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So what did Islamic biologists actually achieve with this remarkable knowledge that nobody else had? Over the period from, say, 600 AD to 1500? Can you name one disease they cured, for instance? Alleged knowledge that you can't demonstrate the use of is pretty unimpressive.

And how many atheists do you actually know?

But what the heck is 'an impersonal force'? I believe in millions of impersonal forces, but I don't feel at all compelled to call any of them 'gods'. And what difference could it possibly make to anything if I did? I suspect that nearly all the people who ticked the 'impersonal force' box would...

But -- other things being equal -- does that result in better outcomes? A cool, dispassionate logical approach to a problem may well come up with a better solution than a deeply empathic one.

The utilitarian answer is 'when that event turned out to have consequences that were positive overall'. And that allows us to get past the intention of the rapist and look at the outcome of what occurred. Most people, most of the time, do things for non-moral reasons. It's the social...

If I go up to a roulette table with a friend, and one of us says the next spin will come up black, while the other one says it will come up red, then one of us has successfully predicted the future. Wow! But since we don't know which one it is until the wheel stops, that's of no help whatsoever...

"You call this a Flood? Why, when I were a boy I had to swim to school every single day. And catch me own fish for lunch while I did it!"

Judging by the size of the monkey (a marmoset?) that's probably a baby giraffe. They would have been a lot easier to capture and tame than the adults: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/7f/17/48/7f1748f9b985ea84b554c9f76f602570.jpg

The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep. Woody Allen http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/woodyallen136697.html

I'll bet $100 that if you ask ten of those people who said God is an 'impersonal force' what their God wants, at least eight of them will regard it as a meaningful question. 'Impersonal force' is just what people say to strangers when they're embarrassed to admit they believe in a Sky Daddy.

OK, now kill the man and the chicken...

Individuals probably aren't; but losses to religious belief tend to come from among the moderates, so as a religion shrinks the remaining rump is going to become more fundamentalist on average.

With no vertical scale, this is meaningless. But I see from the article that: The top of the graph is two standard deviations above the average; the bottom is three standard deviations below the mean. By 'the average' do they mean the mean? This looks like something prepared by the...

And let's not forget George Burns: "Take my avatar -- please!"

Here's one possibility: whatever it is you imagine your god did just happened by itself. And since you can't explain how a god does anything, there's no way for you to show that the presence of a god is necessary for whatever you think happened. There's no way of distinguishing between "An...

Q: What does Noah have in common with The Chipettes? A: They both need gopher wood.

I first encountered this in a wonderful book by George Borrow, in which one character is a poor demented man who believes he is condemned to hell forever because he committed this sin; and nobody can convince him otherwise because nobody can figure out what it is supposed to be.

Not if you commit the sin against the Holy Spirit. Mark 3:28-30: "Truly I tell you, all sins and blasphemes will be forgiven for the sons of men. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin." So slag off Jesus and God all you want...

But we can confidently assume that someone who claims the topic is unknowable is not going to contribute anything of value or interest to a discussion of it.

And yet the police do nothing...