Nothing special about this, just an empty series of coincidences.
Posted on 01/15/2016 9:02:07 PM PST by massmike
Iceland seems to be on its way to becoming an even more secular nation, according to a new poll. Less than half of Icelanders claim they are religious and more than 40% of young Icelanders identify as atheist. Remarkably the poll failed to find young Icelanders who accept the creation story of the Bible. 93.9% of Icelanders younger than 25 believed the world was created in the big bang, 6.1% either had no opinion or thought it had come into existence through some other means and 0.0% believed it had been created by God.
The poll, which was conducted by the polling firm MaskÃna on behalf of Siðmennt, The Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association, an association of Icelandic atheists, found that 46.4% of Icelanders identify as religious, which is the lowest figure to date.
Older people are far more likely to profess religious beliefs and to identify as Christian than those who are younger. 80.6% of those older than 55 identified as Christian and only 11.8% said they were atheists. At the same time 40.5% of people who were 25 years or younger said they were atheists, and only 42% said they were Christian. Traditional Christian beliefs also seem more common outside of ReykjavÃk, where 77-90% of people identified as Christian and 7.1-18 were atheists, compared to 56.2% of people in ReykjavÃk who identified as Christian and 31.4% as atheist.
(Excerpt) Read more at icelandmag.visir.is ...
True, this doesn’t tell us a lot. Theistic big bang or some other kind of big bang? There was no distinction made.
Christian faith isn’t a philosophical tome. It is a claim about things revealed to humanity.
And what was the question? How was it phrased.
I am a believer but would say the universe was made by the big bang.
and God said Let there be light, and kaboom, a explosion of energy.
/s
Achmed the terrorist! “I’ll keeeel you!” /s
(From Jeff Dunham.)
Any one ask them if they believe in Odin?
It is deeply troubling it’s amazing to see this kind of fast paced apostatey, go at the rate it’s going wouldn’t you agree?
HA!
Western liberalism is corrosive.
“...have imported their own Malmo-starter-kit, in the form of a hundred or so Syrian “refugees””
That is funny, but true.
Very troubling...ripe for Islamic invasion
I have no problem saying I don’t know. I also admit that what I do know is subject to change with new data. Right now as for pretty much my whole life I believe in God. The Christian version. It matches what I see in this world. The exact mechanics of creation are beyond me and I dare say all of humanity. Although we clearly have some hypotheses.
Actually, more than half of the original Icelanders where Irish and British slaves abducted from their homes to serve their feudal Viking masters.
True. According to physics, after the Big Bang, it took 400 million years or so for enough hydrogen atoms to collect together to make the first stars. Before that the whole Universe was an expanding, hot, hydrogen "soup".
Then it took billions of years of stars growing, exploding into supernovas, and then being born again, over and over again, for enough heavy elements to make rocky world solar systems. That took about 9 billion years, with the Sun and Earth only coming into existence 4 billion years ago or so.
The belief in nothing requires greater faith than that of believing in Creator God.
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A very popular, but ultimately meaningless, meme.
How does one calculate the amount of faith something requires?
Atheists are the children of Marx, and the enemies of America.
Actually, it's not meaningless at all - at least conceptually. If you distill it down further into the question of whether there is any reason for, or meaning in existence it becomes much more difficult to justify the hypothesis that there is no reason that anything exists. Scientifically, it requires profound leaps of faith.
All science, even mathematics, is at some level observational, and we only know what our senses allow us to ‘see’ and our brain capacity allows us to understand. Hopefully we are able to understand a lot more than we do now, but the evidence backs up the presumption that we know an infinitesimal amount of what is knowable. To know so little, but to be dogmatic about something as fundamental as the reason and meaning of existence, is non-fact based and by definition a belief of ‘faith’.
I agree
You never addressed the meme that faith can be quantified and measured against another “quantity” of faith.
Nothing special about this, just an empty series of coincidences.
It depends on what you mean by ‘quantify’. People have tried to address this mathematically, for instance starting with the 50:50 possibility that God exists, and then trying to calculate the probability. One such approach used Bayes’ Theorem and calculated a 67% likelihood that God exists. Personally, I don’t need or want a number, and I don’t see any utility in trying to quantify faith.
That said, I go back to my previous post and my contention that to know as infinitesimally little as we do, but make such a dogmatic pronouncement as saying that there is no reason for existence, is without doubt a profound leap of ‘faith’ not based in demonstrable facts.
All that said, I agree with your general premise that it is an exercise in futility to try to quantify someones beliefs. IMHO, we grow when we wonder, and when we are dogmatic we sometimes shut off our ability to wonder. That limits us, and if one believes that the more we know the more we know God (one of my personal beliefs) then we should be wondering and thinking all the time.
Anyway, have a great weekend.
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