Atheists smite online God poll
An online poll enquiring as to the possible existence of God has somewhat backfired on Christian outfit The Alpha Course, with 98 per cent of the popular vote currently saying he doesn't: Screengrab of The Alpha Course poll results at time of publication According to the Sun, The Alpha Course kicked off a multi-million pound …
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that 98% No is an achievement -
given they already biased the test with two possible positive answers (yes, probably) and only one No ... yes/no/maybe would have been fairer, and yes/no/prob-not biased the other way. Mind you, with a Prob-not they might have at least split the No vote up :-)
Really, there is no god, we made it all up.
If you believe in one true god then you don't believe in all the thousands of gods that have gone before, roman gods, greek gods, norse gods, mayan gods, egyptian gods etc. I agree with you. I don't believe in any of those gods either. I'll just go one small logical step further and not believe in your god either.
stupid poll
I logged on to vote No, but I suspect the counter is bust.
It is unlikely that the average person going on to a Christian site will be atheist, non-theist or agnostic. So, a poll of them is not exactly a random sample. It's like a poll on the BNP site asking if you support immigration.
What stupidity, and typical of the kind of person who runs these sites.
Existence or non-existence of something is not proven by majority vote. If the majority say God exists, does that automatically create him, if he did not exist before the vote? It sounds like one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld gods, who pop out of existence if people stop believing in them.
Alpha Cult
People should be very careful around the Alpha Course. Their course leaders are trained to target the lonely, depressed and vulnerable. Their "questioning" sessions involve partnering one newbie with three or four Alpha stooges, for peer-to-peer indoctrination.
In short, they use many of the same techniques as the Moonies and Scientologists to trap people in their clutches.
ooops
alpha site seems to have fallen over, maybe the big woman upstaris is not happy?
Serves them right.
If they'd added "probably not" to the list of possible responses I'd have a lot more sympathy for them. As it stands my first thought is "hahahahahahaha".
Missing option
I saw this on a poster and thought they might do better to include the rather obviously missing option of "probably not".
Epic!
Get snubbed by atheists....create webiste with poll trying to prove said aheists wrong....have people vote any which way they please.....aaaaaahh, results at at variance with intended goal of poll......you're all a bunch of liars, this poll is rubbish anyway, who would believe any old poll, clearly, if God has the awesome power of creating the universe, this poll would pale into insignificance....anyway, you atheists cheated because you made your opininions known en masse....you are not very nice people...in a gentler kinder time God would smite you
Heh heh heh.
http://www.limmy.com/blog/2009/09/27/atheist-graffiti/
Ha!
Looks like the increased traffic has downed their website! That tickles me.
Oh dear
If He doesn't exist, I suppose I'll have to disappear in a puff of smoke.
Only goes to show ...
... what happens when a web-aware group of people with an agenda start emailing/twittering/whatever now. Similar thing happened when the Guardian ran a poll for the greatest TV show in the "noughties" ... initially it was deluged by people voting for top gear (much to the consternation of the people posting in the accompanying comments section). Then came the backlash with "The Wire" getting the vast majority of the rest of the votes cast to try to force the un-PC TopGear out of top spot ... ultimately (with I think a bit of multiple vote discarding) it just scraped past TopGear and the Guardianistas could sleep safely again.
So, I expect here some anti-Christian group has emailed round all their contacts to tell them to vote. I'm now expecting my email to get deluged by Church contacts telling me to go to the site and right this wrong. If this gets into the appropriate US email lists then they could be deluged.
End result is it won't tell us very much ... but in any case I doubt this is the intention - its ADVERTISING and it appears to have worked!
Surely the title should have been
Bear Grylls is an Alpha Fail
looks like alpha fails pretty hard
Their site is currently suffering from database problems. Even more hilarious is that it is displaying the MySQL db IP address and the username.
Screenshot here: http://omploader.org/vMmxvag/alpha_fail.png
Enjoy!
I made my opinion known...
Anyone wan to guess what I voted for?
Really? They think it was a sting?
Or maybe they just need to realise that religion plays more and more of a token role in educated people's lives
Not hard to believe
Most people using the internet are a little tech savvy, hence most will veer more towards science as more credible answer to the great questions, ergo they lean towards an agnostic, if not totally atheist outlook.
( A pint, that's the answer to most of life's great questions! )
God's way
of punishing them for the DDOS attack on those Aussie atheists' sites.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
This is going to tickle me all day!! Something even slightly objective - this is why church attendance in the UK is dropping, people don't want to be told that they're going to burn for eternity by nutcases with dubious belief structures. Offer some PROOF for your claims (thats aimed at all religions everywhere) or STFU, no one cares!
I haven't voted, but I'd be in that 98% of No's for certain.
Nicely biased there
Does God exist?
Yes
No
Probably
Although I voted 'No', I'd still consider it fairer if they included a Probably Not option.
backfired?
'The Humanist Society insists the poll has "backfired",'
Not sure how they work that one out. Sounds like the alpha group has identified a potential market of 98%!
Really tho, what a pointless poll.
Er?
Of course God exists. I was touched by his noodly appendage years ago.
(yeah, I know, no way I'm the first to post along those lines, but the pasta made me do it)
Wait just a cotton pickin' minute...
How much do you bet that this was perpertrated by 4chan?
Or a flash mob?
I can also see a really sadistic botnet owner doing this for a laugh.
(I say to him: "Well done, Sir!")
Also, he has won 1 Internets.
God? No God? Who cares?
The point which the Humanist Society should have tried to get across with their ads is not that there's probably no God, but that it doesn't matter whether there's a God or not. But they had to go for the headline-grabber.
Point is, you should be trying to be a good person, which basically comes down to a lifelong Hippocratic Oath of "first do no harm". Every ethical position comes about naturally from that. And according to JC in the New Testament, it doesn't matter who we pray to - the good guys get to Heaven anyway, and the bad guys don't. The humanists and atheists are at an advantage here, because they can consider "first do no harm" without the laborious framework of how to do no harm which has built up historically around every religion - the utterly unholy Catholic doctrine of "every sperm is sacred", for example, which has no basis in the teachings of JC.
So it's the reverse of Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal reckoned that you should go to church regardless of whether you believed or not, because if the Christians were right then it'd get you to Heaven, and if the Christians were wrong then you'd not lost anything. But according to JC it's the other way around - you'll get to Heaven whether you follow a religion or not, so long as you behave well. And if there isn't a Heaven, you've still led a good life which has generally improved the world as a whole (even if only in a small way).
Besides which, there's a deeper point. Unless your god bases its decisions about an afterlife on the way you actually act, and the reasons you act that way, that god isn't worthy of worship. And if it does (cf. Christianity, Judaism and Islam), then it's handling admission to Hell, not Heaven.
touched by his noodly appendages
what sort of variable is possibly? bah!
Able to live with fantasy
Mr Grylls is only exhibiting in his personal and professional life the ability to separate reality from fantasy. He delivers the fantasy but there's no need to suffer in reality.
The Alpha Course is a pernicious bit of evangelising nastiness. They push certain cultural values under the guise of religious values, e.g. gay-hating, and have got the Church of England under their thumb. Not that this matters over-much, given that the poll really does indicate the position of the CofE in everyone's daily lives, i.e. about that equal to God.
2% say yes... that's familiar
Is that not the same proportion that attend church regularly? Seems this poll could be indicative after all.
I've seen a lot of their "Does God Exist? Yes, No, Maybe" posters about the place, most have them in London seem to have been vandalised to have the "NO" box ticked as well. Personally I hope that the UK is transforming itself into a largely post-religious society, all that organised religion seems to stand for these days is prejudice and anti-rationality.
Believe if you like, but I reserve the right to think you're delusional.
The Intertubes do not lie
Ergo: That god fella, he no exist.
"I don't think this is indicative of people's faith in this country."
ITYM "I don't want to be believe this because it doesn't fit in with what *I* think..."
Vote as many times as you like
Just click refresh after you've voted!
Wait
"The poster and ad drive was a response to a Humanist Society campaign last year suggesting there was "probably no God" - a view shared by the vast majority of the 154,500 online votes at time of publication."
Wan't the HS campaign jsut a response to a different Christian campaign?
Subtle?
Could a Christian site be subtle enough to create a poll which fails in an embarrassing way, so as to get viral spread, lots of hits on its site, and sales o Christian training courses?
Hmm... seems unlikely that a christian site could have that level of intelligence. But I wonder.
Ha Ha (In a Nelson Muntz stylee)
Being a Humanist myself I find this enormously amusing, but in a serious way I'm very glad this has backfired. There was a simple intention behind this campaign as as response to the (in)famous "probably" campaign. That point was that they were hoping to get a massive yes vote which they could use to "prove" that there is a god. The Alpha bods seem to have fallen for the popular media delusion that public opinion is the same as fact.
Guys religion isn't the same as the X-Factor
Given the options......
Yes : Anyone who knows that God exists for a fact is probably delusional
No : Anyone who knows that God does not exist for a fact is probably delusional
Probably : Rational Theists (if there is such a thing)
Where's "Probably Not"?
This is the most rational category, and where most Atheists (and anyone who had genuinely thought about it rationally) would put themselves, given the absence of this category "No" is the closest, I suspect that the survey gave the most accurate result possible given the critera.
Just added my no vote
When I was told Father Christmas wasn't real, I couldn't believe anyone who reckoned that God existed. Can't see much difference between the two.
Puff of logic
Yet more proof that god doesn't exist, as though we need anything beyond the Babelfish, proving that because god does exist, therefore he doesn't.
Mine's the one with the book labeled "Don't Panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover...
Atheism
One wonders why one would reject one load of prehistoric control freakery and immediately latch onto it's opposite. If you don't believe in ${DEITY}, that's it. No need to replace it with anything, the question should be moot and a non-issue for you. Active discussion promotes the idea that you're not entirely certain and trying to convince anyone else of your rectitude just perpetuates the asshattery.
Since you can't prove a negative, just drop the entire subject and get on with your life. And, for fuck's sake, please stop poking the theists with a pointy stick; they're as entitled to an opinion as anyone else, especially given that it has been shown that some brains require this feudal belief system to accept the fact of life's unfairness without turning completely bat-shit crazy.
We'll find out who is right in a few years anyway. Oh yes, it's on all our to-do lists, usually the final entry.
As an aside, I'm surprised Apple haven't patented religion yet.
No sting involved
Perhaps it's just that us non-believers are over-represented on the web. Let's face it, in this country many Christians are even older than myself and may not be totally in tune with these new-fangled Babbage machines.
How to fix the poll
Instead of wasting an option on 'Probably' which was always a half-assed attempt to load the poll, they should have used options of "Yes", "No" and "LOL".
LOL is to intertnets what shave and a haircut is to roger rabbit.
hahahahahahahaha
'Spokesman Mark Elsdon-Dew added: "I don't think this is indicative of people's faith in this country." - what an idiot.'
when are the christian population going to realise that they are slowly reducing in numbers?!
this poll although quite obviously messed with by some idiotic atheist's could be more accurate than they believe, especially when you actually speak to people and realise that religion is no longer seen as something to believe in and more something that causes tension, strife, war and political unrest.
The day religion becomes defunct is the day the human race will finally continue to evolve and unite in the peace we all seem so intent on forcing each other into
Probably?
"Don't know, Don't care, what a bunch of wasters" would have been a better option than "Probably".
Why didn't they just fix the online poll? Religion has been hearing only what it wants to hear since some idiot first came up with the idea.
Does God Exist?
Yes - If you're a five year old hoping to receive an education in a state school your parents have already paid for through their taxes.
Probably - If you're a cleric up to the level of bishop.
No - If you're an archbishop or higher.
Standard advice to all...
Don't ask a question unless you are prepared to get an answer you don't want to hear!
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