I do not grok. Is there a typo there?
I would agree that if Continuity eror maintains his/her beliefs and system of logic, he/she will probably remain agnostic, yes.
MMMMmmmmmaaybe.
No proof of something is not the same as disproving something.
Which is what s/he said in his/her first post.
Bullshit.
Do you have a right to keep your children illiterate?
Answer: No.
Your children have civil rights, dude, and it is the business of the government to protect them. You have no right to abrogate them.
Pst.
The official view of the Catholic Church is that evolution theory and the story in Genesis are fully compatible. Specifically, if you take the 7 “days” as being “periods of time” and not “24-hr periods” (and there’s plenty evidence that time counting wasn’t exactly up to Rolex standards when the Genesis was written, not to mention they still hadn’t invented archaeology), it’s kind’a funny how nice it fits with the Big Bang, paleoastrophysics, the soup thingee and the general order given by archaeology (first life appears in the seas, plants before animals, mankind is a relatively recent thing). Several of the biggest students of fossils and evolution during the mid-20th century were Jesuits. Anybody who thinks the Soldiers of Jesus are dumb has never argued with one (that’s what “SJ” means, “Societatis Jesus” but in the military sense, after all their founder had been a mercenary captain and their head is a General).
Don’t assume that everybody who believes in God denies science, please. Or that everybody who has religion takes his religious books literally. I use examples in my own scientific writings, writers of religious books use parables. I have a “point of belief” I’m comfortable at, you have another (which in the case of an atheist is no belief). On the other hand, one of the reasons I’m glad that my soon-to-be-ex-employers didn’t allow me to take the job I was offered in the US last year is that I’m as uncomfortable with the whole religious climate there as you are. I do hope you don’t mind that I pray for you guys… after all, if God does exist my prayers may help you, and if there’s no God my prayers won’t hurt you (only my own silly self, who is wasting time in them) 
Peace,
Nava.
PS: we need a hug smiley.
God does work in mysterious ways, I’ll grant you that. He has also worked in my life in very real ways. I could tell you stories about some of the miracles I’ve witnessed, but you’d either attempt to disprove them or write them off as anecdotal evidence and ignore them.
So, either way you’re not willing to listen.
And ye, verily, I have now witnessed a miracle: the miracle of mind-reading.
If you’d like to discuss, state your position/data.
If you want to play with a strawman, you can do that without posting.
Amen, Nava. Besides which, genetic studies were advanced pretty far by a Catholic monk experimenting with pea plants.
Religious faith is not in any way incompatable with scientific inquiry.
Why would you be concerned? Trust me, the prominence of US’s religious climate has been blown all out of proportion by people on both the pre-religion and anti-religion sides. The reality here is that most folks here aren’t much more driven by religion than people in other countries and it is not generally considered a polite topic of conversation so you wouldn’t be drawn into one unless you tried. I know what churches a couple of my co-workers attend but that is it. You’d probably have had a perfectly lovely time working here and we’d’ve been glad to host you.
As for Dr Peano’s Axioms, isn’t the whole point of an axiom is that it is intuitively obvious to the casual observer and is not proveable but because it is so obvious anybody who goes to the effort to prove it gets deservedly laughed at? In fact, I assume the reaction of the mathematical community on the publication of his axioms was a mixture of, “Well, DUH!” and, “You mean, if I had published something that blindingly obvious people would still be talking about me 115 years from now?”
Math teacher: “For our purposes here we will assume that zero is a number…”
Wiseass or pedantic student: “But can you prove that zero is a number?”
Math teacher, after throwing his eraser at the student: “Shut up! As I was saying…”
I disagree.
Faith, of any kind, has no place in science. There’s a reason they call it scientific skepticism.
Science deals only with testable, refutable data points.
Or in the case of thought-experiments, it deals with the math behind phenomona.
Nowhere in science is there room for unproven assertions. It’s just not how it works.
You left out a bit.
Wiseass or pedantic student: “You can’t prove zero is a number, therefore God exists!”
Was I wrong?
Well, without seeing your data, I can’t speak to how I’ll interpret it.
However, I will not “attempt to disprove them”, I will see if they constitute proof of your claim. I will not “write them off” as anecdotal evidence, but I will recognize the difference between qualitative and quantitative research. I would hope you’d realize that I’m debating in good faith and so I won’t ignore what you have to say.
In any case I am most certainly willing to listen.
Whether I will reach the conclusion you have reached, I do not know.
You’ve not yet shared your data.
Maybe in another thread. I don’t want to hijack this one any further.
Well, I think this thread pretty much is composed of roving hijacks at this point, but do as you will, of course.
In any case, if you do end up starting another thread, drop me the url and I’ll poke my head in.
These discussions would work better in person, without such a time lag and a need to catch up. 
I feel that way too. I was pushing a point to the extreme to see what discussion occurred. My point is that if the universe is simply a collection of strings in various patterns, then what would it matter if your pattern were cohesive and able to have these disccussions, or disjoint and floating about the void?
Logically, with the data at hand, nothing seems to matter. But I don’t feel that.
I reckon everthin counts, pardner. I’m just here trying to enlighten myself, not find reasons to support untenable positions.
My question is that, even as an atheist, aren’t there things that you accept without proof (which I believe is the definition of faith)?
Some say that having any kind of faith means you have faith in God. That’s not in the definition, but people think what they want to think.
I’m an agnostic because I feel it fits. I don’t know what’s true. I want to. I used to need to about everything. I’ve just stopped getting so scared about (some) things I don’t know, realizing I can’t know everything. What’s scary is believing in something despite the facts. When there are no facts, I have faith in “having faith in whatever gets you up in the morning”.
I see you have faith in humanism. I haven’t studied it, but I like what I’ve heard so far.
Point of clarification; you don’t need faith/evidence/arguments in order to be an atheist.
All you need is a lack of faith in a God or Gods.
No, you need conviction, or faith, that there is no God.
If simply don’t have faith that God exists, you’re not an atheist.
It seems my “idiot” comment has upset people. That’s what I get for acting out.
When I say all religious people are idiots, I am blowing off steam. In my original post, I expressed my frustration with a government that is not separated from religion, focusing particularly on the issue of creationism vs. evolution. I also just plain ranted. Thus the placement of this thread in the Pit. No, I am not a bigot. I have many friends, relatives, coworkers and acquaintences of various religions, and I don’t hate them for it. I don’t think it makes them evil or even particularly stupid. To reiterate, the best way I could think of expressing it is to say I think of them like I think of racists or supremacists - some are outright evil, some were raised to be that way and don’t know any different, some are just too stupid to know any better. Of course I have no problem with someone who is religious but willing to separate the two, just like I really have no “problem” with someone who is a racist but agrees not to enact racist laws. But here in the USA that is not the prevailing attitude and that is not what I live with every day.
Collective fantasy does not belong in the classroom or the government no matter how compelling.
To someone who looks at religion from an objective viewpoint, it is barbaric and silly. It pisses me off. I don’t care if God exists or not, the imposition of any religion on my life should be illegal. And then on top of that to have someone tell me that the real problem is that I need to re-examine my faith is downright infuriating.
Nonsense. All you need is a sufficient grasp of reason to disprove the so-called evidences for theism, such as the claims of the Bible. Can one absolutely disprove the existence of God? No, but neither can one conclusively disprove the existence of leprechauns. One can, however, show that the likelihood of little green men bogarting pots of gold at the rainbow’s end is exceedingly remote.
I don’t worry about the leprechauns and I don’t worry about God.
So, you and I agree you can’t disprove God. If you want to be an atheist, though, you have to assert that there is no God - even though you can’t prove it.
Otherwise you’re agnostic.