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Well yes, quite. The week used to start on a Sunday, which would make the 7th day (that God apparently rested on after having spent 6 days working hard to create the universe) Saturday. Imagine a professional rugby player that refused to play on a Saturday!

Maybe this will spice things up a bit... BBC Sport - Rugby World Cup 2011: Devout Euan Murray questions Sunday matches What a load of nonsense - we live in a broadly secular society and should be governed by secular rules. It's no-one's fault but his if he doesn't want to play on a Sunday.

Again, you've misinterpreted what I've written. Nowhere have I said it's madness. What i'm saying is that to present (as Mr Burns did) evolution as a "simple" answer is not true. The whole reason behind the development of religion (imho) was because it provided a "simple" answer to things we...

Sorry, i've been out for the evening so missed all this. The probability stuff is a bit irrelevant for exactly the reasons that people have highlighted- but my point was that to make out that the idea of this planet evolving by chance is "simple" is pretty disingenuous. Mr Burns, on the...

To put it in perspective - from a quick google I have found Is there anybody out there? - University of East Anglia (UEA) which suggests that the odds of intelligent life on an Earth-like planet developing may be of the order of 0.01% over a 4-billion year period. My point is not to answer the...

Blimey, you don't half load your comments. Let me rephrase what you just put, in a slightly more (to me, at least) neutral way. What is more simple, i) the existence of an all-powerful (albeit generally non-visible) god ii) the thousands (millions?) of low-chance events relating to the...

Mr Burns, your logic in that long post doesn't really work. DG's point (which I don't agree with, but it's his view, he's entitled to it) is that young children are 'without sin' so get to go to heaven. Giving a baby an opportunity to grow up and commit (or not) sin is not an inherently bad...

It's pretty clear they were 6 people looking for something, some justification of their existence - it's hardly surprising that they found something. It's not for me, but I hope you enjoy the retreat.

This is where it gets interesting. There is a theory that humans 'jumped forward' behaviourally about 50 thousand years ago to what we now consider normal human behaviour - I'm sure there are those that consider it the work of a god. The only question I'd ask (and I know it's unanswerable) is...

I think it's equally fair to pose this to atheists/agnostics. If I'd had religion forced upon me from a young age (and, despite what some may think, I really don't think that any religion in this country truly does that), would I still be an atheist? My heart says yes, but my head says probably not.

Nu, you have changed the meaning of what I wrote. We still share some of those moral views (i.e. that murder is wrong; I'd argue that adultery is still viewed as wrong by the majority of people) but some we no longer share (such as the belief that a bit of verbal abuse/insults should be met...

Why did you change my 'mauling bears' example? You liked that parable earlier. Your examples are wrong - those are still things which are morally reprehensible to society, my point was that some things that are done/said as being morally correct in the Bible are no longer considered so. One...

You insinuate it pretty heavily. Your argument certainly is that religion is responsible for the establishment of these morals, which I'd say is the wrong way round - religion was used to enforce morals that were already present in society. Which is why, for example, we go along with some of...

These morals didn't start with Christianity though, did they? Ancient Egypt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Is this a pisstake, or are you actually mental?

For me this is the best post on the thread. No matter how much either side would like to paint it as such, this isn't about being right or wrong. It's about belief. I don't have a belief in God, or religion, and need some kind of evidence to support such a theory, but that doesn't mean that I...

But isn't that double standards? You are effectively saying good deeds are done out of an inherent goodness, and bad things are done because of religion? I'd agree that the people that do good things are fundamentally good people, given a structure or a sense of community by their religion. But...

I'm atheist and I wouldn't agree with that. On a day-to-day basis I see far more good done by religion than bad. However some of the bad things are so bad that perhaps they balance out the frequency of the good things.

I think I watched the Stephen Fry piece back when it was originally posted a few months ago. From memory he attacks the behaviour of the Catholic Church - does he say anything about religion in general? I think you'd have a pretty hard time defending some of the actions of most organised...

I'm not religious, and I don't have a problem with people being religious (although I do have an issue with twunts, and sometimes the two do overlap; no more than in normal society IMHO though). To be honest the bit I find weird is the whole church thing (this might well apply to mosques and...