Veyne's 'Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths', which was awesome, though mostly for it's questions rather than it's answers).

It's not surprising, then, that they also think that Islamic fundamentalism is what Islam was always about rather than an odd 20th Century offshoot.

Like I said earlier, I live in the Bible Belt, work mostly for low-income blacks and Latinos, and draw fundamentalists like flies. At least at work I can tell them that my agency forbids me to talk about religion (not true, but they don't know any different).

xp THAT is a very interesting point.

omg we have a church hi 5

I'm all for starting the ILTMI Church of St. Deeper. Should we start it in Illinois or Florida?

Let's just say it's a state of mind that we carry around with us. And tell no one about.

Darn, I was looking forward to seeing what the steeple looked like.

would look like, I should say.

These are some mighty temporal concerns for this particular thread.

don't know why, as proposer, the church wouldn't be based in connaught tbh

The US/UK divide is pretty weird. I've never met a "prickly atheist" in my entire life. It seems to me that the vast majority of atheists in the U.S. don't talk about it, or call themselves "agnostic" because they think that sounds better. Polling seems to support this. From wikipedia: "A 2008 Gallup poll showed that a smaller 6% of the US population believed that no god or universal spirit exists. The most recent ARIS report, released March 9, 2009,...1.6% explicitly describe themselves as atheist or agnostic, double the previous 2001 ARIS survey figure." So apparently less than a third of atheists in the U.S. even realize that they're atheists.

Sorry, I think I must have been expressing myself badly last night (which is highly likely, I was kind of drunk). My point about real world concerns was not that this was the domain of religion, but rather that the debate between theists and atheists is a distraction from real problems. And yes, religious groups are part of this problem, and have a lot to answer for in these areas, and should be held to account whenever possible.

I think I see the problem here. The "extreme, hardcore, obnoxious, whatever" atheists are not debating the existence of god. They're debating the value of religion. In my opinion, religion is the primary problem in the world, and dismissing that by simply saying "eh, I don't have time for that. I'm worried about real problems." is not a valid argument. And talking about the problems of religion is not an ad hominem argument against the existence of god because, again, we're not debating the existence of god.

The US is still very much a frontier country in spirit, even now, and frontiers tend to hold on to old habits longer. Also, we're an enormous country and new attitudes take a long time to filter out to the hinterlands (yes, even now).

The US doesn't have a monarchy or very good universal health care or other institutions that would support a secular society as well as other advanced countries, so I think we're stuck with religious institutions providing those things, and places with even less than that are stuck more, but I don't really see this as a problem provided they don't derive their authority and mandate from scripture.

I've never met a "prickly atheist" in my entire life.

In my opinion, religion is the primary problem in the world, and dismissing that by simply saying "eh, I don't have time for that. I'm worried about real problems." is not a valid argument.

yeah you're about as far up your own asshole as you can get

And you're not judgmental at ALL.

who said i wasn't?

saying "religion is the primary problem in the world" is just deluded lala-land bullshit, sorry.

The real problem of the world is... people.

I'll grant you it's a leap of faith to:
1) speculate that people would be less likely to be shitty to each other if they were not able to justify this shittiness as divinely inspired, and
2) that it's possible to remove this justification as a global behavior

but I think these are experiments worth trying.

http://oregonmag.com/Jihad_ElmoPuppet.jpg