Atheist. But to give a little history, I was baptized and raised as a Roman Catholic, and had my First Communion, but was never confirmed. Then I switched to Protestantism for several years, becoming an evangelical/born again Christian but harboring more fundamentalist inclinations that were really equivalent to Old Testament Reconstructionism a la [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rousas_John_Rushdoony"]Rousas John Rushdoony[/ame]. Publicly, I was a friendly social conservative, doing nothing more malevolent than protesting at abortion clinics and writing letters to Senator Boxer opposing Gavin Newsom's gay marriage "stunt." Privately, I had an interest in the criminalization of homosexuality, fornication, and adultery, crimes that I favored the death penalty for. In the back of my mind, however, I always had a suspicion that God was nonexistent, a suspicion that I then attributed to the machinations of Satan, and pacified myself by thinking of Pascal's Wager (which I thought of independently) and the statistical improbability of human life forming without deliberate and conscious design, which I'd been led to believe was around 1 in 1,000,000,000...(23 more zeros or so). However, I was expelled from the parochial school I was attending (which was affiliated with my church) because of a dispute with a teacher (in addition to about twelve suspensions and numerous other detentions, lol) and bringing
The Da Vinci Code and
The Origin of Species to school, I distanced myself from my faith somewhat, the final nail in the coffin being when I brought more information about the theory of evolution to church as well as a Catholic Bible, which of course contained the Apocrypha. Then I started to get into textual criticism of the New Testament, and discovered the inauthenticity of several major passaged and books, and became a religious pluralist of sorts, then an agnostic theist, then a pure agnostic, and finally an agnostic atheist. It's been quite a ride.
Spiritual, not religious.
:2razz:
Oh, you mean a religion is based on imagination, unprovable yet illogical axioms, persistent insistence on devout application of faith to smooth over the illogical parts, and declamations of blasphemy and idolatry to all who stray from the official line that comes straight from the deity?
That certainly applies to Marx...
The idea that Marx represents the entirety of socialist thought itself reveals the nature of your ignorance of political economy, particularly since he primarily wrote on capitalism. That said, I see that you've ignored my offer to a True Debate about socialism. If my position is so ridiculously illogical, why the odd silence? :2wave: