And the inability of soem folks here--Christian and athist--tor ecognize their arrogance annoys me,.

If you are going to wear a religious symbol you believe in, do so proudly.  Or, what's the point?

God and the afterlife.

We don't know.

Now, beliefs - there be plenty. But knowledge is beyond scarce.

I personally believe that when I die, I'll go to a place where every thought I choose to animate will become corporeal reality.  Makes me happy. And no one else has to believe it.

Those Maoists probably sneak lead into them like they put lead into everything else.  Festivus is NOT a Falun Gong holiday - why do they need to poison us?

...NO ONE gets gifts until someone gets pinned. :D

would dispute the lack of meaning in the contemporary incarnations of Xmas...

I am not a Christian but I definitely believe in Christmas..... Who can argue with 'Peace on Earth, goodwill to men' and the spirit of giving?

I live among a lotta Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. Some of them wish ME a Merry Christmas....and I'm an agnostic ( " we don't know and we don't care!")but I'm still on my wife to come clean to the kids about Santa Claus before they get the shit embarrassed outta themselves at school....and I tell em to ask their mom about Jesus and all that Jazz when they ask ( 11 years of Catholic school and what did they do? Turn me into an agnostic...they do emphasize critical reading after all...)and anyway my doc, who happens to be Jewish, suggested I go to the movies Christmas day if I'm bored. So I took up his advice and went to a 3 pm show one Christmas. He laughed and said perfect, you shoulda gone out for Chinese food afterwards...and hey the movie was packed, so I guess a lot of people don't celebrate...i think your daughter sounded incredibly cute, i've got a little spitfire of my own...damn just noticed you are in Alabama...now that has to be kinda tough. I know Atlanta and environs has lots of diversity but don't know much about the "Bumminham" area if that's where you're at.I remember being at a pig roast down south back in 82 and the subject of religion came up and us three jersey guys got them riled up because we were Catholic, except for my buddy Larry, who calmly informed them he was a Jew...dudes had to stop and think on it for a second. Incredibly, they passed us some moonshine and let us hang out.

But it's okay if our daughter points out that we're Jewish -- I think it's good for people to know there's a diversity of belief and practice.  So long as she says thank you and is friendly and polite, I think it's fine.
Reading this just gave me an idea -- maybe next time someone says Merry Christmas, I'll answer "Happy Hannukah!"  Of course, can't do it this year since Hannukah is over 2 weeks before Christmas!

the nice couple at my local kiosk a Happy Ramadan.  I am not Muslim but it is a gesture of kindness and friendship in wishing all the good things about a respective religion's holidays on the practitioners.  I mean, getting right down to it, they all have family, love, kindness, and charity as their core principles.  What's not to love about that?

They also loved my Thanksgiving soup, and wished me well for my own (secular) holiday.

Huh?
First off, the very fact that you use words like "mountains", "zero", "not possible" and "EVERY argument you could make" in your statements means you don't think logically or like a scientist.

Second, interesting how you lump ANYTHING you don't seem to believe in into the category "such things".  What in the world is "such things", and how is it valid to lump them all into one category? I mean, telepathy is the same thing as religion? Talk about your sweeping, emotional, unsupportable statements.

So "every argument you could make" now or at any point in the future (wait, are you saying you know what people are going to say in the future? That would be predicting the future, wouldn't it?), is ALREADY "equally" valid?  Haven't you ever heard of the scientific method? Did we have a world-wide vote that I somehow missed, where everyone agreed they were "equal" in "all" cases?

You and Thorby may or may not be right (o.k., only Thorby might be right, because he only made ONE sweeping, unprovable statement), but you are both being intellectually dishonest.

assuming he exists,
and said "Hi Thorby, I'm here and I'm real," you STILL would not conclude that there is a possibility. Instead you would conclude that you must be crazy, or are hallucinating for some reason.

Nonetheless. Occam's Razor does not say "Where there is no evidence for the presence of multiple entities, unnecessarily multiplied entities do not exist", merely that "Where there is no evidence, you should not unnecessarily multiply entities".

A colleague of mine and I found an interesting phenomenon in a part of the brain of a certain kind of bird - well, to clarify: I found an interesting quirk of behavior that seems to correlate with the neural phenomenon. I could assume that thetans (just to be outrageous) were involved, but because thetans are totally unnecessary to explain things and because neural transmission is fairly well-studied (although much is not yet known about it), it makes more sense for us to assume that the phenomena we saw are merely the natural result of sexually selected brain circuits processing sound and producing behavior.

That doesn't mean that thetans aren't involved.

It means that I'm not going to write about thetans when I try to write up my results, because they are apparently irrelevant.

That's the key: apparently irrelevant. Spirits of all sorts, including deities, are apparently irrelevant to the phenomena we see around us. But we can't say for sure that they are really and truly irrelevant, just that we have as yet not seen any phenomena that could possibly involve the intervention of such spirits.

Now: I'm going to go off and live like an atheist, until the day I experience some form of gnosis. But I cannot say, with absolute certainty, that any gnosis I may experience is merely the result of neural misfirings. Obviously neural misfirings are the mechanism by which I might experience gnosis, but what causes them? Obviously, gross physiological disruption caused by drugs, or dehydration, or electrical shocks, can cause these experiences; yet sometimes they appear to happen without cause.

We could simply shrug and say, "Some things happen without cause." But I think that's a bit of a cop-out. Except for singularities, maybe, there's always a triggering event, whether we can see it or not. What is that event? You tell me. Alternately, are singularities rather common?

There are some some groups of atheists and agnostics organized around a belief in ethics and kindness.

One branch of Judaism is Humanistic Judaism---a nontheistic branch which bases its beliefs on promoting the well-being and dignity of all people. (national org= society for humanistic judaism). The basic belief is that changes in our lives and history are caused by the actions of people (not divine actions) and with that comes the responsibility to help others, be kind, ethical, etc because it's up to us to make the world a better place.

Ethical culture is another one.

Also--there are humanist organizations. Harvard has a Humanist Chaplaincy which has a great website.