Metal Reviews

The answer from a religious person with enough presence of mind to remember the phrase is Pascal's Wager: If there is one true God, and if you don't worship him you are sent to Hell, and way past purgatory at that, what is lost if you believe in Him even though he does not in fact exist?

The problem is that this is a meme, and a heriditary false answer, and most of all, a logical fallacy, as it is not an answer in itself, and is not a complete scenario, IE, which god is the true God? What do you know of God's intentions? and so forth

just playing angel's avocado

True. There has to be more to it than "playing it safe". Sadly this is the answer that most religious people come up with and it keeps me questioning , trying to find a reasonable answer only to find that most of them just believe because they fear the unknown.

That also assumes God is an idiot; I'd think that ze would be able to tell the difference between sincere belief and someone faking it to keep out of Hell.

That's the point; they are not doing it for god, just for themselves, to stop guilty worries.

Humanist - i believe in the Good (and the Bad) in people.

I'm too rational to believe in any religion and have problems understanding religious people's thoughts.

But isn't humanism just Christianity with the 'god' bits stapled out? All the moralistic viewpoints etc seem to be the same.

i'd say humanism and Christianity is close to each other, but not quite the same... respect, tolerance and understanding is also a part of my humanism and not all directions of Christianity seem to have those moralistic viewpoints.

i'd also say it was the best possible way to use christ's teachings. we certainly don't see much turning of the cheek from the devout, anymore..

Not that I'm anti-humanity, but they even have rituals at funerals etc, non-religious ones, which seems kind of daft to me.

Some of the views here seem to have some similarities with the way people categorize music.
Person 1 "This is BM they can't play it like that"
Person 2 "Actually it's not BM it's progressive metal"
Person 1 "Oh now that you said it belongs to that category, I have no problems listening to it"
Essentially and surprisingly even christians are people, and people tend to make mistakes, and even the occasional good thing. They strive for higher goals but cannot necessarily fill them and end up doing things the easy way. Why should someone be different from anyone else just because he/she is a christian. Same people who say blind faith is a bad thing are now saying that christians should strictly live by their book because they've been "marked" as the followers of that religion. Are they "poser christians" then if they don't?
Lot of things have been done "In the name of..." but does that give people the right to bash those in the same religion? Does what Varg and friends did allow the rest of the world to blame it on us who listen to metal? We metalheads often see ourselves as not as responsible for our actions as the christians are, we don't believe in anything so why should we have feelings of guilt? We have the right to do what they can't do. Bullshit.
Look at them as individuals and not as a lump of people and you'll see the normal amount of assholes (a large part) and the good guys (few) among them just like among any other group meant for categorizing people.
I feel strongly against the church as an institution but I'm not blaming all the christians of today for what it has done, just those who deserve it.

System.exit(0);

I wouldn't call humanism a religion, it's more a way of thinking, a philosophy.

Wikipedia gives a good definition and description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism