It has been claimed by a creationist that there are "reasonable tests" for his creationist beliefs. In fact, this creationist claimed, when initially asked to present those tests, that his are "Far more reasonable tests than what you have" for, I suppose, the other person's non-creationist beliefs.

This was followed by several requests for the creationist to present those far more reasonable tests, which went un-answered. The creationist finally explained that he did not want to derail the...

Some fictional religions are parodies, eg, The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Some seem to have become real for followers, eg, Jedi.
I like Bokononism for its way of viewing reality & living in it.
Bokononism - Wikipedia
Bokononism (/ˈboʊkoʊnɒnˌɪzəm/) is a religion invented by Kurt Vonnegut and
practiced by many of the characters in his novel Cat's Cradle. Many of the sacred
texts of Bokononism were written in the form of calypsos.[1]

Bokononism is based on the concept of foma, which are...

Why do so many Westerners mistakenly believe either that the Tao is a god or that the Tao did not come into existence before the gods?

So, if you were burned from head to toe in a car crash, disfigured by scar tissue, had no ability to grow hair, and two amputated limbs, but while in the hospital somebody laid their hands on you and prayed over you, and the scar tissue left, your limbs were restored, and your baldness replaced with a full head of hair, would you consider the possibility that God exists, especially since you used your new limbs to run around the hospital twice, and heard a voice loudly and clearly say, “I am...

I was raised in a backwared, hickish, racist family in the early 50s. I heard things about Chinks, Redskins, Wet Backs and Blacks that now days humiliate me. They were all for keeping the Japanese pinned up. Somehow, when Wernher Von Braun started making Rockets, the Germans escaped all that.

I knew it was wrong and when I left home, I vowed to do better, much better.

Seven decades after all that, I'm still working on that lofty goal. Today I stood on a balcony looking down at a group of...

I was thinking about a pretty obvious question during recent arguments about creation and evolution, specifically: "Why?" Why would a deity need to create a universe in the first place?

So of course, I asked Google (about as omniscient a thing as I am aware of). And I came across this:

Why Did God Create the World?

It turns out the entirety of creation, everything, seems to be because God felt himself to be so incredibly wonderful that he "created the world for his glory!" Or in other...

I see here how proselytizing, by the proselytizer, is just assumed to be a good thing, advancing a community, helping an individual. I would like to question that assumption.

No doubt each and every situation is different. For some lost souls, searching for any kind of meaning in life, getting converted can be really meaningful. For others, well, not so much. It can actually be quite harmful.

But looking at it as an overall process, what do you think?

I'll list a few examples of the...

How oft do people hear a response like...
There is a scientific consensus on the theory of evolution.

There is a scientific consensus...
There is a scientific consensus...
There is a scientific consensus...
There is a scientific consensus...
What has that got to do with anything?
Especially in a debate, why is that relevant? It's nothing but a fallacy.

Argumentum ad populum
When an argument uses the appeal to the beliefs of a group of experts, it takes on the form of an appeal to authority...

This is not meant to be about faith or truth of religion or stuff like that.

But would like to hear from a personal point of view what people get from their religion.

1. What does your religion give you in terms of positive values in your life? Do you think it makes you a better person than you could be without it? So basically just thoughts about what you get from your belief.

2. Do you think that there are any negative things about your religion, which you think limit you or restrict...

I recently watched a video on the golden ratio which has to do with a sequence of numbers. This sequence is seen a lot in nature because of the way cells grow and divide. It turns out as things grown the cell counts follow a Fibonacci sequence. Things express a kind of fractal image in nature. An example is a tree. As the branches grow the smaller branches look like a miniature version of the whole thing. This a very popular aesthetic for most people because it expresses a kind of...