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To answer the topic question, yes I was taught evolution at a Catholic School in the 1960s. Catholics accept evolution as a fact. It seems only some fundamentalist religions for some reason, do not accept it. They come up with ideas that simply do not match with reality.

I heard that recently belief in a flat earth has been increasing! Strange but true! A local group has asked a leading believer to talk to us next January. He must be a very brave man indeed. I'll report back after the meeting, watch this space.

I know many religious married couples, all of whom seem to be quite happy. As far as I know, those with whom I have had conversations are at least tolderant oh my being an aetheist. As far as I know......

I wish I had seen a UFO for myself. All the accounts I have so far read involve someone whose camera wasn't working that day, or there wasn't enough light to take a picture. Does make me wonder if there isn't always a 'natural' solution. The most common is a weather balloon. Most people have never seen one and when they do their mind tries to find a plausible explanation. If they are naturally of an imaginitive nature they might guess it is a UFO - it is unidentified, it is (probably) flying and it is likely to be an object, so technically it is a UFO. However, not all of them are flying, some are reflections of something else and so on.

There are many who believe that a UFO was captured and taken to 'Area 51' in the USA. There are even some photos which suggests that some people are so keen to spread these rumours they have gone so far as to fake photos. Can't imagine why anyone would want to fake a photo, but people can be weird! After all, some believe the earth is flat! I have great doubts about this, but as I am open minded in case future science discovers something that today we know nothing about. You only have to think of electricity and where that discovery has got us today to realise that other amazing things are no doubt yet to be discovered.

Radio carbon dating has helped prove how old many items are, especially rocks that prove the age of the earth. In time many unexplained things, sometimes put down to a religion or a paranormal event, will come to be explained, and some might not. Maybe the paranormal will remain for many years as an 'odd' item in human life. Some people have such experiences and some do not. Why is that? Nobody knows what is different about those who see such things and those who never do.

If you have seen something that is clearly unexplained I would ask you to find some friends who do not believe such things exist and invite them to visit you and see for themselves. Either they won't see the event, in which case there is an argument that says it didn't happen and exists only in the mind of the observer, or the unbeliever will be converted by what they see. In that case the next step is either a local newspaper or an international journal. Get them to visit with a camera crew to publicise the event. I've never heard of that happen which is probably why although I don't deny the existence of anything that I know nothing about, I am naturally a 'doubting Thomas' as religious people might say!

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I guess that would explain their song, "Yellow submarine"!

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There is no 'evidence' either or aliens or of god. Time will tell. Meantime, I found this:


Yet another nail in the false 'Creationism' theory. Darwin has once again been proved to be correct as yet another piece in the jigsaw falls into place.

I guess some people are going to have to admit they were wrong - if not now, then at some point in the future.

I don't think it is worth the effort to try to argue with a deluded insane idiot who thinks he knows more about biblical writing than the experts who put our modern bibles together and also thinks that the only thing to do with everyone who disagrees with him is to kill them. I shall enjoy reading this thread and the more of you who wind him up the more fun it will be to read what y'all have to say!

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Now we see you for what you really are.

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The majority of people in England do not believe in a god. They are not Muslem, not Christian, not Hindu and not any other faith. It seems reasonable therefore that if you make a claim that most other people disagree with, it is up to you to prove your claim. It is not necessary (and quite difficult) to prove the non-existence of something. Although one famous biologist has written a book in which he claims to have proved the non-existence of god. I must get a copy and see if it is written in normal English and not in complex science that goes over my head.

Just quoting what other men said in books thousands of years ago does not count as proof. Neither to weird things that happened once and are not repeatable. A proper scientific test is something that other people can duplicate. If others consistently get the same result it becomes more likely to be true.

If you put your hand on the hot plate of a cooker and it gets burned, you have a theory which can be tested by asking others to do the same. If everybody who tries that experiment gets the same result it is reasonable to assume that human skin does not like too much heat. For this experiment I'm sure I can say that 'it works' - would you care to try it? People are so sure that this theory works that I doubt any reader here will try it - they don't need to! Nobody is going to say, "My god will protect me, so I will do the experiment and not get burned". If they did, that would be scientifically interesting. If that person could repeat the experiment in front of other people as often as required, it would become very interesting.

However, to become accepted as proof that you don't always get burned, it would require a large number of people to show to others that they don't get burned. At that point the theory would have to be modified to say that some people get burned if they touch a hot plate. If it happens to only one person, a likely explanation is that the person lacks sensitivity to pain. There are such people and they have to be careful what they touch as they genuinely cannot feel pain. Their hands will certainly get burned if left on the hot plate for a few seconds, so that experiment does not invalidate the theory.

I believe it is up to those that claim there is a god either to say they know there is and they are quite happy in that belief (as some have done here) or to try to prove their claim, which has been shown to be a complete waste of time and effort. As far as I can tell, belief in a god is an internal thing, something in your mind which is convincing to you, like people who 'hear voices' in their head. The voices don't actually exist, they are not heard through the ears, else other people nearby could also hear them. They are imagined by people who have a vivid imagination.

Those who are convinced there is a god, while obviously deluded, are no doubt people with vivid imaginations. Perhaps they ate too much cheese the night before they had a weird experience. I've heard this can happen to some people, but I think I must be boringly 'normal' having never had any such experience. As I said before, if you 'expect' something odd to happen then it is very likely you will find it. And conversely, if like me, you have no such expectation, you won't find god no matter how much you try and how hard you look.

Large numbers of men will kill large numbers of other men in a war. Often those doing the killing will have been told to consider the enemy as some sort of sub-human animal. It makes it easier to another person that way. If you think the man you are about to kill has parents, a wife and family, just like you have, then it becomes more difficult to kill others, just because they are 'on the other side'.

I find it hard to understand why Christian priests would 'bless' a submarine before it went to the seas in the second world war to find and destroy other submarines. Somewhere in the bible it says something about not killing other people, but I guess there's a bit written in invisible ink that says it's OK to kill others in wartime.

For me, as a pacifist, it is never, ever, OK to kill another person. In the first world war that means I would probably have been shot. In the second world war I would probably have been able to drive ambulances or some other non-combatant role to help injured people. Let's hope that in any future war, I will be able to help in a non-combatant role. I doubt that at my age I would be able to do anything else!

To see the difference, take a look at earlier posts. The 'normal' Christians are those who just answer the original question with a short statements like, "Yes there is a god". They do not see the need to 'prove' anything!

I have never said that all believers are nutters. Many Christians I know are, as I have said (please read what I wrote!) 'normal' people who quietly go to church on Sundays, do the kneeling, standing and sitting down thing.

They listen to some words and sing a few hymns. Then after coffee they go home and forget about it till next Sunday. These are normal Christians.

The nutters are those like you who spend vast amounts of energy quoting things written in books by men as if it were some sort of 'proof' that there is a god.

These angry writings, sometimes shouting in capitals, not to mention bold text and italics are all nothing. They are just things that people wrote about a long time ago.

No doubt some of them actually believed their stories to be true, others were most likely just repeating what was written by someone else.

Instead of accepting as 'mere coincidence' the unusual things that happen in life (which is all they are) you immediately state that they are 'proof' of your beliefs.

You have no idea how stupid you look claiming that it 'must be god' for everything that has ever happened which doesn't have an explanation that is easy for a qualified engineer to understand.

Very lazy thinking to give up and say, "Oh well, that must be god".

Maybe I could join a ghost hunter group in the hope of asking Tom's questions if I ever see one!

From this and other threads I am coming to the conclusion that if you believe in something you will see evidence of that which you believe in, but if you don't believe in something you won't find any evidence of it.

Unfortunately, I don't believe in ghosts.

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rats, someone noticed that river was looking at the phone upside down!