I think comparatively, Islam is a violent and repressive religion. But I will protest bigotry, discrimination and hate crimes against peaceful Muslims who make a contribution to society, in the same way I condemn Islamic terrorist attacks and persecution of Christians in Islamic countries.

I don't Islam. I support human rights.

MajorMitchell: For roughly its first millennium Islam was far more liberal and accepting than Christianity. Today, many Islamic doctrines and even major sects like the Sufis are quite liberal.

And while all religion is 'pseudo-intellectual' to me, Islam appears to be significantly more coherent than older Abrahamic religions. It strips away much of the doublethink in Christian doctrine by updating it with a unified narrative.

As for disguising a 'theocratic political model', you do realize that Sunni Islam has lacked this since the end of the Caliphate a century ago, right? Zaidiyyah Islam has lacked a 'theocratic political model' since the fall of the Imamate half a century ago. Shi'ite Islam lacked a 'theocratic political model' for most of its history. The Druze and Sufis never had a political center so far as I am aware. Christianity on the other hand has a firmly established theocratic hierarchical political model in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox churches, Oriental Orthodox churches, Anglicanism and many Protestant churches. Moreover, Church titles and terms for political subdivisions directly correspond to late Roman civil offices and political subdivisions. The 'totalitarian theocratic political model' was never even disguised in Christianity.

President Eden: Sure. If you want to argue that there is a single belief in atheism, go for it. That still doesn't make it a 'set of beliefs' (presumably more than one belief), nor allow atheism to fit the various other requirements that makes a 'set of beliefs' a religion.

I cannot believe you bastards omitted the only religion worthy of respect:

The Church of God, The Utterly Indifferent

Especially given the massive amount of evidence proving His indifference to our plight.

"Sure. If you want to argue that there is a single belief in atheism, go for it. That still doesn't make it a 'set of beliefs' (presumably more than one belief), nor allow atheism to fit the various other requirements that makes a 'set of beliefs' a religion."

No, but it definitely occupies a particular, unique space in the world of religious thought that makes it qualify for discussion in something like this, even if reducing atheistic thought to a single axiomatic position (in this case, an active rejection of the thesis that a deity/deities exist) is a gross oversimplification.

This tangent is a bit dense because the original concept of the thread is dodgy, but if we're going to "rank" the world's religions, we would obviously have to set some kind of threshold of participation to determine a cutoff point (below which a particular belief system wouldn't have a sufficiently relevantly high number of participants to be worth the time spent discussing it). There's no doubt that the broad umbrella of "disbelief in existence of god/gods" has enough participants to merit inclusion in such a discussion, nor that if we broke down this broad umbrella into too many constituent parts, we would have too many such parts to consider and probably not enough followers in most of them to be worth considering.

So while it's obviously a gross simplification and inaccurate, a reduction to simple "atheism" is probably at least somewhat fair to make sure that the important space of "disbelief in a deity/deities" is covered in the discussion.

At that point we're just debating degrees, and I don't think I care enough to do it beyond this, but I think acknowledging and "ranking" (as it were) the substantial realm of disbelief in deities would be more informative than not, despite the complications that come from such an oversimplification.

Well no one is asking the BIG questions, the important questions, such as the relevance of God in WebDiplomacy, how can divine intervention prevent the loss of a vital sc, like there's a lot of God smiting this enemy of the chosen people, that sinner gets blasted into a pillar of salt etc in the Bible.

Tangential thought.. Match players with Biblical characters... Eg The prodigal son..brainbomb. Judas.and Barrabas...well I can think of a few nominees, The three wise men..obviously a couple of Almighty Mods

Islam
Christianity
Judaism
Zoroastrianism
Hinduism
Agnosticism