On Sat, Jun 28, 2003 at 10:35:59AM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Questions like "is there a god or not" or "was Mary a virgin" etc. were invented just to distract people from the real one - "why should one pay money to the church, and obey church rules". But it seems like it doesn't work any more - at least in Europe people were able to stop caring about the church without changing their beliefs much. Power of churches fell much more than number of believers.
Well, if Europeans manage to believe in God without giving power to the Church, then why is it that you're the one bringing churches' power into this, when the rest of us were simply talking about belief in God? Indeed, as I'm about to demonstrate in another post, it's /your/ position that depends heavily on the technical point of whether or not some God manages to actually exist. NPOV, of course, cannot judge.
It's wrong to say that most Europeans believe in god or that they don't - most don't give a shit either way. They managed to see the real question and answered it "no" - they aren't going to give church any powers. Having done so, whether they think "god exists" or not is as important as believing in fluffy elephants bringing luck or in existence of Neptune - it doesn't affect them, so they may answer like others do, or the way they feel any given day.