Are British people mostly atheists?
To answer your question, yes and no. It's funny really. In UK, where we have a state religion, most people only call themselves "Christian" out of tradition. In the USA, where there's a separation of church and state, most people would call themselves "Christian" sincerely. I would even go to the extent of saying most of the "Christians" in this country are not "Christians". Who says who is and isn't a Christian, surely that's personal? Well no actually. Statistics show comparably low numbers of people going to church and then there's a fairly low number of people who can actually name the four gospels and that many get their Noahs/Adams/Moseses muddled up. I do know these answers but I would have marked my Census with them until not long ago like them until I really thought about it. As for the names you listed, I'd hasten to call John Lennon an atheist, he himself said: "If you say you don't believe in God, everybody assumes you're antireligious, and you probably think that's what we [The Beatles] mean by that. We're not quite sure 'what' we are, but I know that we're more agnostic than atheistic." I don't think there's any such query as to what Dawkins believes but here's a quote anyway: "The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no." Laurie also makes it clear: "I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he'd take it away."
What is that Albert Einstein quote where he acknowledges God's existence ?
In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human understanding, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views. — Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, Towards the Further Shore (Victor Gollancz, London, 1968), p. 156; quoted in Jammer, p. 97
Atheist Super Bowl Commercial?
Are you talking about this Go-Daddy video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XoAIG9HcLvA
To whom do atheists confess their sins, and how are they forgiven?
I am an atheist.Like all human beings, I sometimes do things wrong and I sometimes hurt people. Like all human beings, the people around me sometimes do things wrong and sometimes hurt me. This is part of being human.We are all born of frailty and error. There is no outside devilish force, no demonic entity making us this way; it is a consequence of living in a world with billions of other human beings, many of whom have different goals and desires, on a planet with constrained resources that guarantee it is not possible for everyone to have everything they want.As an atheist, I know that if I and my fellow human beings are to succeed at living with each other, we must be willing to pardon reciprocally one another’s faults and failings.If I do harm to Sue, Bob can't forgive me. Even if he wears a funny hat or a shirt with a weird collar. An invisible man in the sky can't forgive me. A character in an epic book of mythology can't forgive me. I will find no absolution from Gandalf, Ulysses, Dumbledore, or Jesus.If I do harm to Sue, the only person to whom I can reasonably confess that sin is Sue, and the only person who can forgive me is Sue. If, as sometimes happens, she cannot or will not forgive me, there is no absolution.It is hard for people of good character to do wrong and receive no forgiveness. It becomes a weight you carry forever. It is tempting to want to put down that weight by pretending an invisible man who lives in the sky can forgive you and wash away the weight of the wrong you've done.It's tempting, but it's false.I get it. Carrying the knowledge you've done harm to someone and that person will never forgive you is hard. I get why people so desperately want to believe they can go in a little room and say some magic words that grant the forgiveness the person you actually harmed can't or won't give you.As an atheist, I believe that “forgiveness” granted by some outside agency is a sham. I carry with me the knowledge that some of the harm I have caused will never be forgiven. I know what that feels like, and that knowledge encourages me to forgive those who have harmed me, and to seek to treat other people well.
Why do the vocal atheists ask theists for evidence for the existence of God/gods like it's easy and common to produce when it's not either of those?
If there is no God, I wouldn't expect to find much quality evidence for one. If God is a fundamental property of the cosmos, why shouldn't I expect there to be reasonable evidence showing that? Just consider the two possibilities:One: there is a god. What would the world look like? Two: there is no god. What would the world look like? Why exactly should these two possibilities look in any way the same? Yet if you can't come up with something that shows possibility one, then why should anyone take it seriously? Atheism could be defined as the default presumption of possibility two until somebody demonstrates some observable and actually observed evidence of possibility one. Continue on and look at any of the world's major theistic religions and their core texts and related traditional beliefs. All of them are chock full of inconsistencies and stories and descriptions and cosmological and biological conclusions that are quite clearly wrong. Consider two possible explanations for all of the many problems with these texts:1. Some difficult to identify core in at least some of the world's religions is truly divine or truly divinely inspired. The rest is inconsistent and inaccurate due to combinations of human mistranslation, human editing, human additions beyond the divine core. Additionally, some of the divine core is merely parables that are intended to illustrate important points (though oddly poorly and very ambiguously, and often very much in line with authoritarian "morality"). 2. The entirety of the religion's texts and beliefs were created by humans within human cultures over many generations of time, often being told, retold and altered over the course of many centuries through various oral traditions and then coming together and eventually written down and edited by further groups of humans, with no divine interaction at all. The second possible explanation is a far better match to the reality of the world's religions than the first. So, why consider the first except due to an emotional or cultural attachment? In general, explaining religion, and spiritual and supernatural belief, as having any non-human origins is a fool's errand that has never yielded any objective substance, so why should a non believer accept any of it?
Maybe Christians can explain to me why Satanism is so bad?
Satanism is bad in 'their' views because they don't understand it and automatically exert that it is bad because it is the anti-christ of their beliefs. In short, ignorance and narrowmindedness equates to believing that Satanism is bad. Remember, through the lore of Adam and Eve, God didn't want you to understand anything. Which is quite ironic really if you think about it. It's funny because God casts all these temptations out onto the world and say "If you take those temptations, I'll cast you to hell" - yet it was he who created those temptations in the first place. /golf claps