back to article 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 …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.

Page:

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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 :-)

  2. Richard 120
    Boffin

    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.

  3. Mathew White
    Happy

    Ahh...

    ...the silent majority.

  4. Michael O'Malley

    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.

  5. PerfDave
    Gates Horns

    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.

  6. Martin 47
    Thumb Up

    ooops

    alpha site seems to have fallen over, maybe the big woman upstaris is not happy?

  7. Freddie
    Thumb Up

    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".

  8. Matt 43
    FAIL

    Missing option

    I saw this on a poster and thought they might do better to include the rather obviously missing option of "probably not".

  9. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    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

  10. ilikejam
    Thumb Up

    Heh heh heh.

    http://www.limmy.com/blog/2009/09/27/atheist-graffiti/

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ha!

    Looks like the increased traffic has downed their website! That tickles me.

  12. Beelzeebub
    Flame

    Oh dear

    If He doesn't exist, I suppose I'll have to disappear in a puff of smoke.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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!

  14. Ian Chard
    Joke

    Surely the title should have been

    Bear Grylls is an Alpha Fail

  15. NB
    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!

  16. Dave Ross
    Thumb Down

    I made my opinion known...

    Anyone wan to guess what I voted for?

  17. Piro Silver badge
    FAIL

    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

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    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! )

  19. Anonymous John

    God's way

    of punishing them for the DDOS attack on those Aussie atheists' sites.

  20. Paul Donnelly

    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.

  21. MinionZero
    Happy

    lol

    :)

    How long before they take it offline?

  22. Tom_

    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.

  23. ElFatbob

    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.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    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)

  25. Fractured Cell
    Megaphone

    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.

  26. James 5
    Alien

    Just added my No vote.

    Now, if they'd asked about ET !

  27. Graham Bartlett

    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.

  28. Paul 4
    Thumb Down

    Its a stupid poll

    It lets you vote more than once...

  29. Yorkshirepudding
    Grenade

    touched by his noodly appendages

    what sort of variable is possibly? bah!

  30. Hollerith 1

    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.

  31. David Hicks
    Happy

    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.

  32. Winkypop Silver badge
    FAIL

    The Intertubes do not lie

    Ergo: That god fella, he no exist.

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Troll

    /b/ prank ?

    Poll's closed, due to atheists.

  34. Graham Marsden
    FAIL

    "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..."

  35. Matt.Smart
    Thumb Up

    Love it!

    Go atheists! :D

  36. Skavenger

    Vote as many times as you like

    Just click refresh after you've voted!

  37. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    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?

  38. Michael O'Malley

    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.

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    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

  40. No, I will not fix your computer
    Happy

    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.

  41. Wibble
    Happy

    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.

  42. Captain Save-a-ho
    Coat

    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...

  43. Chronos
    Stop

    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.

  44. sandman

    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.

  45. jubtastic1
    FAIL

    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.

  46. Dom S
    FAIL

    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

  47. Ian Wilson

    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.

  48. Anonymous Coward
    Headmaster

    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.

  49. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    As they say...

    Vote early and vote often.

  50. Melvin Meatballs
    FAIL

    Standard advice to all...

    Don't ask a question unless you are prepared to get an answer you don't want to hear!

Page:

This topic is closed for new posts.