"Atheism is a discipline to me for diggin at truth, it is NOT a belief system. 'There are no gods' is at the root of every philosophy."

I would question whether atheism is a belief system or not. But a discipline? No. It's a position, not a discipline. I do, however agree that trying to explain something by invoking God and saying "God caused it" is a six-lane highway to total ignorance. It really explains nothing.

And as to your second sentence, that is also highly questionable. Many of the Greek philosophers often referred to "the gods" (some later Christian theologians translated Plato using "God" [singular, upper-case G] instead of "the gods" in the original, but that's spurious), and many later philosophers referred to God. I'm not saying that that is a good thing, however. In line with my contention that invoking God explains nothing, any philosopher who tries to base his philosophical system on God is building on a structure which may very well not be there at all.

From that, you might assume that I am an agnostic as opposed to a believer or a nonbeliever. The jury is still out on that. But if there is some kind of transcendent intelligence behind the universe, I'm sure that it bears no resemblance to the cranky, bearded old man wearing a bed sheet, living on Arcturus Twelve, logging all our sins, marking the fall of sparrows, and firing thunderbolts at people who piss him off that the less philosophically-oriented believers like the fundamentalists (of several religions) seem to believe in so avidly. Considering the immensity and complexity of the universe, if there is such an intelligence, it is truly beyond our comprehension, and most assuredly does not need or want to be worshipped, any more than a biologist needs or wants to be worshipped by the bacteria he or she is growing in a Petri dish.

To me, Christianity is—or should be, if one reads it properly (unfortunately, a rare occurrence)—something akin to an ethical system. The core readings in the Gospels, sayings ascribed to Jesus, outline principles for how people should treat each other. I've often linked to Matthew 25, verses 35 through 40 as that core. That, and the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Very good principles for human interaction to be found there. Someone said or wrote these things, and whether or not it was Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew himself, or some unknown copyist in a monastery somewhere makes no essential difference.

Don Firth