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These are all very different things. Firstly, you have to distinguish between national health insurance and a national health care system. In France, health care is paid for out of taxation, as it is in Britain. The difference is that here care is largely provided by a nationalised industry...

As I understand it, Sanhkya was a philosophy of nature, no more atheistic than Aristotle or Kant — it just addressed other questions. Later exponents of the school referred to Brahman as a third element, creating the universe out of pre-existent matter. As far as I can see, it just died out...

There's an old saying that there are two types of people: those who believe that there are two types of people and those who don't. There are certainly two types of religion. Firstly, there those religions which have evolved over centuries as successive generations have interpreted and...

Actually, it's more due to my philosophical background: I accept Ramanuja's criticisms of the equation of God and the soul as being based on invalid arguments, such as circularity. As for the idea that the Gods are simply aspects of Brahman, that seems to me to be just be be an assumption...

Not me! I have a great respect for Hinduism — if I didn't, I wouldn't be concerned about any weak points; unlike Islam, where I'm always agreeably surprised by anything good. It's interesting to compare two sets of virtues: Patañjali: non-violence, truthfulness, honesty, absence of desire...

The original poster's arguments are perfectly valid from a philosophical point of view. I'm not going to set out the arguments from design and causation: they are available on the internet and in numerous books. But the argument from causation obviously implies a single cause, as Aristotle...

My off-the-cuff reactions are 1. 1,000 people questioned per country? Not very representative. 2. Are the opinions of people who may never thought about the subject before being questioned worth the paper their written on? There's rubbish, utter rubbish, and opinion polls.

There's always a balance to strike when deciding the "real" beliefs of a religion. On the one hand, one might say that any Hindu met in Maryland is "extra-ordinary" compared to one living in an Indian village, in that they have had the experience of growing up in an alien society. On the other...

Not for me. For Western (e.g. Plato) and Chinese (e.g. Mencius) thinkers, ethics is objective. Because of that, it is possible to say that some traditions of a society may be unethical. Your own comment about "affirmative action" suggests that you yourself admit this.

Silly quizzes are compulsive: I've just been told that if I were a Muppet, I'd be Kermit. Actually, I think I'm more Waldorf or Statler...

There are certain answers that count strongly. My top three were obviously selected because I said I believed in reincarnation: if I didn't, I got Bahai and Unitarian (again, ignoring polytheism). They're also geared to distinguishing various types of Christian, with a question about faith...

Thank you! I was wondering why I was the only one with no results :o I hope mailinator.com has someone who will enjoy being on Belief-o-matics's mailing list. It wasn't much better for me: the top scores were Sikh, despite not being a monotheist Jain, despite being a theist Hinduism — that's...

The main tenet of Gnosticism was that the world was created by a minor deity in error or arrogance; consequently it's not a good place and matter is evil. The creator, the demiurge Ialdabaoth, was generally said to be the son of Sophia, and identified with Yahwe. The Gnostics believed in a...

The form of Buddhism that is said to be non-theistic is Theravada, but 1. When a recent pope (John-Paul II?) remarked that Buddhists didn't believe in God, he got a letter of denial from the President and Prime Minister of Ceylon. 2. I once consulted a huge manual of Buddhism published by the...

I didn't get any percentages: it just said I should be a Sikh, which doesn't match at all.

In the 19th century, apart from a few recalcitrant positivists, western philosophy was dominated by absolute idealism. At that time westerners started to take an interest in Hinduism, and naturally exclaimed "Look, Śaṁkara's just like Hegel and Bradley!". Meanwhile, Indians getting a western...

Not watching, but listening to Wooden Joe Nicholas: Wooden Joe Nicholas - Up Jumped The Devil - YouTube

Some of us are showing our age: Carry on Cleo, Goon Show, Dick Emery! Perhaps that's why we aren't contentious. If you want to know where the fundies are, they're all over at religiousforums.com talking about creationalism.

St Augustine wrote that if God called someone to be a prophet, that was to teach religion, not history, geography, or astronomy. Anything else, he said, is the prophet's own responsibility. He added that there are certain things we now know to be true which were unknown in earlier times, and...

Actually, this forum is very civilised — although I could name a couple of members I could live without reading again … Here, my reputation button says I'm on a distinguished road. In another place, I got so much hostility that it ended up reading "David is infamous around here"! A case of...