Born protestant but I don't identify with any religious dogma. I believe in the ALL, Hermes' idea of God as unknowable and all-that-is. Other sources call this the Tao.

I suppose that makes me a theist although I prefer the moniker "mystic' myself.

Edit: I'm known around here for my impassioned defense of traditional family values. 

Then it means you are living around Asia or Europe from the time you mentions.

Edit: OK then i am also getting late here as well, but tomorow i will be bussy and i am afraid i will not answer fast enough and will  make you wait for the rply. So i will try my best to answer i hope you understand if my answer comes late.

I don't want to derail the thread either so this will be my last post here... be happy, you'll have the last word.

I'm not mirespresenting Dawkins - at least I don't think so. I just found funny that his arguments are so bad that some atheists become christhians after reading his book. I have read nothing from Turek so I can't speak for him and I'm not invoking apologists here.. easy... If I wanted to, I would quote Chesterton, Lewis or Dostoievski, Pascal or Kierkgaard... Those guys knew how to think.

My point is: you, as human, need to have faith because your knowledge of almost everything is very limited. You can/should work with probabilities but, in the end, you need to make a choice. Even atheists need to make a choice by faith.

The scientific method says that you need to have an hypothesis, realize an experiment and then get to a conclusion. So to someone have a conclusion regarding something he needs to experiment it OR use his faith and believe in others who had experimented it.

Let's say you want to know if the christian god exists. What should you do? Talk with some christians, read the Bible and then try to put those teachings in action. If you don't end it believing what is your conclusion? "There's no God"? NO! You need the check your experiment looking for failures on procedures and rerun it. Eventually, after rounds of experiments you could say "There's no God" but still you'll have to have faith on it. Why? The "steps" of the experiment - described in Bible - are not scientifically verifiable. Maybe you did something wrong on your 999999th try. The same can't be said by searching for a teapot in space.

Do you believe that there's a cosmic object called Pluto? Is it by faith in others - in other words, you don't know it by your senses - or have you "seen" it? Regarding your bedroom example, sometimes you can only have evidences and no proof - you know that they are VERY different. It's highly probable that she was having sex with that guy but this is not a proof. You have to choose to believe that she was having sex - a easy choice, right, but you could be wrong.

In the end, for a lot of things, you have to make a choice; assisted by probabilities, if you want. So, as I already said, a person is atheist by choice.

"Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact" - The Brothers Karamazov

Advice: when you try to poison the well with "lol Daily Mail" you don't help the dicussion. Shame on you. ;)

Edit: Sorry for my poor English. It's not my first language.

You are not alone.

I was not raised with religion in my life and considered myself atheist for the majority of my time here. Around the age of 19 I had experimented with a few hallucinogens - DMT, mushrooms, mesculine (i've done these each around twice) but then finally, I had my mind split in half and felt like I had a far better grasp on the living breathing world before us thanks to another drug, called LSD. I went in an atheist and came out Agnostic.

I absolutely believe human beings and earth are part of a bigger picture. I believe what we've done here so far is wrong. I think there's a conclusion to this chapter that we may or may not live to see and I think that some things are too intelligent by design to be the cause of a slow burning evolution over millions of years.

Atheism, to me is for people that haven't had their third eye opened yet. It's really on each of us as an individual to explore our spiritual side to determine what we can know for fact based on the world around us;;

One thing I know, that I can tell you, is that to this very moment, science has never been absolute. 100% of science is flawed. We have -nothing- as far as theories go that are completely sound. Everything has a second layer of deception or behaves in ways we could not imagine under certain conditions so it's like... wouldn't you need to have just as much blind trust to believe in science as you would to believe that humans so clearly stick out like a sore thumb here?

I'm a Christian (Baptist)

If you lose your faith, you are by definition an atheist, as you don't believe. Most likely you are an agnostic too. Agnostic merely means that you think there's no way we can be 100% sure. So you'd be an agnostic atheist, like the majority of atheists are. To explain, an agnostic atheist doesn't hold any belief that a God exists, but thinks there no way of knowing for sure.

EDIT: To further explain, you can be an agnostic theist too, whivh means you believe in God, but again, thinks there no way we can be 100% sure.

You're not alone my friend.

We live in a world where lies are treated as truth and the truth is treated as a lie.

What's even more concerning is that when you attempt to exchange ideas and state your convictions it becomes a closed minded, bigoted exchange. It's exhausting and sad.

And to top it all off, those who criticize theists, have extremely poor knowledge of what theists believe.

It is rare to meet an atheist who has read an entire chapter of the bible, far less a whole book and I am not exaggerating.

I am open to discuss my beliefs, but if the other party is not willing to discuss but more interested in criticism, I won't waste my time. 

There is quite a bit to learn in open minded discussion, but such talks are very few and far between.

I consider myself to be agnostic.

Christian here, but not always the most responsible one.

i am very very religious and spiritual person.i agree with every religion out there as they are all the same at the core

i used to be an atheist after being indoctrinated by the schooling system and media to believe in the technological materialistic modern liberal age that we live in

then i broke down and started following religion once i realized all atheist were intellectual idiots following the propaganda