What Is Your Religion?

[Mapguy]

Personally I would not want to discuss my religious beliefs on TV

Your avatar says it all, dude!

[Dustoff]

Actually, if the question is -- and it is the question here -- what is one's religion, then 'agnostic' and 'atheist' cannot be answers, because they are not religions.

As a person who does not, by choice, believe in any religion, I would select 'not religious' if it were given as a choice. To me, it corresponds to 'not superstitious' as a response to the question, if anyone were to ask, of what superstitions I believe in. In addition to the fact that 'agnosticism' and 'atheism' are not religions at all, they are unacceptable as answers, in my view, because they are loaded and negative concepts that reflect and embody the mindsets of religious people.

An excellent response, Rassy!

But then, are you a 'practicing' not-religious, or a 'non-practicing' not-religious? We gotta be clear here, heathen-dude..

I have to admit that I tend to be reactive to what I perceive as arrogance in the "mindsets of religious people". Even terms like "unbeliever" seem to be hurled down from the pulpit to identify us heathens to the masses of followers who have received the gift of 'Divine Truth'.

Praise doG...

[Rasseru]

An excellent response, Rassy!

Thank you for the compliment, Dusty.

But then, are you a 'practicing' not-religious, or a 'non-practicing' not-religious?

I am past practice now, and dwell in the perfected realm.

[tigerbeer]

Personally I would not want to discuss my religious beliefs on TV

Bastard.

But then, given the Creepy/Crawly/Pauly stuff you believe, little wonder...

Liar, must at least be a Beer Worshiper. !

this crappy thread still going on huh. !

[Larry]

I would like to know more about the religious make-up of the foreigners in Chiang Mai.

PS: Practising (one or more in one week)

Aren't you forgetting Judaism? There are lots of Jews here in Chiangmai. HAPPY PESACH TO ALL

[Ulysses G.]

At the time of posting I see 20 foreigners are claiming to be Buddhists.

I am wondering how many of these Buddhists know anything about Buddhism or are merely wearing a Buddhist amulet around their necks and claiming to be a Buddhist. How many of these Buddhists actually get down to Wai and make merit to an image of Buddha. How often have you sat with and had a converation with a Buddhist Monk?

It looks like there are a bunch of high-living missionaries (who don't post on Thai Visa), non-practicing Christians and pseudo-Buddhists. What a bunch of heathens!

[meadish_sweetball]

Would love to type a load of junk to in with the topic . But i'm on my mobile phone so i keep it short till i got a stable connecting on my desktop . Hear me dear people of the lost , to each his own , find not the excuse to be good fear not the chance to be brave . Hide not you deed to do well . For life is so short to be wasted on sore thinking . To sad to be used on blind lead of blame and blink . After what ever you do . The simple fact that nobody is more human .

I can vouch for that Ta22 lives his teachings too. Top guy in my book.

[p1p]

I have tried to steer clear of this "debate" but I fear I can hold back no longer.

For someone to have a religion "implies" they have a "Faith" or a "Belief" in some greater being. This being could be referred to by any number of names, "God", "Yahweh (YHWH)", "Thor", "Isis", "Bhagavān", "Bramah", "Sol", "Zeus" or my favourite and the putative patron of the Thai Visa community, "Dionysus" - although he is the god of wine, not beer. So he may not be wholly appropriate.

There are also, of course, "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" and "The Great Teapot" and a massive pantheon of others dating back through the ages.

All these divine beings have a couple of things in common:

• the requirement that you suspend disbelief and "have faith" in their absolute power, their all knowing, all powerful ability to control the minutiae of YOUR life.
  
• The complete lack of any evidence whatsoever that any of these beings exist at all, or have ever done so.
  

Most of these gods derive from our distant past, when our ancestors were looking for explanations for natural phenomena that were, to them, inexplicable.

Its not raining - how can we make it rain. Where has all the game gone etc. etc. etc.

All questions that led to belief in supernatural beings have been since answered or of they haven't, they are being answered daily by people working at the leading edge of science.

I have long been an admirer of Richard Dawkins, (and at MySpace) The Professor of the Public Understanding Of Science at Oxford University. I take issue with some of his writings and methodology, but I would heartily recommend anybody with an interest in science and/or religion to read his books.

[For UG - I hope you stock the following by Professor Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker , River out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale, and lastly The God Delusion, which should be on top of every missionary's reading list - above the bible.]

If I may, I will quote for you here a letter Richard wrote to his daughter, Juliet, on the occasion of her tenth birthday. This letter was used in the forward of his book, The Selfish Gene:

Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun?

The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star" looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you learn by direct seeing (or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an observation.

Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather together lots or other observations, which may all point toward a particular

suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.

Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess (called a hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started. When a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I ought to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests them with his eyes (have you got spots?); hands (is your forehead hot? ); and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child has measles. " Sometimes doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-Rays, which help their eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.

The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and "revelation."

First, tradition: A few months ago, I went on television to have a discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either.

They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else."

Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be right.

The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I simply want to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition. Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition. The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries doesn't make it any truer!

Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims.

People who believe even slightly different things from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually, their different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions.

Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and, unlike Roman Catholics; they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now. But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first invented six hundred years after Mary's death.

I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When I say that it was only in 1950 that Roman Catholics were finally told that they had to believe that Mary's body shot off to Heaven, what I mean is that in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe it. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! Now, probably some of the things that that pope said in his life were true and some were not true. There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said any more than you believe everything that other people say. The present pope (1995) has ordered his followers not to limit the number of babies they have. If people follow this authority as slavishly as he would wish, the results could be terrible famines, diseases, and wars, caused by overcrowding.

Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of light. This looks like "authority."

But actually, it is much better than authority, because the people who wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully at the evidence whenever they want. That is very comforting. But not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.

The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling "revelation." It isn't only popes who claim to have revelations. Lots of religious people do. It is one of their main reasons for believing the things that they do believe. But is it a good reason?

Suppose I told you that your dog was dead. You'd be very upset, and you'd probably say, "Are you sure? How do you know? How did it happen?" Now suppose I answered: "I don't actually know that Pepe is dead. I have no evidence. I just have a funny feeling deep inside me that he is dead." You'd be pretty cross with me for scaring you, because you'd know that an inside "feeling" on its own is not a good reason for believing that a whippet is dead. You need evidence. We all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don't. Anyway, different people have opposite feelings, so how are we to decide whose feeling is right? The only way to be sure that a dog is dead is to see him dead, or hear that his heart has stopped; or be told by somebody who has seen or heard some real evidence that he is dead.

People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves me." But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.

Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong.

There are people with a strong inside feeling that a famous film star loves them, when really the film star hasn't even met them. People like that are ill in their minds. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can't trust them.

Inside feelings are valuable in science, too, but only for giving you ideas that you later test by looking for evidence. A scientist can have a "hunch'" about an idea that just "feels" right. In itself, this is not a good reason for believing something. But it can be a good reason for spending some time doing a particular experiment, or looking in a particular way for evidence. Scientists use inside feelings all the time to get ideas. But they are not worth anything until they are supported by evidence.

I promised that I'd come back to tradition, and look at it in another way. I want to try to explain why tradition is so important to us. All animals are built (by the process called evolution) to survive in the normal place in which their kind live. Lions are built to be good at surviving on the plains of Africa. Crayfish to be good at surviving in fresh, water, while lobsters are built to be good at surviving in the salt sea. People are animals, too, and we are built to be good at surviving in a world full of ..... other people. Most of us don't hunt for our own food like lions or lobsters; we buy it from other people who have bought it from yet other people. We ''swim'' through a "sea of people." Just as a fish needs gills to survive in water, people need brains that make them able to deal with other people. Just as the sea is full of salt water, the sea of people is full of difficult things to learn. Like language.

You speak English, but your friend Ann-Kathrin speaks German. You each speak the language that fits you to '`swim about" in your own separate "people sea."

Language is passed down by tradition. There is no other way . In England, Pepe is a dog. In Germany he is ein Hund. Neither of these words is more correct, or more true than the other. Both are simply handed down. In order to be good at "swimming about in their people sea," children have to learn the language of their own country, and lots of other things about their own people; and this means that they have to absorb, like blotting paper, an enormous amount of traditional information. (Remember that traditional information just means things that are handed down from grandparents to parents to children.) The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins.

It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. Lots of what the grown-ups tell them is true and based on evidence, or at least sensible. But if some of it is false, silly, or even wicked, there is nothing to stop the children believing that, too. Now, when the children grow up, what do they do?

Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever.

Could this be what has happened with religions? Belief that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died, belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is backed up by any good evidence. Yet millions of people believe them. Perhaps this because they were told to believe them when they were told to believe them when they were young enough to believe anything. Millions of other people believe quite different things, because they were told different things when they were children. Muslim children are told different things from Christian children, and both grow up utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. Even within Christians, Roman Catholics believe different things from Church of England people or Episcopalians, Shakers or Quakers , Mormons or Holy Rollers, and are all utterly convinced that they are right and the others are wrong. They believe different things for exactly the same kind of reason as you speak English and Ann-Kathrin speaks German. Both languages are, in their own country, the right language to speak. But it can't be true that different religions are right in their own countries, because different religions claim that opposite things are true. Mary can't be alive in Catholic Southern Ireland but dead in Protestant Northern Ireland.

What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

[garro]

p1p, if you believe that Buddhism is a religion then your presumption is false as it is not based on faith in a 'greater being'. Mind you, even Dawkins refrained from criticism directed at Buddhism as he admitted that he didn't know enough about the subject in his book, 'The God Delusion'.

Mr Dawkins is making quite a bit of money out of his attacks on different religions. It has made him a scientist-celeb. I think that it is a shame that he never directs any criticism towards his beloved science which is also faith-based.

[Ulysses G.]

I have long been an admirer of Richard Dawkins, (and at MySpace) The Professor of the Public Understanding Of Science at Oxford University. I take issue with some of his writings and methodology, but I would heartily recommend anybody with an interest in science and/or religion to read his books.

[For UG - I hope you stock the following by Professor Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker , River out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale, and lastly The God Delusion, which should be on top of every missionary's reading list - above the bible.]

I am also a Dawkins fan and stock as many of his books as I can, but they shoot out the door as fast as I can get them. The God Delusion has turned him into a very famous writer.

[p1p]

p1p, if you believe that Buddhism is a religion then your presumption is false as it is not based on faith in a 'greater being'. Mind you, even Dawkins refrained from criticism directed at Buddhism as he admitted that he didn't know enough about the subject in his book, 'The God Delusion'.

I did not mention any religion by name in my post above and, indeed, I have never considered Buddhism to be a religion. It is far more of a way of life with teachings and beliefs that can be empirically proven to be based on actualities. (I was, for a time, ordained as a Buddhist monk.)

Mr Dawkins is making quite a bit of money out of his attacks on different religions. It has made him a scientist-celeb. I think that it is a shame that he never directs any criticism towards his beloved science which is also faith-based.

I'm afraid I do not understand this. I have never come across any avenue of science that is faith, rather than evidentially based.

The difference between scientists and theosophists is that a scientist will always change his belief if new evidence is brought forward to disprove his old theory. A theosophist or believer in religion will stick to their faith and belief regardless of contrary evidence that may be strong enough to amount to absolute proof.

[adjan jb]

There are also, of course, "The Flying Spaghetti Monster" and "The Great Teapot"

Do you like Gong ?

[Jefferson]

if you believe that Buddhism is a religion then your presumption is false as it is not based on faith in a 'greater being'.

So far, with that statement, we've established only one thing for a fact:

"- Garro believes that for something to be a religion, a belief in a sentient, all-pervasive Creator is a requirement.

And that's it.

( Buddhists tend to call Buddhism a religion. It's what people fill into that box on job application forms and the like after the label 'Religion'. So there are quite a lot of people in apparent disagreement with Garro. Of course greater numbers doesn't make something true. Of course the debate / disagreement here is not about if Buddhism is a religion or not at all, but rather on 'what is a religion'.

If you define that narrowly enough, I'm sure you could get it to exclude Buddhists so in that particular slice of reality, Garro could be correct.

[Jefferson]

Personally:

I filled in "Buddhist (non practising)".

We were at a temple yesterday doing the yellow-bucket-thing, the incense thing, and the pooring water from a cup thing, and in the chat afterwards the monk asked my wife about my religion.

She promptly said 'Catholic';

I didn't consider the issue important enough to bother disputing it.

[garro]

So far, with that statement, we've established only one thing for a fact:

"- Garro believes that for something to be a religion, a belief in a sentient, all-pervasive Creator is a requirement.

And that's it.

( Buddhists tend to call Buddhism a religion. It's what people fill into that box on job application forms and the like after the label 'Religion'. So there are quite a lot of people in apparent disagreement with Garro. Of course greater numbers doesn't make something true. Of course the debate / disagreement here is not about if Buddhism is a religion or not at all, but rather on 'what is a religion'.

If you define that narrowly enough, I'm sure you could get it to exclude Buddhists so in that particular slice of reality, Garro could be correct.

If you are going to quote me, please do not do so in a manner that takes what I said out of context.

P1p said,'For someone to have a religion "implies" they have a "Faith" or a "Belief" in some greater being'.

I replied to this,

'If you believe that Buddhism is a religion then your presumption is false as it is not based on faith in a 'greater being'.

I was not discussing what I believed in.

[ThaiPauly]

Why not get this moved to General Topics so the world and his wife can have an imput????

[garro]

P1P said,

"I'm afraid I do not understand this. I have never come across any avenue of science that is faith, rather than evidentially based.

The difference between scientists and theosophists is that a scientist will always change his belief if new evidence is brought forward to disprove his old theory. A theosophist or believer in religion will stick to their faith and belief regardless of contrary evidence that may be strong enough to amount to absolute proof."

Science is faith based for too reasons; it relies on inductive reasoning, which is the faith that because something happened x number of times previously it will happen the same way the next time. It is also involves faith because nobody conducts every experiment so they need to have faith in what other people tell them. The new high priests in the lab coats.

[Crow Boy]

Why not get this moved to General Topics so the world and his wife can have an imput????

I was thinking the same thing so have moved it to General Topics

CB

[Huey]

Wiccan, non practicing

[LinkPopularity]

so as long you go to church, but otherwise don't give a shit about the essence of it ... then you're practicing?

what about not going to church, but actually living according the essence of the teachings ... wouldn't that be practicing?

[prakhonchai nick]

Only 16 Buddhists practicing and non practicing, but rather strangely 44 foreigners say they are Buddhists!

[BEENTHEREDONETHAT]

What no scientology? Tom Cruise would be upset.

[garro]

Maybe people should do this test before deciding what religion they are?

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html

You might be surprised by the results.

I actually posted this last year on another thread so sorry for the repetition.

[p1p]

Science is faith based for too reasons; it relies on inductive reasoning, which is the faith that because something happened x number of times previously it will happen the same way the next time. It is also involves faith because nobody conducts every experiment so they need to have faith in what other people tell them. The new high priests in the lab coats.

I am afraid I must totally refute your statement above.

Check on the definition of the word "Faith":

In Mirriam Webster: belief and trust in and loyalty to God : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion : firm belief in something for which there is no proof.

Oxford: 1 complete trust or confidence. 2 strong belief in a religion. 3 a system of religious belief. These definitions simply do not apply in the case of science.

Furthermore, to imply science relies entirely or solely on inductive reasoning is grossly simplistic and fallacious. Science takes full account of probability and Bayesian theories and only accepts a presumption as likely if all deductive reasoning shows it to be so. The other notable property of science is that it celebrates being proven wrong.

Perhaps I might give you another quote from Professor Richard Dawkins. This time from the Richard Dimbleby Lecture on Science, Delusion & the Appetite for Wonder, which he gave on November 12th, 1996:

Far from being over-confident, many scientists believe that science advances only by disproof of its hypotheses. Konrad Lorenz said he hoped to disprove at least one of his own hypotheses every day before breakfast.

That was absurd, especially coming from the grand old man of the science of ethnology, but it is true that scientists, more than others, impress their peers by admitting their mistakes.

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." And we clapped our hands red.

Can you imagine the Pope, an evangelical minister or other person of "faith" reacting in this way?

[ajarnmark]

What is the difference between Other Asian and Foreigners?

[uptou]

This is an expats forum in Thailand.What happened to beer,sex,& cash?

[Huey]

Maybe people should do this test before deciding what religion they are?

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/76/story_7665_1.html

You might be surprised by the results.

I actually posted this last year on another thread so sorry for the repetition.

Great questionnaire, very accurate IMHO I'm Wiccan and the results came back,

Kinda scary to see what came back in the lower couple of the top 10 though *shiver*

1. Neo-Pagan (100%)

2. Unitarian Universalism (79%)

3. New Age (76%)

4. Mahayana Buddhism (74%)

5. Hinduism (74%)

6. Jainism (72%)

7. Sikhism (68%)

8. Theravada Buddhism (62%)

9. Reform Judaism (58%)

10. Liberal Quakers (57%)

11. New Thought (56%)

12. Scientology (51%)

13. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (49%)

14. Orthodox Judaism (49%)

15. Secular Humanism (47%)

16. Bahá'í Faith (45%)

17. Islam (37%)

18. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (34%)

19. Nontheist (34%)

20. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (32%)

21. Taoism (32%)

22. Orthodox Quaker (32%)

23. Eastern Orthodox (30%)

24. Roman Catholic (30%)

25. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (28%)

26. Seventh Day Adventist (17%)

27. Jehovah's Witness (11%)

[garro]

Science is faith based for too reasons; it relies on inductive reasoning, which is the faith that because something happened x number of times previously it will happen the same way the next time. It is also involves faith because nobody conducts every experiment so they need to have faith in what other people tell them. The new high priests in the lab coats.

I am afraid I must totally refute your statement above.

Check on the definition of the word "Faith":

In Mirriam Webster: belief and trust in and loyalty to God : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion : firm belief in something for which there is no proof.

Oxford: 1 complete trust or confidence. 2 strong belief in a religion. 3 a system of religious belief. These definitions simply do not apply in the case of science.

Furthermore, to imply science relies entirely or solely on inductive reasoning is grossly simplistic and fallacious. Science takes full account of probability and Bayesian theories and only accepts a presumption as likely if all deductive reasoning shows it to be so. The other notable property of science is that it celebrates being proven wrong.

Perhaps I might give you another quote from Professor Richard Dawkins. This time from the Richard Dimbleby Lecture on Science, Delusion & the Appetite for Wonder, which he gave on November 12th, 1996:

Far from being over-confident, many scientists believe that science advances only by disproof of its hypotheses. Konrad Lorenz said he hoped to disprove at least one of his own hypotheses every day before breakfast.

That was absurd, especially coming from the grand old man of the science of ethnology, but it is true that scientists, more than others, impress their peers by admitting their mistakes.

A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: "My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years." And we clapped our hands red.

Can you imagine the Pope, an evangelical minister or other person of "faith" reacting in this way?

I suppose it depends on your definition of faith and which dictionary you choose. Websters dictionary also provides the following meaning;

'Loyalty or allegiance to a cause or a person'

I think this would be a fair assessment of those who pay homage to the scientific method.

So long as science is not able to test a theory on every occasion it relies on inductive reasoning.

Taking into account theories such as probabilty does not really change anything as these theories also rely on inductive reasoning.

[sbk]

Yes, but what you believe isn't necessarily what religion you practice. I've done your belief-o-matic before garro, but I still consider myself non-religious and do not practice nor have I ever practiced any form of religion. I attend funerals with my husband, have attended Buddhist events at the Wat but do not consider myself a practicing Budhhist either.

No choice in the poll for Non-practising nothing

[slapout]

If it is based on faith it is most diffcult to disprove. Is that not one of the reasons learned men do not discuss, which seems to lead to argument, Politics or religion? The Pharsie and many others may be dissappointed in being consigned to 'other'.