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Lawsuit Claims NASA Specialist Was Fired Over Intelligent Design Belief
New submitter period3 writes "The latest mission of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is defending itself in a workplace lawsuit filed by a former computer specialist. The man claims he was demoted and then let go for promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone."
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Can't say I'm sympathetic. If his critical thinking skills, not to mention his social skills are so bad, then he has no business working for NASA, and show go and work for Ken Ham or something, where his abilities and skills will be better appreciated.
There is a not so fine line between espousing a belief and passing out DVDs to co-workers and trying to convert them. Sounds like disruptive behavior to me. I also would expect from the description that he was asked to stop, then warned before being let go.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
In other news people get fired for their sexuality.
And sexuality isn't even a believe. It is just sexuality.
I hope he wins. I'm not sure that my efforts to convert colleagues to satanism have been making a good impression at work and I could use the precedent.
Didn't Descartes claim he got three visions from angels which set him on his scientific path?
Molecules are too complex to be made by atoms alone. Amino acids are too complex to be made by molecules alone. DNA is too complex to be made by amino acids alone. Human beings are too complex to be made by DNA alone. The internet is too complex to be made by man alone.
A thought:
If life were to be too complex to arise by evolution, and needed an intelligent designer, then surely the intelligent designer would also be too complex to arise naturally.
Who or what created the creator?
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David Coppedge, who worked as a "team lead" on the Cassini mission exploring Saturn and its many moons, alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work. Coppedge lost his "team lead" title in 2009 and was let go last year after 15 years on the mission.
And...
Coppedge had a reputation around JPL as an evangelical Christian and other interactions with co-workers led some to label him as a Christian conservative, Becker said.
[he] says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a "Christmas party."
First, don't shove it in everyone's faces and it won't be an issue. Difficult for an evangelical, I know.
Second...
It looks like a pretty straightforward case. The mission that he was working on was winding down and he was laid off.
Good luck getting around that. Sounds kinda... normal and uninteresting.
Why not? Albert Einstein was an agnostic, and to the best of my knowledge never espoused any support for Intelligent Design.
The man claims he was demoted and then let go for promoting his views
Since one's beliefs on the origins of life have absolutely zero do do with the work of a "computer specialist," I'd hope he was fired if he was proselytizing at work.
There's no need for that hypothesis.
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."
-Albert Einstein
Oh that kidder. We all know he wasn't a fan of evidence or anything so banal as that.
We should design our spaceships and rovers intelligently.
Sure beats the alternative!
What if I don't believe in the metric system. The Earth is flat. The moon is made of cheese. Must NASA put up with my beliefs, even if I promote my beliefs, while still doing my job adequately?
From the TFA:
He [...] handed out DVDs on the idea [intelligent design] while at work
The question is whether the plaintiff was fired simply because he was wasting people's time and bothering them in ways that would have led him to being fired regardless of whether it was about religion or whether he was treated worse based on the religiosity of his beliefs.
The former.
Separation of church and state? NASA IS part of the government. Maybe the guy in charge was having a bad day? If I was the guy that got fired I would press charges.
Well, if believing in intelligent design is not enough to get you fired, believing that you were fired because you believe in intelligent design, and telling people that, is probably evidence of other factors that could get you fired from NASA.
Gently reply
There's a difference between firing someone for their religious beliefs and firing someone for promoting those beliefs at work, especially if the person is in some position of authority over those he's passing the DVDs out to. There's a trend lately with Christians complaining that their religious freedom is being infringed, when what's really happening is that they simply aren't being allowed to impose (to some degree or another) their religion on someone else. Whether it's a teacher lecturing to her students about her religious beliefs, an employer specifying which legal medical treatment an employee's health insurance covers, or a supervisor trying to persuade his team of his religious beliefs, those are all examples of religious "freedom" going far enough to step on others' right to believe differently. Like the old saying that "your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins", your right to proselytize ends at the office door.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Albert Einstein
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Insightful? Dude was a computer scientist, not a xenobiologist. Should they fire the rest of us for every tin foil consiracy theory we believe? ID is no less rational than aliens at Wright Pat, but neither should be fireable offenses.
So I'm a jackass. I'd say that anybody that believes in creationism or ID should be shot (assuming they've been given the opportunity to understand, you know, facts, and just didn't take it).
Toning that back a bit, I'd say he should be fired for believing it. If you want to be a secretary and believe in ID, you're still an idiot but it isn't direct evidence that you're incompetent, like it is for a scientist or engineer.
Now I know that the guy was a "computer specialist", so he could've perhaps gotten by. Some random techie fiddling with the computers doesn't need to "believe" in science (not that science requires belief).
But note the operative word that the summary tossed in - "promoting". That's what changes this from a "they fired an idiot, but his idiocy didn't affect his job necessarily" to "he's getting in the way of everybody's work". Anyone he was able to convince, they wouldn't want anyway - but you can be damned sure he was trying hard to convince people at NASA that science wasn't really that great.
It's like Microsoft firing a guy who goes around bothering the Windows folks and telling them they ought to use Macs. Regardless of your feelings on the matter, it's impossible to see that as anything other than irritating at best, and obstructive at worst.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
...alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work.
and
He did not go around evangelizing or proselytizing.
So which is it? The belief itself shouldn't matter, but the proselytizing at work does. And it sounds like he and his lawyer haven't decided what actually occurred yet.
"The man claims he was demoted and then let go for promoting his views on intelligent design,"
"alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work."
Notice that he doesn't claim he was fired for having the belief. He claims he was fired for promoting it. His version of 'promoting' might be everyone else's version of 'harassment'.
"In the lawsuit, Coppedge says he believes other things also led to his demotion, including his support for a state ballot measure that sought to define marriage as limited to heterosexual couples and his request to rename the annual holiday party a "Christmas party."" ... So it wasn't just ID. He also spouted hate and political correctness.
""The question is whether the plaintiff was fired simply because he was wasting people's time and bothering them in ways that would have led him to being fired regardless of whether it was about religion or whether he was treated worse based on the religiosity of his beliefs," said Volokh." ... And wasting people's time at work.
"He sued in April 2010 alleging religious discrimination, retaliation and harassment and amended his suit to include wrongful termination after losing his job last year."
And he was already suing before he was fired, so this is an on-going thing. I think with a lawsuit in progress, they'd have to be pretty ballsy to fire him over the thing he was suing about, unless they had really, really good reason for it. A court will have to make that determination, though, as we don't have all the evidence. What evidence I've seen isn't pointing in a direction he'd like, though.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
..it was because he's obviously a moron.
I know there's no point in rebutting you, you're either sincerely religious and therefore will brook no interference, or trolling and I'm wasting my time, but the idea of anything supernatural is scientifically nonexistent. It's definitional.
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does. It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
I don't believe Intelligent Design, but calling people who do 'stupid' or saying they 'reject the scientific method' is juvenile, and really serves the exact opposite of convincing the 'other side' that they're wrong...
belief in religion will be viewed as a mental disability.
Sounds to me like he was fired for being a jerk, and continued acting like a jerk after he was fired.
So let me get this straight...
An entity receiving government funds decided that someone who didn't share their core beliefs shouldn't work there anymore?
How is this different than Catholic Hospitals receiving government money and then deciding based on their beliefs how to run their business?
Personally neither should be done but this guy was pushing his beliefs onto his co-workers including giving people DVDs. And the project was significantly downsizing due to it being 'finished' etc. If you're the squeaky wheel, you'll get the grease[d exit] first...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Exactly. Pushing your religious beliefs at work is bad enough, but doing it as a manager is something else entirely. Sounds to me like the dude crossed several lines.
I've worked with a few oddballs, like a Young Earth'er who'd fill your ear with great flood stories (the Grand Canyon is proof positive of the great flood!), but they all knew what lines not to cross and I had no problem with them professionally. One is still a good friend. You can talk about this stuff at a peer level, outside of work within reason (i.e. respect folks desire to change the subject when they are clearly getting uncomfortable). You can't create a situation where employees can reasonably be afraid that their review/raise/promotion can affected by agreeing or disagreeing with them on decidedly non-work topics.
... and wouldn't stop when asked, I imagine colleagues would get pissed and find it a hard work environment to excel in.
I had a coworker became a born-again Christian. No one cared, until he tried to recruit us into a lunch-hour prayer group. When no one showed up, he decided to bring the prayer group to us, where ever we were. I guess he thought he was some sort of second-coming-of-Jesus prophet. That was freaking uncomfortable. He left shortly afterwards. I don't know if he was "moved along" or he felt sullied working with unbelievers.
People don't accept ID because it is rational and well-supported by scientific evidence. People accept ID because it abates their fears about their place in the universe, and because it is consistent with the stories they were told when they were impressionable children.
Rare indeed is a person who can be made, by purely rational means, to reject a belief system to which he has plenty of irrational attachments.
Posting challenges like yours are tantamount to mud wrestling with a pig (you get nowhere, and the pig enjoys it).
A creationist is a potential security risk.
It is only a small step for the Insane to become criminal Insane: Alcohol, family problems, money problems.
That is why they remove this kind of unstable people from Nuclear facilities or NASA as soon as they're identified.
And seeing how NASA is about science, which creationists hate most, this is clearly a win/win situation.
religion without science is blind
That would be your Intelligent Design right there. You may not realize this depending on where you get your science information but there is quite literally ZERO evidence in favor of ID. Not a little. Or some weak evidence that needs more study to flesh it out. ZERO. Not a little bit vs. evolution through natural selection's large piles. I mean zero. Nothing. Intelligent design is blind religion at it's finest.
If you've ever READ anything about this topic, he's actually correct scientifically. If you are unaware of Robert Spitzer, read some of his works, and then come back. I can't understand how this forum claims to be for rational people - who mostly rely on uninformed atheistic dogma for their beliefs rather than rational logical thought.
Whether or not this is justified probably depends on what he was doing.
One small company I used to work for had one annoying prat. who used to constantly send e-mails to the entire company promoting creationism... it was one mass-forward after another from some religious site he belong to. Stating how if you're a real Xian you wouldn't associate with non-Xians because they may make you doubt your faith... etc... How evolution is the devils idea, etc.
You know the usual "We Xians are better than everyone else" dribble.
That, to me was obnoxious. It didn't offend me- but it peeved me. Ironically, it was my religious co-workers who were the ones offended by what he kept sending out.
Eventually, HR blocked the ability to send mass-emails to the whole company to shut him up. Anywhere other than South Carolina he would probably have got in trouble for sending out his hate-propoganda.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"People have quoted me as saying all kinds of shit I never said." - Albert Einstein
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Tell him it was God's will that he was fired, and if he pursues the lawsuit he's doubting God's plan.
From the article:
He did not go around evangelizing or proselytizing. But if he found out that someone was a Christian he would say, 'Oh that's interesting, what denomination are you?'" Becker said....
"He's not apologizing for who he is. He's an evangelical Christian."
wat.
I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
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As usual with cases like this, we don't have all the facts. As a previous poster wrote, perhaps he was asked to stop and refused to and thus was let go (although the official from TFA the project was winding down and he was laid off along with some others. I am a Christian but I would never, and have never, gone around asking people with whom I work about their religious views. It's none of my business and inappropriate at the workplace. As to his belief in ID and his position, from the TFA he was not one of the scientists. His work was basically IT and not space science.
The guy was known to be proselytizing at work, going so far as to apparently hand out DVDs on the matter. That sort of thing is verboten in almost any workplace out there, for good reasons that have nothing to do with the content of the message.
That said, cue the morons who think that his beliefs alone should have gotten him fired, based on the ridiculous idea that because he doesn't follow a specific epistemology concerning matters unrelated to his chosen field, he does not think.
I guess they would never have hired Einstein
I'm sure that even a troll can see what a stupid comment that was. The decision would depend on suitability for the position for which he was applying, not (his) savantism.
Einstein had amazing intuition in certain areas, making him (on the whole) quite brilliant in thise areas but he was also sometimes wrong.
Also, like most so-called geniuses, it appears that he was actually a savant - brilliant at a very narrow range of things and totally inept in other things.
I would have hired him to research relativity, but I sure as hell wouldn't have hired him as a fashion or sartorial advisor.
Your statement/argument is utter nonsense.
Agreed. I'm pretty religious (Jewish), but I don't make it a habit to discuss my religion at work. If asked about a certain aspect of Judaism, I'll answer. If I need to take a day off due to a Jewish holiday, I'll talk with my boss about it. Otherwise, my religion and my work are two completely different things.
If one of my co-workers started telling giving me DVDs and pamphlets telling me that I needed to accept Jesus or fry in hell, I'd complain to HR and would expect that this employee would be warned to stop and fired if he/she didn't.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If you are actively promoting your belief at the job, and preventing other from working on their hours, yes, you should definitely be reprimanded and possibly let go. Whichever belief it is.
I agree. I've worked with a couple of people who believed more in their cause and its evangelism than doing their job. This sort of behavior isn't appropriate at work, especially in a manager position.
We are talking about creationist nonsense in 21st century via internet. That is so dope.
Next we will be planning witch burning via facebook.
Insightful? Dude was a computer scientist, not a xenobiologist
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that Dude was fired for being an idiot, not for his beliefs on biology.
Evolution requires life as a pre-requisite because it depends on reproduction. It cannot explain the origin of life.
the idea of GOD is not scientifically ridiculous
No, it's just irrelevant since it's non-testable, non-replicable, and non-falsifiable.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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I've always had Excellent karma on Slashdot for years until I made a post that the believe that evolution occurs is not in direct opposition to the belief that there is a Creator/God.
I was down-modded like crazy and people came out of the woodwork to make personal attacks.
My wife tells me of how she was harassed while working at a Jesuit university for believing in God, because she was in a lab. Fellow Jesuit employees spoke of how only absolute idiots would believe in God, and how it is an absolute accepted fact amongst intellectuals that God cannot exist.
I still maintain that if it is a great offense to believe in the existence of God (which cannot be tested), then it is equally a great offense to believe definitely in the inverse of something that cannot be tested.
I think most intellectuals who believe in God hide their beliefs out of fear and shame that they will be judged and ostracized for that belief. I would assume that intellectuals would easily spot the logical fallacy that judging a belief solely on the merits of the stupidest people who believe in it doesn't hold water.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/guilt-by-association.html
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
That does not mean what you think it means: Science is constantly proving religion wrong and it gives science an underlying purpose to keep moving forward with its work in every category while religion is constantly revising its interpretations of an apparently flawless book. While at the same time religion needs science because it does actually explain how some of the "miracles" could have occurred if the people in the stories were the thinking kind of people who could predict wind patterns and sun locations. In short, they "need" each other
Einstein was by no means a religious person - in fact, the great physicist saw religion as no more than a "childish superstition". "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this".
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
You cannot convince someone who has faith that they are wrong. This is because the nature of the expected proof is problematic: faith is a personal experience, whereas scientific proof is build on repeated experiments illuminated by predictive models.
The only reason the proponents of ID are mocked and belittled is to edify the onlookers. Because, although you cannot show faith is wrong, the risk of ridicule is a potent counterpoison.
Also, it is in fact only possible to believe that both ID and evolution are simultaneously true is you do not understand evolution. Or presumably ID.
Don't you mean stupid design? Our pleasure unit is mixed with our waste disposal unit.
I do wonder if this is a setup to bring the issue to higher courts. His agenda might be to get ID more out into the open at the workplace. Microsoft will need to prove that the ID itself is not the reason he was fired.
Actually ID is more insidious than even that. The core argument is so vacuous and devoid of anything approaching a prediction or explanation that it can't even really be disproven. Yes, guys like Behe and Dembski will come up with some example, like say, the vertebrate immune system, but really, they're not in fact invoking any particular of aspect of ID to make the claim, they're just saying "ooh, it's too complex!". Worst of all is Behe, who is a molecular biologist, so should know the literature enough to know there are decades worth of studies showing how things like "irreducible complexity" can in fact evolve, and that the very examples he so often invokes were long before his time demonstrated to be evidence FOR biological evolution.
Of course the leaders of the ID movement are a very shifty lot. If they're talking to a crowd of people who tend towards accepting evolution, ID is all about that missing link needed to create life from non-life. If they're giving a speech in a church basement, they basically turn into all-out Creationists.
But I remember many years ago someone on talk,origins summed up ID best when he said ID says nothing more than "somehow something somewhere is wrong with evolution." That's about as much meat as you'll ever got on the beast. It's nothing more than an appeal to incredulity, built up with lots of pseudo-scientific (in particular irreducible complexity) and pseudo-mathematical (Dembski's information filter) fluff. You'll get more content from a 30 second detergent advertisement.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unless you are a politician or clergy. Otherwise you can expect to alienate the majority of your co-workers.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
This exactly. Seeing as how Mt. St. Helens is practically a mini model of the Grand Canyon and was formed in 3 days over the span of a year and a half certainly raises some interesting questions, questions that are fun to talk about. But if it's not fun for the person you're talking with, stop talking about it.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
bull. shit.
ID is nothing more than a rephrasing of 'God is real' without actually saying that.
It's wishfullfillment, nothing more.
Any of which shouldn't get you fired btw. Imposing your (misguided) beliefs upon others in your workspace is.
Most likely he was fired because he sued the company after being demoted. Not a nice thing from NASA, but he should have seen it coming.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
This is a bit like saying Religion is more about how you conduct yourself than about judging other people or justifying wars. Sure, theoretically that could be true, but it's not actually true. ID proponents in practice focus more on casting FUD against science than they do working scientific findings into a belief system.
Put another way, it's fine to say "Evolution is the how, my religion is they why" but that's not what they're doing. What they're actually doing is saying "Science is wrong because my holy book says so!" Religious people who don't reject science, whose understanding of evolutionary theory doesn't contradict their beliefs about higher powers, they don't call themselves "intelligent design."
From the article;
"Caltech lawyers contend Coppedge was one of two Cassini technicians and among 246 JPL employees let go last year due to planned budget cuts."
The interesting thing is he is pretty much admitting that he shoved his views in others faces, otherwise why would it be a reason to let him go?
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
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The only reason the proponents of ID are mocked and belittled is to edify the onlookers
And *MY* point is that by mocking and belittling, all you're proving to the onlookers is that your side are a bunch of dicks.
Remain calm, civil, and courteous. To do otherwise is to sabotage your own goals.
"promoting his views on intelligent design, "
He's allowed to be beleive what he wants, but when he started preaching in the workplace...............
And most likely that's what happened. People began complaining to HR about the guy handing out DVDs and harassing them on Intelligent Design. At some point the workplace situation will become untenable, and the employer's job is to make sure that does not happen.
If you want to hang out on the street outside before and after work handing out DVDs, well, that's your right, but when you walk into the building, you're an employee, and you don't proselytize.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's Sir Isaac Newton.
And he lived nearly 300 years ago. He probably thought you could turn lead into gold with the proper application of liquefied horse dung, too.
All of which is beside the point. The idea of a magician creating the universe is, in all ways, ridiculous.
Considering Obama's call for NASA to reach out to the Muslim world, I wonder if NASA would have fired him if his name happened to be Mohammed.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/07/white-house-nasa-defend-comments-about-nasa-outreach-to-muslim-world-criticized-by-conservatives/
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I recall a guy who plastered his whole office with pictures of jesus, (Every available spot), kept asking people to except jesus, and was just an all-around jerk. When he was finally asked to "tone it down" he through a giant fit about being persecuted.
You know what??? Stop persecuting me, and Science with your Sh*t! I don't come to your church and preach to you about your lack of critical thinking skills, don't come to my place of business and try and sell my your insanity.
Understand Tolerance goes BOTH WAYS.
In what way does a computer specialist's job rely on the scientific method? Heck, even some great scientists have problems understanding the scientific method. Stephen Hawking is probably one of the greatest scientists alive, but he still writes nonsense about the scientific method like ""Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others." (For the uninitiated, the approach put forward by Karl Popper was directly opposed to positivism.) If Hawking can achieve what he's achieved without properly understanding the scientific method, what does a computer team lead at NASA need it for? Maybe the people who interpret the results of the missions need it, but if you'll pardon the apparent oxymoron, rocket science isn't exactly Rocket Science.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"...he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work. "
Sorry David that's proselytizing. Not too mention harassing your fellow co workers. This behavior would not be tolerated in the private sector.
If he was preaching his religious beliefs to his co-workers, and they objected, that sounds like a good reason to start discipline and heading towards dismissal.
They didn't fire him for his tin foil hat. They fired him because of complaints lodged by his fellow workers about harassment. You hire people to do a job, not to preach about their religious views and generally waste others time with your vapid fairy tales.
.....really? so the answers to why and how we are here are more explained in the bible than in science? "Because god said so" is EXPLAINING?
Not really; peer pressure is a real force to be reckoned with in any community. Ridicule is an easy method of applying peer pressure, and (generally) the ridicule is pointing out that the ID believers are the bunch of dicks, not the scientists.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Really? How do you square that with:
Being religious does not automatically mean you reject the scientific method in it's entirety, just certain conclusions that method has reached in some areas of study, which is fine because you have scientists doing that all the time.
This guy was working on the Cassini mission, so what did his beliefs about something he wasn't investigating have to do with his work?
He wasn't let go because because of his beliefs, but because "he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work". Pushing your religion at work can put coworkers in an uncomfortable position. Being given a DVD would make me feel strange. Enough complaints can warrant getting fired.
The important part is that he can believe whatever he wants, he just can't push it on coworkers an make them feel uncomfortable.
If you say something preposterous, expect people to mock you. If you say Obama is a secret Muslim, or not a US citizen, your ideas should be mocked!
If you think the Earth is flat, or 6000 years old, your ideas should be mocked!
In general, if you do/say something ridiculous, it should be mocked. Because this is how you'll know how absurd that thing is. And of, course, it depends on the circumstances. Mocking a child for making a mistake at school is cruel. Mocking an adult who should know better is a public service. It is somehow deemed acceptable to be ignorant, and have opinions. Because all opinions should be respected.
Fuck that.
Ignorance is not a valid point of view, and never was. Your wrong and silly ideas (as opposed to you) should be mocked.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does. It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
The trouble is that the "other side" doesn't see it that way. They believe that the book of Genesis is a historical document and anything that contradicts it is wrong. They're attitude is "who knows" - science can't disprove it (I know, I know!) or, here's the best I've heard from an A&M trained engineer no less: "That theory is based upon their current knowledge and available data. Data may show up that changes everything!"
Yeah, a little knowledge .... yadda yadda yadda ...
Oh! What's my "insider" view of Fundy Christians? They're my family.
It amazes me that such intelligent people will refuse to accept facts. And I have to wonder about myself. Am I that stupid too?
With my militant (fundy) atheism, am I blinding myself to something more?
Carl Sagan once wrote, "It's important to have an open mind but not so open that your brains fall out."
Yeah, great. When your brains are on the floor, it's too late.
The article says he was laid off because the project was winding down.
Though if they chose him among the first, I wouldn't be surprised if it was because he was, "that annoying asshat that constantly aggravates all of his coworkers."
It sounds like he was finally fired for not being able to take a hint after being demoted for the above activities.
Definitely not the sort of person you want to spending tax dollars on at NASA.
No sig today...
The two aren't incompatible....
Let there be light - big bang
Separated the heavens and the earth - universal expansion after big bang
Created the animals of the field and birds of the skies - assisted/guided evolution
Created man in god's own image - man evolved as hermaphrodite, mostly carbon (dust/earth), later split into 2 genders when small leg of dna (rib) pulled from 2nd chromosome to make one XY, and the other XX.
I could go on and on... The early histories/stories are for a simpler society without concepts or clues of science.
It might be possible to believe both at the same time, but it's absurd to do so...
On one side, evolution, you have natural selection leading to the selection of genetic mutations. It's verifiable, testable and the theory fits the available evidence.
On the other side, ID, you have non-natural selection. You have a designer that creates "changes". It is not verifiable, testable, and stands in the face of available evidence.
It is not fair to say ID sits in the realm of abiogenesis. It doesn't. It sits firmly in the realm of evolution. And frankly, it is completely unscientific. ID has relied on psuedo-science like Irreducible Complexity to try and look legit. But it sounds "scientific" and so is peddled to the layman to get around the problem that ID does not fit the evidence. ID is nothing but an attempt by certain religious zealots to find a sell-able solution to the phylogenetic tree that *requires* a creator.
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Actually, the real beef here is promoting personal beliefs in the workplace. It would be like pushing a religion on others where you work. Inappropriate. You as an American citizen are allowed to believe whatever you want, but you are not allowed to impress those beliefs on others in the workplace. I have known several people who have been reprimanded and let go from the place I worked for 11 years due to trying to openly promote Christianity in the office. In this case I would have to imagine it was something similar and the suit has little chance of success, but will generate a ton of political fodder for the coming months. [sigh]
I don't think it was firing him for believing in a dead carpenter on a stick.
I think it was firing him for handing out religious literature at work and demanding his coworkers and subordinates read it.
Someone was nice and let him ride out the project before they let whoever couldn't be easily reassigned go; instead of seeing it as a favor to him, he thinks his being let go was "discrimination."
This guy was not fired for his beliefs. He was demoted and later fired, because he was a "team lead" and proselytized to his subordinates while on the clock as a government employee. This is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. His co-workers complained he was harassing them, it was investigated, and her received a written warning. He persisted and was demoted. Duh! Failure to Acquire Clue often has negative career consequences. He was terminated along with 245 others due to budget cuts. Again, Duh!. Negative performance reviews will put you onto the redundancy list. The bottom line though, is that when you are a government employee, you don't get to promote religion at work. Period.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Should they fire the rest of us for every tin foil consiracy theory we believe?
If you announce it clearly, yes. You should also lose all social benefits and be shunned from your circle of (rational) acquaintances and relatives. We, as a species, seriously need to weed out the nutjobs.
To be fair, calling bible stories "honourable" might indicate he never read it....
Under normal circumstances, sure, the guy has a right to believe and say what he wants. But if your job depends upon understanding how science works, and you're publicly making an ass of the organization that employs you, you kind of have it coming.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
You do understand that none of your attempts to show Genesis as an allegorical explanation of Big Bang cosmology actually makes sense, right?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Being disruptive is certainly worthy of being fired, and he was doing that, as has been stated ad-nausium here.
Also, as a computer scientist, he may very likely have worked with xenobiology stuff, particularly in SETI, so, yeah, it could also affect his work performance.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does. It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
No, ID answers nothing, At best It dresses up an opinion to make it look like a reasonable emperical observation. Yes, you can believe in both, but ID adds unusable baggage to the questions it attempts to address. There is a reason philospophy and hard science are usually separate. ID is attempt to not only bridge the science/philo gap, which has been done much more elagantly by others (see Alan Watts & Carl Sagan), but impose a completely un-empirical & subjective notion into the science side. Its a group of people playing dress up (as scientists) and going "see, we can do science too". But if you're going to attempt to answer some hard questions abot the universe you don't do it by burning some insense and appealing to some sky ghost to help you feel batter about your place in the universe.
...calling people who do 'stupid' or saying they 'reject the scientific method'
Ok, but if they continue to use useless or unsound scientific methods to put forward fanciful notions about theory that many serious researchers are spending a considerable amount of their lives trying to unravel don't expect those nutbags to command a lot of respect.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Insightful? Dude was a computer scientist, not a xenobiologist. Should they fire the rest of us for every tin foil consiracy theory we believe? ID is no less rational than aliens at Wright Pat, but neither should be fireable offenses.
Again, you are allowed to believe whatever you want, but you are not allowed to promote personal beliefs (in anything) in the workplace. Inappropriate. Pretty much everywhere in the U.S.
We can observe the results of actual evolution occurring in the real world, with species drift and controlled experimentation (the creation of Dwarf Wheat through controlled plant breeding for chosen characteristics being a key example).
We can't observe the magical-thinking existence of "cures" based on someone praying to a dead carpenter on a stick.
Get the picture?
"It's part of a pattern. There is basically a war on anyone who dissents from Darwin and we've seen that for several years," said John West, associate director of Center for Science and Culture at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute."
--
WRONG. It's a war on anyone who crams their beliefs down others throats. It's a war on those who don't respect that other people MIGHT have a different opinion and not want to discuss such subjects for fear of oh, say LAWSUITS?!! i.e. leave it at home.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The story says that he claims he was let got "for promoting" that belief. Yea, it is bad enough that someone has that poor of a scientific understanding, but is is far worse if he (as implied) was wasting any of the time he was being paid for to promote his superstitions. One can at least try to argue that someone should have a right to their silly religious beliefs, but they certainly don't have the right to be paid by NASA to promote that foolishness to others.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"In short, they "need" each other"
that is exactly what i think it means.
Thank you.
You are my hero.
NASA isn't just about flying rockets into space. If you're trying to find other planets which could harbor life you can't leave evolution out of the equasion.
---
"You cannot convince someone who has faith that they are wrong."
A lot of people on both sides would agree with that comment.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
He was fired because he didn't know when to shut up. Only a religious zealot would be fool enough to try and sell intelligent design in a room full of rocket scientists.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
At first, I misinterpreted the title as "intelligent (design belief)," rather than "(intelligent design) belief." So I was thinking someone got fired over a design that they were responsible for, because of a design philosophy that was good engineering practice or otherwise common sense. THAT would have made sense for NASA. Now I am confused...
The dude was pushing his BS on unwilling subordinates and they (rightfully) complained. Then he was demoted. Then, when layoff came, he looked like a weak performer due to his weak performance and made the cut list.
Good riddance to him. He's was working in a scientific institution pushing anti-scientific snake oil and I can't imagine that did good things for workplace morale.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
He probably thought you could turn lead into gold with the proper application of liquefied horse dung, too.
Well, if by "liquefied horse dung" you mean "hydrogen atoms produced from horse dung by chemical breakdown, then flung at incredible speeds through a cyclotron towards a small quantity of lead", you might get a little bit of gold. Maybe. ;)
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Indeed... really the only way he would have a case in the first place is if Intelligent Design is admittedly religious belief. I know that the Dover School trial established that it was, but ID proponents keep trying to argue that it has nothing to do with religion, in an effort to get it into the schools.
So, really, creationists are stuck between a rock in a hard place. Either it's not religious so it can get into schools, or it is religious to get protected belief status. (You cannot be fired for being Christian, or expressing belief in Christian dogma. You can be fired for believing that the Loch Ness Monster actually exists.)
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I'd say that any diagnostic and troubleshooting is going to use the scientific method.
Based on the data, you formulate a hypothesis as to the underlying cause, and then attempt to remediate it. Then you determine if your hypothesis was correct, and you're either done, or you need to keep looking for another plausible hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but anybody who has to work with reality and arrive at logical conclusions based on reality is going to use the scientific method in some way or another. Otherwise you'd be doing things at random.
If your sysadmin is pulling out the ouija board or calling the psychic hotline to find out what's wrong with the server, get a new sysadmin.
And, slightly more on topic, if a co-worker started handing me DVDs on intelligent design, I'd be forced to tell him to keep his crap to himself -- same as if you handed me pamphlets for your church; I'm not interested, please go away or I shall have to talk to HR.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I had someone like this guy at my previous job. When he started preaching it was impossible to get rid of him. I installed a fake call application, but even that didn't always work.
Well, at least now everyone knows that this guy is not only a nuisance to others, but also a litigious bastard.
I hope he loses quickly and no one ever hires him again.
The Obama situation wasn't being too quick to pull the trigger, the right wing hate machine had already latched onto the short sound clip. Similar thing happened to ACORN -- the organization did nothing wrong, but was destroyed (in that case) by selectively edited interviews with low-level members. By the time the GAO report clearing the organization of any wrongdoing was released, ACORN was already defunded.
It's terrifying how easy character assassination is.
Oh good. Shit, I thought someone might actually QUESTION modern Science!
No, they're questioning intelligent design, which has many more fundamental flaws in it than "lightning striking rocks". In my opinion if you can accept an entity that no one has ever seen or heard except by third party reports is behind EVERYTHING that happens in the universe AND still has time to stay hidden, 'lightning hitting rocks is just as acceptable.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
There is no excuse for discussing religion in a work place. Its a work place, not a church. They dont pay you to speculate on the existance of god. They pay you to job and if your not, then you get the axx. Personally i find that type of speech offensive. In my opinion there is no difference between someone trying to force religion on coworks thern there is for sexual hrassament. Both are deplorable crimes. The deserved to get fired.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
1. If Intelligent Design does not fit under the definition of "science", then it is obviously time to expand the definition. -- This seems to be the result of ignorance and the fact that both science and religeon use the same words for subtly different purposes. The first example that comes to mind is the word "evidence", which has a very scrict definition under the scientific method. Religeous folks hear that science requires evidence, and become frustrated when their "evidences" for the existence of God are brushed off as incomplete or incorrect. We can probably blame a poor education system for this misunderstanding, though the condition does seem to be self-reinforcing at this point. Not good.
2. The one sister I have who actually has a decent understanding of the scientific method thinks that perhaps I.D. should not be tought in science classes (Thank God!!), but believes that the recent push by religeous folks to influence scientific discourse is the natural reaction to the "war on faith" that religeous leaders have been talking about for as long as there have been religeous leaders. If us un-enlightened would only see the light and conform to their supersticious beliefs, this entire dispute would go away. -- This is the more troubling problem, because the solution requires that we train people to think more critically, both about scientific and spiritual issues. There is room for God and science to co-exist, but very little room for the litteral interpretation of scriptures or the blind acceptance of religeous dogma when one learns to think critically. Unfortunately, I don't think people are generally smart enough to make this leap. Religeon is to comfortable, and offers easy answers to the complex questions that life presents.
Hitchens was right, religeon poisons everything.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
If a higher power created life, then that higher power isn't what was created, and therefore cannot be alive in the sense of this created life.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'm a creationist and a Christian and I agree. At work, I do not hide my beliefs. Heck, I have a framed image of a C.S. Lewis quote on my desk. Sometime I come to work wearing a shirt that says "Prays well with others" and has a quote from James on it. And if someone wants to engage me in a conversation on philosophy or religion, I'm game. But I don't go around passing DVDs and trying to convert my non-believing coworkers to believe in creationism. It's about the same as me trying to convince them that baptism by immersion is the true baptism. It's nonsensical to do. Now with my Christian friends, I would engage in deeper conversations about the various beliefs of Christianity, but that's a different story.
Here's the deal, as Christians, we should be trying to spread the Good News. That is, that we don't have to pay for our transgressions because they were paid for by God Himself. And we shouldn't do this by being disruptive, but through our works. At our jobs, we should strive to do our best. I should strive to be the best programmer I can be. I should let my actions be proof of my faith. Then my faith has merit.
"alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work."
Mod parent +1 THE MAN
This argument, which you got from the "New Atheists" and specifically Dawkins, is just awful philosophy and theology.
If you want to read a complete take down of this, read Alvin Plantinga: Here there is much to say, but I'll say only a bit of it. First, suppose we land on an alien planet orbiting a distant star and discover machine-like objects that look and work just like tractors; our leader says "there must be intelligent beings on this planet who built those tractors." A first-year philosophy student on our expedition objects: "Hey, hold on a minute! You have explained nothing at all! Any intelligent life that designed those tractors would have to be at least as complex as they are." No doubt we'd tell him that a little learning is a dangerous thing and advise him to take the next rocket ship home and enroll in another philosophy course or two. For of course it is perfectly sensible, in that context, to explain the existence of those tractors in terms of intelligent life, even though (as we can concede for the moment) that intelligent life would have to be at least as complex as the tractors. The point is we aren't trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity, and we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general; we are only trying to explain one particular manifestation of it (those tractors). And (unless you are trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity) it is perfectly proper to explain one manifestation of organized complexity in terms of another. Similarly, in invoking God as the original creator of life, we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only a particular kind of it, i.e., terrestrial life. So even if (contrary to fact, as I see it) God himself displays organized complexity, we would be perfectly sensible in explaining the existence of terrestrial life in terms of divine activity.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Grr... Isn't it strange that those on the right are the ones claiming discrimination when they're pushing an inherently discriminatory position? It's like some people cannot understand what it means to disagree but to get along on a professional level. I'm a supervisor sub-contracted to a local bible college, and every single day all I hear is how the "gay agenda is taking over the world" or what, and it disgusts me. I'm trans and in my early 20s, and yet I cannot even hint a word about myself for fear of being fired on the spot. But everyone around me complains about how society is discriminatory and wont allow the "Christian" viewpoint within the workplace. Dear Christians: How about you deal with your discriminatory policies before you go claiming that everyone else is discriminating against you...
Also for being enough of a dumbass to try and convert people in a place which mostly hires scientists. Not the brightest bulb on the tree, methinks.
No sig today...
Indeed, why was he harassing his coworkers with something that had nothing to do with their work?
You're confusing Evolution with abiogenesis. A common misunderstanding, but to put it simply (i.e. Without using big words) you're confusing the origin of species with the origin of life. Species is about divergence, why we get so many different things from a common ancestor. Evolution has been proven in the lab numerous times using bacteria cultures, as they reproduce quickly enough to see the divergence within our lifetimes.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I have known some people who are regarded, and rightly so, as leaders in their profession who when approached about religion/politics become raving lunatics. Especially if they think you have an opposing belief. I have chosen to believe there is in fact an omnipotent/omniscient/omnipresent being who created everything and loves everybody equally despite the stupid things we do. I don't care what anybody else thinks because I made this choice for me. I also don't think it is up to me to get everybody to choose the same thing. Unfortunately there is a large contingent of people who believe they are in fact tasked with beating Jesus into everybody else. IMHO Jesus does not approve of their tactics any more than he does of Iran sentencing a Christian man to death...for being a Christian. As to ID IMNSHO it is an attempt to explain something God told us not to try and understand in the first place. If you choose to believe in God then you do so on FAITH!!! You do not get explanations if you are believing on faith. To try and explain what you say you believe on faith is to admit you do not in fact believe so much as you want it to be true but you need more proof.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Except one side has faith, and the other accepts logic and evidence. If tomorrow through a series of discoveries the scientific consensus became that we were indeed designed (who knows, maybe by aliens) I would accept that we were designed.
The essential difference is this: personal experience is worth nothing to a rational mind. Even if you trust your senses, building a theory which is founded purely on personal belief is impossible. How would you express it? Can you make predictions from it? Can you disprove it?
If you say something preposterous, expect people to mock you. If you say Obama is a secret Muslim, or not a US citizen, your ideas should be mocked!
If you think the Earth is flat, or 6000 years old, your ideas should be mocked!
In general, if you do/say something ridiculous, it should be mocked. Because this is how you'll know how absurd that thing is. And of, course, it depends on the circumstances. Mocking a child for making a mistake at school is cruel. Mocking an adult who should know better is a public service. It is somehow deemed acceptable to be ignorant, and have opinions. Because all opinions should be respected.
Fuck that.
Ignorance is not a valid point of view, and never was. Your wrong and silly ideas (as opposed to you) should be mocked.
If you think that the Indian people can rule themselves, or that blacks deserve equal rights, or that the East Germans deserved freedom to visit family on the other side of the world...
What do those things in common? They had people making rational, coherent arguments as to why they were true, they didn't act like dicks saying that the people who didn't think so were morons.
STOP. BEING. DICKS.
If you note I quoted the word "need". This is because science really does not need religion at all, we are all curious enough to want to know the answers to fundamental questions. Religion was our first approximation to all the important questions, like cosmology, astronomy, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be quite wrong. We now know much better how life evolves, how solar systems and planets form, we now know how even universe can come from nothing. Even philosophy really has nothing useful to say about the real world we live in let alone religion. Religion on the other hand just wishes science would go away. The only thing it has going for it is ignorance.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I wonder...If scientist ever figure out how to create life, will it be considered Intelligent Design?
Einstein believed in God as a concept, more along the lines of Taoism or pantheism (although he denied being either of these). He repeatedly denied and entirely derided the idea of a personal God that most mainstream monotheistic religions espouse, calling it "naive" and "childish".
This is basically what agnosticism is -- belief that there may or may not be a god, but if there is, it is unknowable to creation. This is the opposite view of monotheistic religions, which states that God is a divine person and can be understood, and has been revealed to creation via $our_holy_book.
If you'd bothered to RTFL from the parent post, you'd have also seen this Einstein quote:
"If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
The whole "Intelligent Design" thing is just Christianity in disguise. Please don't pretend it's anything else.
No sig today...
I think the grandparent post is confusing "deism" with "agnosticism".
Einstein was not a Christian, and as such did not believe in the "God", but he did believe in a god.
The problem comes in that Christians have kind of co-opted the word "god" to mean their god. Making it difficult for deists to actually express a belief in an unfalsifiable impersonal deity, without Christians assume that they're talking about the same god. (Which they're not.) In the formation of the country, they took to referring to this impersonal deity with oblique terms like "Creator". (After all, this was well before the origin of species, at the time the best most learned belief of the origin of the species was special creation.)
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Content has been a license AND a product for ages, depending on what its maker needed it to be, why shouldn't it work with another religion?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except Shirley Sherrod has been working for the Departmenf of Agriculture for decades, has a long track record of excellent service, and was relaying a story of how she did something positive at a NAACP event on her own time. Cappedge was fired for actually being a disruptive and problematic employee.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
That does not mean what you think it means: Science is constantly proving religion wrong
Science has proved some religious claims wrong, yes. But not "religion" -- it's a much more diverse category than most slashdotters seem to realise, and most of the polemic against it fails to define its terms (or, in the case of Dawkins, defines its terms and then ignores those definitions).
and it gives science an underlying purpose to keep moving forward with its work in every category while religion is constantly revising its interpretations of an apparently flawless book.
What flawless book is that, that all religion acknowledges?
Einstein was by no means a religious person - in fact, the great physicist saw religion as no more than a "childish superstition".
In your sense of "religious". As religion was understood by Schliermacher he was intensely religious.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
We don't expect to see a pile of bricks self-assemble themselves into a wall and yet the fundamental idea of 'Non-intelligent Design' is that amino acids and proteins self-assembled themselves into something unbelievably more complex...a functioning biological cell. The key concept behind 'Intelligent Design' is that someone or something had to create a plan and assemble the first few units which then began self-replicating and evolving based on the conditions they were living in. Call the creator 'God' or call it 'Extra-terrestrial Designer/Builder' but isn't that at the very least a viable explanation for the origins of life on Earth? Why should the theory of biological self-assembly be the only explanation considered scientifically viable? Recent self-assembly theories have attempted (desperately) to identify certain rock structures surrounding deep ocean thermal vents as a possible substrate for self-assembly but any close examination of that mechanism makes it appear as so much scientific hand-waving due to problems with sequence, complexity, protein chirality, length of time needed, etc. making the Intelligent Design theory appear to be well-substantiated in comparison. Human arrogance appears to exclude any extra-terrestrial origin based on nothing but 'We don't need no stinkin' outsider doing creation.'
Science is constantly proving religion wrong
[citation needed]
If you are actively promoting your belief at the job, and preventing other from working on their hours, yes, you should definitely be reprimanded and possibly let go. Whichever belief it is.
I agree wholeheartely, especially if your beliefs include annoying people at work about how running a race cures various diseases (as if the money saved not administering the race wouldn't also be helpful, yet only serves to finance their running hobby). Of course other beliefs are probably equally disturbing or non-productive such as the belief that somehow helping your son or daughter sell Girl Scout cookies, or Boy Scout popcorn at work helps your child learn the lesson to value hard work and achievment; or maybe the belief that selling candy to raise money for class trip somehow benefits everyone (yes, we can all use more calories, perhaps the insurance underwriters at work should be alerted to this to see what their opinion is on that). Another big one is the lottery number pool promoting the false belief in innumeracy, or the various sports betting pools that promote the belief that gambling is a harmless addiction for all...
Unfortunatly, let's face it: work isn't a sanctuary and you have to tolerate some amount of religious arguments for other folks. For example, at my office, one the biggest bigots of all is an opensource advocate. He tends to be highly disruptive at work and often emails all sorts of propaganda around and CC on almost every thread about his beliefs and how we should support the open source community more. Frankly, all that proselytizing sometimes prevents others from working their hours, and perhaps he should be reprimanded and possibly let go...
I find it funny when people quote Einstein as if those statements indicated he believed in the quoter's God. Neither of those statements really have anything to do with intelligent design. Einstein also said this:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
True -- Einstein was never really noted for his computer programming skills.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Mt. St. Helens is practically a mini model of the Grand Canyon
I know I'm going to regret this. But can you explain this in short words?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
And twice so in a GOVERNMENT agency.
They would get on very thin ice if they did NOT fire him for spreading his faith in a government facility.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You can be fired for believing the Loch Ness Monster exists? That's news to me.
This guy can believe all of the cockamamee(sp?) ideas he wants to, and shouldn't be fired for it. In America, we're pretty much allowed to believe whatever we want, and the only employers that are allowed to discriminate based upon beliefs are religious institutions.
However, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. He must show that his beliefs rather than his actions were the reason for his demotion and subsequent firing. It will be hard to prove that about the firing, seeing as how they were laying off a lot of guys at the same time. He can believe in the Loch Ness Monster if he wants to, but if he wastes taxpayer resources expounding upon that belief, then he should be first on the chopping block.
You can't create a situation where employees can reasonably be afraid that their review/raise/promotion can affected by agreeing or disagreeing with them on decidedly non-work topics.
This. I had a mentor at one of my work places, and he kind of told me straight to my face that he thought I was living in sin. One of those homophobic people, who is all, "oh, you're GAY... well, that changes everything." It's no wonder that other LGBT people on my team were afraid and discouraged from coming out at work...
ID is no less rational than aliens at Wright Pat, but neither should be fireable offenses.
If the believer's behavior is effecting his performance or the productivity of others it sure as hell should be a termination level offense. Assuming they asked the offending party to correct their behavior first.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
The NASA administrators stated his problem wasn't "believing" in ID, but refusing to stop proselytizing his coworkers. Since this is an objective claim that, if true, can be corroborated by witnesses, it's fairly likely.
It turns out that personal belief systems do not entitle you to bother your colleagues with stuff that has nothing to do with work, and when they ask you to please tone it down and do your bloody job, that's not discrimination.
It's not about beliefs being right, unfalsifiable, or provably wrong. Wherever I end up working, I would make no secret of my atheism, and be glad to discuss it at lunch if someone brings it up in a personal conversation. I would not treat my workplace as a personal ministry to preach at.
Actually, ID probably is quite a bit more irrational that aliens at Wright Pat. At least in the case of the aliens, we have a number of eye-witnesses who claim to have seen the aliens or to have seen artifacts or to have seen technology they could not explain in terms of our current technology. That is the same type of proof we would rely on in criminal prosecutions. I don't know of any ID proponents who claim to have eye-witness knowledge of the creation of anything.
Can you provide even one specific one of those "all ways" in which it is "ridiculous"?
Because, seems two can play the "bare assertion" game.
It is ridiculous in no way whatsoever.
Even granting your blatantly intellectually-dishonest "consider my term 'magician' the same for the purpose of conceptual equivalence, and different for the purposes of rhetorical effect, simultaneously" recasting from standard descriptive term and -actual- conceptual content of "God".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"Religion on the other hand just wishes science would go away. The only thing it has going for it is ignorance."
but this is not the case for the vast majority of religious people. it would be more accurate to say
"Liberals on the other hand just wish religion would go away. The only thing liberals have going for them is their prejudice of those who don't believe what they do."
but then, back in the 60's and 70's being a liberal meant respecting other peoples views.
In case anyone cares, her name was Shirly Sherrod.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Shirley_Sherrod
Read up on the peppered moth; the scientific method has been applied to natural selection, and the result was that natural selection produced the same result as predicted.
As for questioning modern science, questions are what it's all about, not just blindly believing what a book (Torah, Bible, Koran, Mahabharata and Ramayana, Tripitaka, etc.) say.
As for "intelligent design", if God created parasites, then he's a twisted, sick, evil bastard.
We also can't prove the non-existence of such cures.
Hell even Einstein believed in it.
No he didn't. He used the word "God" a lot but he really meant "Nature".
The quote should really be: 'Nature does not play dice'.
No sig today...
Incorrect. You *are* allowed to do such almost everywhere in the US, exceptions being positions where it might be construed as official government policy. Some bosses might have special rules about it, but that's their business. Usually, the line one has to cross to be in trouble is one of harassment: repeatedly proselytizing after people have said "no" (specific to Christanity, Jesus told his followers not to be this kind of $@& when he sent them out two-by-two). In a government job like this one, where his position can't establish official policy, this guy had to have either been harassing his coworkers, or he has a legitimate grievance.
man: God, why was I laid off? God: I work in mysterious ways, son. That, and you forgot to carry the two.
That and you forgot to convert from imperial units to metric.
FTFY. This was JPL after all.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
The reason I belittle ID isn't that I cannot prove it wrong and want to feel superior. I belittle it because it's sold as a "scientific theory" while lacking everything a scientific theory is about. Most of all, it comes from the wrong direction.
Science is about observing, pondering how what you observed could happen, why it could happen and what it needs to happen, then formulate a theory based on those observations. It's not "proven", but at least it's consistent with your observation. If you happen to stumble upon new findings that contradict your theory, you have to adjust it and refine it to match the new observation.
Religion comes from the other end. We have a theory (not only a theory, we KNOW for sure that it's that way because it's written in an ancient book), so what we observe must be brought in sync with the theory. And if what we see contradicts the book, our observation must be wrong or we have to think harder, because the book IS right, no matter what, and we have to adjust reality to match our theory.
What the heck does this have to do with science?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
the idea of GOD is not scientifically ridiculous.
The Christian God as described in The Bible is 100% ridiculous. Try reading it sometime.
No sig today...
Not christian, but Jewish.
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
I expect there's more to it ... like perhaps he couldn't stop engaging and distracting fellow employees to argue about personal beliefs. We don't know all the details.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How's that different from your parents ultimate reasoning "BECAUSE I SAID SO!"
And how's it any more convincing?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Edward Blyth (1810–1873) was the man whose ideas probably influenced Darwin most. An English chemist and zoologist, Blyth wrote three major articles on natural selection that were published in The Magazine of Natural History from 1835 to 1837.7 Charles was well aware of these. Not only was this one of the leading zoological journals of that time, in which his friends Henslow, Jenyns and Lyell had all published articles, but also it seems that the University of Cambridge, England, has Darwin’s own copies of the issues containing the Blyth articles, with Charles’s handwritten notes in the margins
What ID & creationists argue against what is being passed off as science, namely the "goo to you via the zoo" Grant theory of evolution. NS works by filtering out what is already in the population, this is not a creative effect but only a selective effect. Mutations works against the host vastly more often than they benfit. Scientific Test: If you argue mutations are good, please step inside a necular reactor :-P
(Actually there are some rare cases of mutations being good to the host but every instances it because of something breaking, which doesn't show Goo to you)
But for Evolution, you use a bait and switch to lure in the layman by saying, see here these things change/evolved over time, and fitter things survive, therefor things evolved from mud in the ground. :-P The fallacy here is you are using 2 different terms for evolution to trick the layman, and I think it's a very cleaver trick imo.
So please dont call the kettle black, when you own views you declare out loud to everyone have there own "faith" based position.
John 11-35
In America, we're pretty much allowed to believe whatever we want
Yes, we are.
the only employers that are allowed to discriminate based upon beliefs are religious institutions.
The only employers who are allowed to violate the PROTECTED beliefs are religious institutions. Religious beliefs are protected beliefs, but non religious beliefs are not protected beliefs. (The law only protects adverse employment actions against people's "religion", not all beliefs.)
Employers can fire you because you smoke. They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. They can fire you for ANY AND ALL REASONS that are not explicitly protected by law.
As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } and depending upon the state { sexual orientation, gender identity }, it is not a protected status, and thus is fair game for adverse employment actions.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
"It may seem logical, in retrospect, that a combination of awe and rebellion made Einstein exceptional as a scientist. But what is less well known is that those two traits also combined to shape his spiritual journey and determine the nature of his faith. The rebellion part comes in at the beginning of his life: he rejected at first his parents' secularism and later the concepts of religious ritual and of a personal God who intercedes in the daily workings of the world. But the awe part comes in his 50s when he settled into a deism based on what he called the "spirit manifest in the laws of the universe" and a sincere belief in a "God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.""
Whatever Albert Einstein believed in, it didn't make him any less of a scientist, and it doesn't make his contribution to the world any less valuable. Obviously, I'm not comparing the guy in the article to Einstein, all I'm saying is it would be better for everyone to judge each other on skills and accomplishments, instead of what we believe in. Judge him for what he did, not for what he believed in. If he was an ass at work, preaching all the time up to the point of annoying people, or trying to force people into agreeing with his religious views, then that's a whole different thing. (The article doesn't say)
I'm an atheist, I worked with an Islamist IT guy. Sometime, we'd find him praying in the server room(only place to have some privacy), on Fridays he would take a bigger lunch break so he could go to the mosque, unless he was on a service call. And you know what? Who cares. He did his job, he was polite, he didn't force his views on anyone.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does.
It provides an unjustifiable, partisan[*], and almost certainly wrong answer to the "why" question. It would be more accurate to simply admit that we don't know and that we are very far from having enough data to claim any such knowledge.
[*] The Catholics and most other branches of Christianity reject ID (the Catholics learned their science lessons the hard way, and avoid any contradiction of evolutionary theory). So do most branches of Islam and other major religions. So ID is an intrinsically partisan minority viewpoint.
It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
It's possible to believe any pair of contradictory hypotheses, if your ignorance encompasses both of them. And ignorance of both evolution and so-called intelligent design would be needed to believe in both of them simultaneously.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Intelligent Design does not rule out the possibility of intelligent alien life, so this probably wouldn't have affected his work performance.
The major religions by themselves aren't so bad, the rules they teach their followers are pretty good. Don't steal, don't lie, don't kill, don't cheat... hell, if people upheld those rules the world would sure be a better place.
And if all it takes for some people to actually stop being assholes is Harvey on a fluffy cloud, let them believe!
But cut the rest of the crap.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not christian, but Jewish.
Ah, good catch. Christocentrism is prevalent in even the non-Christian population of the US...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
A few people have giving other Einstein quotes that don't go in the same direction. And they exist for a really simple reason: Einstein was a person, and like most people, his views changed over time. His early beliefs were close to deism, and over time he became more agnostic and in some of the comments made in his last few years (such as the quote given by langeljm below) closer to outright atheism (although his views were always complicated and changing enough that even this narrative is a simplification).
But none of this is really that relevant. There are clearly some very bright people who do very good science who are religious. Ken Miller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_R._Miller is a prominent biologist and religious Catholic. Similarly, Robert Aumann is an Orthodox Jew who won a Nobel Prize for his work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Aumann. While it is true that successful scientists are in general much less likely to be religious than the general population (see discussion here http://news.discovery.com/tech/are-scientists-atheists.html), some people are able to do very good work while still believing. The problem with ID proponents in a nutshell is that they can't keep straight which of of their beliefs fall into science and which fall into religion, and indeed by and large, they don't wan to.
But even this isn't that relevant to the matter at hand. In this particular case, the individual wasn't a scientist but a computer technician. And according to NASA he was fired for being disruptive, not for his actual beliefs. If it turns out that he was fired solely for his beliefs that will be a problem, but it is not likely. The ID people have a long history of claiming persecution where none exists. A very good example of this is how Expelled, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed Ben Stein's movie about ID being mistreated by the "scientific establishment", claimed that many people interviewed were fired or blacklisted for their pro-ID views, yet every case when actually examined turned out to be baseless. http://www.expelledexposed.com/ The same thing will probably happen here.
Here are some interesting answers to the interesting questions you did not pose:
The Colorado Plateau slopes north to south, so a rush of water appearing in north east Arizona that might have formed the Grand Canyon would rush south into Mexico and not west to the Gulf of California.
If the speed of the water was enough to carry it west to cut the Grand Canyon, the canyon would be straight since momentum carries water in a straight line, but the Grand Canyon is sinuous like a normal river canyon.
The Grand Canyon has very many side canyons tending north-south that are cut all the way down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. A high speed rush of water to the west could not cut north-south side canyons.
Just say'n.
The last I knew, NASA's essential mission was to do science, and this guy's work was supposed to be in support of that science. He was paid to be a scientist (or in this case, to do computery to support the science). Preaching the Gospel or some semi-covert version of creationism, while not a bad thing in and of itself, wasn't part of his job. If he was spending an indordinate amount of time on the taxpayers' dime doing so, or doing so in a way that interfered with the work of others, then yeah...I could see reprimanding him and, if he didn't cut it the hell out, kicking him out the door.
What's your quesion?
I would think, that since his job is based on science and he has such a flawed understanding of it to think that a 50,000,000 year old plesiosaur still existed in an isolated loch in Scotland, then yes fire him for his idiotic beliefs or that the earth is only 6000 years old, its 2 sides of the same coin after all. I don't want a doctor working on me that still thinks my humors are out of balance and decides I need a bile infusion, or a pilot that believes in the flat earth theory. However, this isn't about freedom of belief so much though as has been stated previously, it's about some asshat trying to force his asshat point of view on his fellow colleagues.
I got here through a series of tubes
I live by Wright Pat and they did a lot of testing on drones and stuff before they were well known and commonly used in the Air Force. At that time, people around here actually had a more logical basis for believing in aliens than anyone has for ID. While I always believed the UFOs were just stuff that Wright Pat was testing I didn't find it shocking when these sightings convinced people of alien life.
ID, unlike UFOs from Wright Pat, has yet to be identified to exist as anything other than a severally flawed theory that doesn't conform with empirical observation. The greatest lie about ID is that it's an attempt to explain natural phenomenon. It's not. It's an attempt to disregard natural phenomena as a subset of some greater whole that cannot be observed. The best analog to ID is the Hindu notion of Maya - that what we think of as reality is an illusion, and we cannot possibly learn about the rest of reality by studying the illusion (kind of like The Matrix).
ID is straight up anti-intellectualism and those ideas have no place at a scientific institution like NASA. I believe this guy had the right to believe in ID and work at NASA, as much as the thought makes me queazy, but he had no right to evangelize the idea around the workplace. I'm a Christian and I find the whole idea of ID to be revolting. Being religious doesn't necessitate being irrational.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Can you provide even one specific one of those "all ways" in which it is "ridiculous"?
For starters, it explains nothing and simply passes the question of "where did stuff come from?" to "where did God come from?" If the answer is "God always existed" then why not use Occam's Razor, and just say the universe always existed (from big bang to big crunch and back)?
Even granting your blatantly intellectually-dishonest "consider my term 'magician' the same for the purpose of conceptual equivalence, and different for the purposes of rhetorical effect, simultaneously" recasting from standard descriptive term and -actual- conceptual content of "God".
Could you parse that so it makes sense?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
"Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution."
Biology (and by extension, evolution) are also important to NASA's mission. Micro-organisms are being found on planets other than Earth, are they not? Understanding them is undoubtedly crucial to NASA.
That doesn't mean EVERY employee must understand it in nuance. But it does mean that an employee who goes around to other employees spreading misinformation and arguing with scientific fact is especially disruptive.
If an employee of JP Morgan were to spend work hours expousing the positives of socialism would anyone give credence to that employee's claim of discrimination when he or she was fired?
How about a better example of being fired for non-religious beliefs. You can be fired for believing that pi is equal to 3.5. The really interesting question is if you can be fired because you believe that pi is equal to exactly 3 and your belief on the matter is due to the bible saying so (or at least implying it).
That is, that we don't have to pay for our transgressions because they were paid for by God Himself.
This is one of the many things that ticks me off about Christianity. What transgression does a newborn have other than being born? Unless I'm mistaken, everyone is screwed from birth and to find salvation has to accept God (or Jesus) to be saved.
Saved from what? The kid was just born! What possible transgression can they have?! Or are you saying God screwed things up so badly that he had to put in a hack to correct his mistake?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Actually, the decision was more that someone working for government shouldn't preach a certain religion not only in a US government run facility but also to other US government employees.
I guess firing him was a pretty good move, at least if government doesn't want to look like it favors a religion over others. This could be seen as "respecting an establishment of religion" and you have a first amendment issue at hand.
Yes, the 1st swings both ways. It's not only "speak what you want and gov mustn't stop you", it's also "government must not promote you", at least when it comes to religion. And allowing someone to preach in a government facility to coworkers could easily be taken that way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
no problem.
and for what it's worth, i was raised catholic, but now consider myself between agnostic and possibilian.
I just get annoyed by both extremes.
Except that you missed the point. What the "right wing hate machine" as you put it latched onto was not what Sherrod said; it was the approving reaction of the audience when she said the first part, before she got to how she actually overcame that prejudice.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Because Einstein was a deist as he proclaimed when he stated he believed in the god of Spinoza. Otherwise known as "Don't use Einstein to promote your theist views".
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.
It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Ugh, you would-be scientists fail the first lessons of the early naturalists, and/or at reading comprehension and/or reasonable good-faith social discourse. Please, learn some lessons from the renaissance-men...
Yes, some were "fools" who believed in alchemy. They still founded the very foundations of the modern scientific method -- and made these discussions possible.
The idea of GOD is /scientifically/ irrelevant. Not irrelevant.
Just as the fact that I have drawn a square using a blue marker is geometrically irrelevant to the four right angles and equal length segments. The blueness may very well be relevant to an observer.
A discussion of god and faith has no place in science (at this time--and likely, ever).
That does not make it irrelevant. That makes it a concept outside the scope of scientific discussion.
A scientist that cannot discuss faith has no more business making judgments regarding atheism/pantheism than a philosopher ignorant of calculus does regarding engineering. The disciplines are presently orthogonal -- nearly by definition.
And for all the would-be fool scientists that fall utterly at basic philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and likely basic prose.
*****
the presence of "NOT SCIENCE" does not imply scientifically wrong, or even -- always "unscientific" (depending upon definition)
It merely implies outside the set of scientific thought.
You cannot take U - {Science} and conclude that equals ~ SCIENCE semantically. The NOT of prose =/= the set negation operator.
*****
Religion is not science. Science is not religion. The union of the two is not the universe of thought or discourse. And science is not final conclusion or starting primitive/fixed-point of logic or comprehension.
And please...let's drop the myth of non-falsibiability and replicability. Most of modern astrophysics will never be replicable or testible save in diminutive fractions. It's still science. I'll leave it as an exercise to those who don't understand the science from a thousand years ago to understand why.
Imagine this was the story instead:
Or
Be honest: the fact that he was promoting - in a NASA workplace - what can only be minority views in a heavily tech-oriented workplace has everything to do with why people complained he was "harrassing" them. If he was badgering people to buy Girl Scout cookies, or fund his 10K run for baby hunger, or form a comic book club, or support a ballot initiative that would fund space colonization, nobody would've complained.
That said, I don't feel any sympathy for him, because he should know better. But really... the "harrassment" claim is only because "I don't like his views, and he's disagreeing with me." It's a bunch of tech-heads closing ranks and drumming out an outlier.
He simply wasnt smart enough to be there.
So most of the AWG people should be out of a job too?
And that way lies the Terror in France, the Killing Fields in Cambodia and the Great Leap Forward in China, all of which were attempts by people to "seriously ... weed out the nutjobs". I don't really think that way of thinking leads to good ends. In fact, if I were in charge of weeding out the nutjobs, the people who expressed such sentiments would be exactly the ones I'd want to weed out. Mass murder sounds good and fun if you're the one in charge. It's to protect that rest of us that we don't allow people who are in charge unlimited discretion in the exercise of their powers. (Or at least, we haven't in the past. I'll readily admit that those barriers are breaking down, and it's only a matter of time until the rule of man is the norm, and the rule of law only a pro forma obstacle.)
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Sure we can. In fact, numerous studies on the matter have been conducted. All the properly double-blinded ones show no difference between people who were being "prayed for" and those who aren't.
If someone there was going around saying that there was no point in looking for life on other planets and aggressively fighting spending money on searching because god only created life on earth for mankind then yes, he could be fired (after fair warnings).
even i thought that was funny +1
Sorry you don't understand what Occam's Razor is, such that you don't understand what "passing" it would me. Occam's Razor simply says, -all else being equal-, the simpler description is preferred, for the purposes of human conceptual economy--and says absolutely nothing, ever, on any subject, about what is -true-.
We can go around and around in your characterization, that in fact "goddidit" is much more conceptually simple than any other causal description you can provide for the Big Bang, described in terms of physics (multiverses, quantum anomolies, etc.). This shouldn't be necessary, though, since your basic understanding of the principle is entirely wrong.
As for "parsing it", it's quite simple--if -you yourself- thought "magician" is an equivalent term to "God" in this context, there is no reason to simply not use the standard terminology. You aren't because you want to contradict yourself in asserting they are the same in terms of logical inferences, but you need to use another term to hope to introduce greater incredulity. In your very own brain, you hold the positions "they are the same" and "they are not the same", at the same time. For your purposes, I'll let you deal with the personal psychological issues involved, but for discussion purposes here, it's simply, directly logically invalid.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"Except one side has faith, and the other accepts logic and evidence."
And, yet again, both sides would agree with this statement.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Einstein believed in God as a concept, more along the lines of Taoism or pantheism (although he denied being either of these)
Perhaps because he really wasn't either of these? Yeah, that's right reading comprehension is not a skill of yours. People applying those religious labels to him are people trying to claim him as their own. He stated very clearly what he felt on the subject and needs no religious apologist to reinterpret it for us.
This is basically what agnosticism is
No this is what self-proclaimed "agnostics" should read to promote their understand of the English language:
http://jhayeshappyheretic.blogspot.com/2001/06/there-is-no-such-thing-as-agnostic.html
brandelf -t FreeBSD
The simple reason for this is that you cannot use logic to counter an argument that was made without logic. You cannot reason with an unreasonable belief because the 2 positions are not on the same terms. Simply put: "If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people." -- House.
I got here through a series of tubes
Look, I'm not arguing from authority here, but I will say I've been involved in this discussion as a "hobby" for almost two decades now.
While ID, like many things, is hard to lock down to an exact definition here is the definition from the ID wiki:
Intelligent design (ID) is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
As always, feel free to edit it to something different. But from my experience (which is why I mentioned I've been at this a long time and thought it relevant) that is exactly how it is used/argued. I do not believe ID, in general, adheres to natural selection, and almost certainly does not refer to mutations that will eventually lead to a change in "kind" (broad general term often used by those with a preference for ID).
Irreducible Complexity, while not being ID is perhaps the most common sub-genre of it, clearly states that certain aspects of life could not "evolve" on their own. It's the old Bombardier Beetle argument that has been rehashed time and time again.
Also, I'm not using two different terms for evolution, there is no trick and I am appalled that you try to state that. That mutations are not often/usually beneficial is not a surprise or a hidden agenda. Nor is it that they are always passed on nor dominant. It's not a conflict. It's pretty damn obvious actually. Of course, no one, and certainly not I, claimed that all mutations are beneficial. I'm very confused that you even took it that way and am left to wonder what your agenda really is.
An atheist doesn't believe in your god.
An agnostic doesn't believe in your religion.
Technically, what ID proponents are saying is more like "Evolution is wrong because I don't understand how it can do what it does". (The predisposition to reject evolution may be religious in origin, and there is certain documentary evidence that the whole thing was dreamt up as a mechanism for promoting religious ideals without being overtly religious, but ID doesn't actually state that evolution is wrong because some holy book says so, it argues that it is wrong because what it does is too complicated to do without deliberate planning.)
Just because it happened ages ago doesn't mean you cannot come up with something to test it. History might want to have a word with you if you want to call it a non-science because you can't reenact the conquest of Rome.
Geology is another field that you just called a non-science because we cannot recreate the formation of rocks inside a planet. And let me not start on astronomy, it's so terribly hard to build a sun...
You need not recreate the history of time to apply the scientific method to science that deals with things you cannot recreate in a lab. You observe something and postulate a theory. This theory applies as long as you cannot find anything that contradicts it. Radiocarbon dating (just to take an example that has been "debunked" by ID proponents) relies on the fact that half times are reliable over time. Is it proven that it works back to ages immemorial? No. You're invited to present a counter example that shows how there are items that appear much older than they actually are. The only cases where RC dating failed (that I know of) made items younger, due to contamination with younger material, but not older.
The scientific method applies to evolution. No, we do not have all answers. Sadly, nature didn't provide a manual. But I'd prefer not having a manual than a badly translated one. I've suffered enough from crappy Japanese manuals that made little if any sense, I somehow don't think taking a much older one that has been subjected to at the very least five translations would be any more accurate.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You probably already know this, but Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design are two very, very different things. Most of the IDers do not believe that the Earth is 6000 years old. Basically, the way I think of it is this: the Young Earth Creationists are ignoring any scientific evidence that doesn't fit their faith; the IDers are trying to fit the evidence into the mold of their faith. I think both are essentially wrong, but the IDers are not necessarily stupid (unlike the Young Earth Creationists). At the very core of the idea of ID, there is no arguing with the premise, that evolution was sparked and guided by a superhuman power. The problem the IDers have is that they fail to realize that the very fact that their premises are not subject to evidence, and especially to disproof, is what renders the whole idea unscientific. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily wrong, but it does mean that it's not scientifically valid and thus not valid to be taught in a science class.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does. It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
No, it deals with an article of faith, one that specifically goes against a scientific principle. ID rejects evolution and brings for a made-up how concotted to justify their version of 'why'. There are articles of faith in other religious movements that explain the 'why' that neither question nor challenge scientific principles (what people call Theistic Evolution). Most religions (Christian churches, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc) either have an explicit separation faith from science as things that are incomparable, or have syncretic views. Intelligent Design is categorically NOT a form of Theistic Evolution.
Intelligent design is neither one of these, and it is predominant in fundamentalist (Christian and otherwise) views, which thank God are not universal. Intelligent Design (in particular the type found in the States and among Islamic Fundamentalists) purposely states that Evolution as incompatible with their 'why' articles of faith.
I don't believe Intelligent Design, but calling people who do 'stupid' or saying they 'reject the scientific method' is juvenile
Might be juvenile in the delivery, but the essence is true. When you have all major religious denominations a)accepting or being agnostic to Evolution as a scientific fact, and b) condemning the forceful entry of Intelligent Design into the classroom as an article of science (as opposed to as an article of religious teaching), then it is stupid.
We can argue that intelligent people can do stupid things, or that stupid people do stupid things. But in the end, Intelligent Design, in particular as pursued in this country, it is stupid. Almost like believing that the world is flat and that the Ptolemaic system is an accurate description of the Universe.
and really serves the exact opposite of convincing the 'other side' that they're wrong...
For the most part, you can't convince them. And it is fine and dandy (and certainly their right) when they want to believe that (or whatever they want to believe). But when they forcefully try to replace Evolution in the classroom with their religious beliefs, then they cross the line into idiocy. Call a spade a spade. Sometimes shame brings a change, at least for the honestly misguided. For the utterly stupid, there is no hope.
Your "rights" include the right to observe your religion as you see fit, so long as that observance deprives no one else of their rights.
Your right to "free speech" is not absolute. No, you are not entitled to "spread the good news" in any venue you choose. No, really. Soapbox in the public square? Fine. Your workplace, on your employers dime? Not so much.
So who gets to decide what should be mocked and what should not? It's ignorant to assume that everyone thinks like you, and that if they dont that they are inherently wrong.
Wait, does that mean I get to mock you?
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Nothing against you, per se. I just hate the very idea of received wisdom in science. To my understanding of science, that is such an unscientific concept that it attempts to reduce science itself to a faith. Yuck.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Your chances are way higher with Mercury.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He was an IT guy with no degree in CS (but he does have an education degree from Bob Jones University!). Probably not too many people less bright than him at JPL. Not that there is *anything* wrong with being an IT guy, or that you can't be a brilliant one, but he does not appear to be an example of such.
Of course what nobody bothers to remember is that the original video release was about the racism of her audience (who cheered when she said that her first reaction was to not help the white farmer).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If he believes in God, Allah, Buddha, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even Scientology, that is his right.
If he insists on pushing that belief on others when they are 'captive' that is not his right. Termination is acceptable, especially of other methods of behavioral modification (written up, demoted, etc.) have not worked.
I once frequented a coffee shop run by a pair of brothers who were Jehovah's Witness. They had literature available, and if you asked they would try to convert you, but they understood that people came to get caffeine, not God, and thus kept it very low key. They ended up closing down for tangentially related reasons (a run-in with the Aryan Brotherhood that went very badly), but they got it, that religion is not barred from the workplace, but must be subordinate to it, in that the focus of a business, or office is to work, whereas the focus of a house of worship is, well, to worship.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The difference? A book cannot beat the shit out of you for talking back.
stuck between a rock *and* a hard place. you're stuck. on one side of you is a rock. on the other side is a hard place. both of them suck. that's the point of the saying, but i suppose you could care less and probably think i'm being close minded ;)
Well, OK, ya. As I understand it, he and his religion harassed coworkers and subordinates. The material he used to harass these people is less important than the act of harassment itself. If anything, I'm guessing he was given MORE leeway because of the subject matter, but ultimately if you can't behave yourself then yes, you will be fired/let go.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As an atheist, I accept that it is entirely possible that an impersonal absent god really does exist... but if he doesn't, I'm not going to live my life in praise of a absent "parent".
As such, Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. Until such a being's existence makes its presence self-evident and intrusive in my life, it doesn't deserve recognition.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
What if someone there was going around saying that there was no point in looking for life on other planets and aggressively fighting spending money on searching because life arose on earth through the random process of evolution and the chance of it happening twice in the same solar system is infinitesimally small?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
What I'd like to see (and may have been done) is a study where the double blind was for religious people being told they were being prayed for vs people told they were not being prayed for with neither being prayed for.
To clearly show that the 'benefits' one receives are entirely internal. The human mind is amazing in its ability to heal the body.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I hope you are never a manager, HR rep, or someone with authority because that is a terrible way to do things. You don't demote people to "give them a hint." If there behavior, whatever it is, is a problem you pull them aside and tell them the behavior is disruptive and not appropriate at work. If they continue, you fire them. As far as him not being the type of person you want to spend $$ on at NASA that is entirely dependent on his job performance, not his personal views on things.
Really? How do you square that with:
Try finding out what Einstein meant by God. Hint: it's utterly alien to your apparent conception or that of anyone who cleaves to ID or indeed to any of today's major religions.
In 1929, Einstein was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded by telegram: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
You'll find that quote and references to it in lots of places, including Wikipedia's articles on Baruch Spinoza, on pantheism, and on Albert Einstein, among others. In fact, it's hard to see how you avoided the linked article on Einstein's religious views where he described himself as being agnostic since the age of twelve, and also stated the year before his death:
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.
Or maybe it's not so hard, as even the most superficial inquiry would have devastated your position.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Are you willing to use 3.141592653589 in your equations because your employer requires that constant to be used and not 3.00000000? If so, then you may believe Pi == 3 to be true all you want.
If you insist on using 3.00000000000 where your employer wants you to use 3.14... then you may be terminated.
IANAL, but this just seems to be common sense.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I wonder...If scientist ever figure out how to create life, will it be considered Intelligent Design?
It will be called "engineering".
Technically, only some concepts of got are non-testable, non-replicable and non-falsifiable. Animism is (at least theoretically) all three. There are other belief systems that rely on gods that are a part of nature (and thus subject to natural law) that would also be one or more of the three. The Abrahamic idea of god, and other sky god religions where the divine entity/entities are outside of the rules of nature or even outside of nature itself certainly fit your statement. But there are a lot of religious conceptions which do not.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Well said sir.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Problem is, mockery simply exacerbates the problem: it makes the person being mocked dig their heels in, and gives them a "victimized minority" status to cling to in their irrationality and ignorance.
If your goal is eliminating ignorance, the only way to do that is by engaging in calm, rational discourse. If your goal is to make yourself feel smugly superior to anybody who holds a view you consider "silly," without actually changing anything about the situation, then yeah, keep mocking.
My parents are both fairly conservative catholics, I'd consider myself an agnostic - I consider my parents' set of beliefs to be well-meaning, but pretty irrational, and I don't share them. But we still manage to have discussions about religion and belief without me shouting at them, rolling my eyes, and calling them names, and they pay me the same courtesy. And honestly? Those discussion are far more satisfying and interesting than "LOL U LOVE UR SKY DADDY YOU IDIOT SHEEPLES LOL".
Mockery does nothing to eliminate ignorance, so any argument in support of mockery is simply an argument in favor of divisiveness. As somebody else noted above: STOP. BEING. DICKS.
Intelligent Design (ID) is not scientific because if it where scientific it would provide a set of hypotheses which can be falsified (meaning they can be tested) or deduced from other hypotheses which can be falsified. Furthermore, all hypotheses of a theory have to be consistent. ID does not provide anything in that direction.
ID claims the evolution is false and therefore ID must be true. But that is not how science works. When I claims all flowers are red and you claim leaves are pink. Then bringing a blue flower does not validate your theory it only invalidates mine. Furthermore, science is not about truth, it is about models to describe the past and present and to provide predictions about the future. In the words of the present pope: Science is about how things are. And religion is about why things are.
I'd say that any diagnostic and troubleshooting is going to use the scientific method.
Based on the data, you formulate a hypothesis as to the underlying cause, and then attempt to remediate it. Then you determine if your hypothesis was correct, and you're either done, or you need to keep looking for another plausible hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but anybody who has to work with reality and arrive at logical conclusions based on reality is going to use the scientific method in some way or another. Otherwise you'd be doing things at random.
That's a trivial level of scientific method (phrased in a positivist way, but it would work much the same in any of the other scientific methods) which ID proponents actually have no trouble with at all. Some of the best programmers I have known have been religionists, and it doesn't seem to have impaired their programming. One of my final year engineering set texts at university had an Islamic dedication, but it doesn't seem to have led to any engineering errors. Your suggestion that a religionist is incapable of doing that sort of work is falsifiable. Are you going to be scientific about it?
If your sysadmin is pulling out the ouija board or calling the psychic hotline to find out what's wrong with the server, get a new sysadmin.
Yes, if he was doing that then it would be a reason to get rid of him. Was he doing that, or is that a strawman?
And, slightly more on topic, if a co-worker started handing me DVDs on intelligent design, I'd be forced to tell him to keep his crap to himself -- same as if you handed me pamphlets for your church; I'm not interested, please go away or I shall have to talk to HR.
Yes, but his spokesperson suggests (doesn't specifically say) that he was doing that in response to co-religionists asking about those things, in which case I wouldn't have a problem with it. Although if his co-religionists kept their jobs then it does rather support the idea that the reason for him losing his job was nothing to do with his religious beliefs but something to do with his behaviour or performance.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Read the study. They told some of the religious people that they were being prayed for; the religious people actually had more complications due to stressing themselves up and expecting miracles to occur.
"alleges that he was discriminated against because he engaged his co-workers in conversations about intelligent design and handed out DVDs on the idea while at work....Coppedge received a written warning because his co-workers complained of harassment. They also said Coppedge lost his "team lead" status because of ongoing conflicts with others."
Handing out DVDs? Co-workers complaining of harassment? Seems pretty clear he was forcing his beliefs on his co-workers.
I believe in intelligent design too, that something we have not yet discovered had a hand in it since science has a lot to do with believing in things you can't see but you believe are there, but it sounds like this guy was just a jerk to work with.
kept asking people to except jesus
As a skeptic, I've been actually excepting Jesus for all my life. (The supernatural parts, at least. The social stuff is OK with me.)
Ezekiel 23:20
By the time the GAO report clearing the organization of any wrongdoing
Mischaracterization of the highest order. The GAO didn't "clear" the organization, they identified many issues, but simply identified that most (but not all) criminal complaints did not present enough evidence for prosecution. In addition, the report also said there was no way to tell whether their spending was illegal because their accounting practices were so shoddy and money was slushing everywhere that no one could trace it. And that was probably intentional. A few choice quotes:
Hardly "cleared" - there was enough wrongdoing for prosecutions. ACORN was a clearly partisan organization and received $48 million in taxpayer funding during the period in review. That's bad enough by itself, but in addition to the above, there were other clear indications that ACORN organizations were violating rules. There are a number of observations like this:
And perhaps most damning was this:
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Actually it can and has been done...to a reasonable point anyway.
As far back as 1950's experiments were done that took what we believe the early earth atmosphere was and ran electric shocks (lightning) through them.
Viola, amino acids, organic building blocks, were formed. So yes there is a way to produce the building blocks of life from no life that is testable and repeatable.
Is it tested through from acid creation to swinging monkeys? Of course not. But it is the 'aha' moment that proves that organics CAN be created out of inorganic material naturally and reliably given the right conditions.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Harassment is harassment. The topic is irrelevant. It is not appropriate to do anything of that sort at work unless you work at a church, or you were requested to do so by your employers.
The fact that it is a 'tech oriented' environment is irrelevant, as is the fact that he was espousing religious views rather than girls scout cookies. If they are disruptive, and something that was complained about and written up about, then the answer is clear.
Unless you work as a priest/reverend/monk/nun/pastor or work for some company that is actually associated with religion, then don't discuss religion at work, or any other personal opinions for that matter. Freedom of Speech doesn't override "get some work done!", and work collegues shouldn't have to put up with anyone's particular rambling (or attempts to sell their kids cookies).
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
How's that different from your parents ultimate reasoning "BECAUSE I SAID SO!"
And how's it any more convincing?
Parents are more convincing. When your parents say "because I said so", you may have to do what they say for very practical reasons other than the fact that they said so. Your parents are likely to have an observable, measurable, repeatable influence on you, which (to those not in the throes of hormonally-fueled rebellion) may be very convincing.
The correct answer is, "Shut up and start praying for your salvation." Of course it doesn't make sense. That's the beauty of it. If it made sense, it wouldn't be so compelling. There's a great book about this subject called Religion Explained that lays out the brain's tendency to believe such a particular type of nonsense.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Reasonable enough, though the mind is an amazing thing when motivated to heal oneself.
:)
Sorta related, I read a study somewhere that the most fervent religious crowd was also more likely to demand every last treatment when near end of life, whereas the agnostic/atheist crowd were less likely to demand such extreme care.
Makes you wonder what the Fundies are afraid of
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Oh my god, I bet you listen to a lot of heavy metal, don't you?
You steely-nerved titan, standing on the frozen edge of the future's dawn... how do you bear the burden all by yourself? Truly you MUST be the ubermensch Nietzsche told us about.
Now that you've made yourself feel better by shouting in all caps, maybe you should take a nap. Internet tough guys need their rest.
hmmm... doesn't "created by aliens when they were done building the pyramids' fit into the ID-NASA venn diagram?
No, but it does hinder making search parameters for intelligent (or for that matter, non-intelligent) life. "Whatever God wants" is a lot larger scope than "whatever evolution dictates possible/rational."
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Do you really need some bibliography listed here? How about you take good math foundations, then learn about scientific method, then learn about quantum theory, then see how physical chemistry and atom theory follows from quantum theory, then go to organic chemistry, chemical bond theory, then learn about biology, cell theory, genetic and molecular biology, evolution, learn about diversity of life, astrobiology. Learn about how geology and how geology follows from quantum theory. Lean about tectonic plate theory, geologic time and evolution from geologic point of view. Then lean about theory of gravity, theory of relativity, cosmology, solar system formation, origin of universe (big bang theory), Casimir effect, quantum tunneling, vacuum energy and how a flat universe can come from nothing.
Now contrast that with the world view and understanding of the bronze age herdsmen and the tribe god they invented and the religion that flows from it. Look at the character of the god they have, how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age to behave. Look at the competing religions all claiming to posses the true words of the creator of the universe, yet they are totally incompatible and different to one another. Look at all the claims about the real world and see if they are compatible with what we now know as scientific facts. Evolution of religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made.
Yes none of the above claims are backed by any evidence at all. Which brings me to an interesting point. Presumably an omniscient, omnipotent creator of the universe would know people would invent scientific method and evidence based reasoning. Would it not be incredibly stupid of god to demand belief in him without any evidence and leaving something important like what to believe and if you will be saved largely correlated with where you were born. If you are born in Saudi Arabia you will be defending Islam, rather than Christianity. Needless to say in Islam, Jesus is not only not the son of god, but he never died on the cross, and never resurrected. Believing otherwise will get you damned to hell for eternity. Yet, how many Christians spend sleepless nights worrying if Islam could be right? And why is that?
There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, rational thinking, logic and the healthy mind has no option but to accept them (doing otherwise leads to cognitive dissonance which is rather unpleasant). And then there is belief in something based on no evidence. You could say, it is based on ignorance. This kind of belief is called faith. Religion is really all about faith, otherwise if religion were based on facts it would be a branch of science. All we have in religion is dogma, a set of beliefs no matter how incredible (look at transubstantiation - a central dogma in Catholicism) that one must accept without question to be counted as member. The biggest fault with religion though is that it makes a virtue out of accepting dogma, i.e. belief without evidence. Religion is making a virtue out of ignorance.
Many people were killed for questioning and seeking evidence and challenging accepted dogmas by the religious. But now religion comes to use mild and meek with open hands offering consolation, but we should not forget how it behaved when it really thought it had god on its side.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Already done......
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7745868/Scientist-Craig-Venter-creates-life-for-first-time-in-laboratory-sparking-debate-about-playing-god.html
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Posting to erase incorrectly given mod points... Sometimes I hate laptop mouse pads :
Sometimes I read a comment and think, I wish I'd written that!
Well done Sir.
I've had many physics and engineering professors who ALSO believed in Intelligent Design. Hell even Einstein believed in it. Should these people be fired simply because they believe there is a Creator the originated the Big Bang and Evolution?
These claims are spurious at best. A professor can believe whatever religious bullshit they choose since most of them won't go too far past the textbooks to actually teach, it doesn't lend it any more credibility.
As for your claims about Einstein that's bullshit too
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
-- Albert Einstein, in a letter March 24, 1954; from Albert Einstein the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 43.
I got here through a series of tubes
Hilbert space continuum, fuzzy logic, quantum theory, multi-universe theory, big bang theory, you name them, compared to the simplicity of the GOD, all of them looks ridiculous. And no, when scientist speaks about GOD, he does not mean the "well known" old man with big beard and nice looking eyes, but something entirely different.
And just for the sake of the argument, i will tell you one well known fact. There is no way, i repeat NO WAY one could say whether some planet for example is having speed 0 or speed 1000 km/h. All the math and physic laws are EQUAL in both cases, so, i am asking you, who made the difference??? Who made one object moving, and another staying still???
And yet we do expect hydrogen and oxygen to self-assemble into water. A tree is not mobile, but a bird is, despite being made of much the same stuff. Different things are different. You seem to be trying to say that if A cannot lead to B, then C cannot lead to D. This is not a valid logical structure. Please try again.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
The wikipedia page on his religious views is pretty explicit on these points. He gave some interesting quotes, but ultimately he didn't believe in a personal god and called himself an agnostic. That actually makes him a Deist, which is fine.
Believing in a god that created the universe doesn't hurt anything. It's a harmless belief. However, it is not scientific to believe that god regularly changes the rules of the universe in order to help or hurt individual people or groups. It's not testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Believing in something like that is the opposite of being scientific.
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that people can compartmentalize. A person can have strict scientific beliefs when working on their car's engine or when writing code or designing electronics and then still believe nonsense about things they have no personal control over.
It's fine to believe religious nonsense about biology just so long as you aren't a doctor, biologist, or voter.
Cow Cube
Who says that in 100 years we don't have a project to populate a planet in our solar system with engineered self sustaining, and evolving life. If that happens then this guy was right, then life CAN be formed because of intelligent design. Our intelligent design.
And with that being said who can know for sure if our planet wasn't formed by intelligent design by a sentient life spitting out engineered life to the farthest reaches of the galaxy for some reason we don't know?
I'll probably get modded down, but I will point out 2 things:
You _do_ know that a Catholic priest gave us the theory of the Big Bang, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
a) You ignorant to assume that the Scientific Method is _mutually exclusive_ with Religion (the latter which is _supposed_ to be the Science of the Mind when it is not corrupted, but I digress.)
And
Have you _personally_ seen an electron?
Have you _personally_ seen Dark Matter or Dark Energy?
If no, then you take them to exist on faith -- based on another person's word. Science relies on Subjective Truth to establish an Objective Truth. Note the order and dependency!
b) It is arrogant to assume your objective "faith" is somehow more valid then someone else's subjective faith who has a different set of assumptions. It would behoove you to spend less time criticizing others who don't think like you and focus on solving problems.
Maybe he didn't fix the bugs and put in a popup when errors occur saying something like "Don't worry, God'll keep you safe - i've prayed for you"
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
lol, no problem with that either.
the paradox is that the same people who are critical of this guy for pushing his views on others, are the same ones who push their views on others here at /.
We can observe the results of actual evolution occurring in the real world, with species drift and controlled experimentation (the creation of Dwarf Wheat through controlled plant breeding for chosen characteristics being a key example).
So I guess that wheat has been intelligently designed then ...
Well said. But this is /. There will be mockery and lashings of it. My personal (not very mature) instinct is to mock people's religion, but I am conditioned to not do so to their faces. They are in the majority after all and more likely to violently defend their cockeyed beliefs than I am to defend my atheism. So while I mock religion with my atheist friends perhaps religious people and their deluded friends are mocking atheists! So no meaningful dialogue ever takes place!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Well, yes. The influence of the mind is the entire reason we double-blind studies and test for placebo effects.
Makes you wonder what the Fundies are afraid of :)
I imagine they imagine something like this.
Well, all I wanted to say has already been said in the posts above. So I will share an observation that might or might not be relevant here.
Remember the ordeal of the Chilean miners not so long ago? As they started to pull them out BBC had live coverage. I just happened to be watching when one of the miners emerged. What he did first was the opposite of what I expected. As his wife rushed to him with outstretched arms to hug him, the man dropped on his knees (leaving his wife suddenly frozen) prayed and then got up and kissed his wife. I said to my wife "Now, there is a guy I don't know anything about and I have only observed one act from him. But I will never, ever want to know him or speak to him".
Later I forgot about it until Christmas time when I was watching the annual BBC show called "The most annoying people of .... year". Suddenly, among all those celebrities (mostly), businessmen and politicians (occasionally) that are objects of the satire, a familiar face - the same miner! Turns out he was annoying people so much that he made it into the list! First, he annoyed the hell out of the other miners for so long and with no escape for the poor fellows. Annoyed them by demanding everyone to almost constantly worship and pray plus endless preaching. You know, he annoyed one of the most religious people in the world in a situation where even atheists would feel inclined to pray. Wow! Then after the rescue, he went on a kind of evangelical rampage, (ab)using his celebrity status as one of the survivors. He was tolerated for a while and eventually sort of told off, as far as I remember.
And since I might have completely drifted off-topic, let's do the whole hog - I strongly recommend you to read the latest and most profound attempt to describe another very famous ordeal of a group of people - Nando Parado's "Miracle in the Andes". The whole theme about belief and religion in this impossible conditions that runs through the book is astonishing and moving. Amazing stuff!
Hey, I liked that! Jumping from one topic to another via some common link. Recently, I read a whole book written in this style and it was the second time in my life I had so much fun reading a book (first was hhgttg). It was called "Etymologicon" and you need only read the preface (available online) to know what are you dealing with.
Anyway, I have to go and change the subject of this post now, from "speculation" - it being that this fired guy might have been annoying as the miner, to "The idle thoughts of an idle fellow". Which is - you guessed it - another book by....
Religious people who don't reject science, whose understanding of evolutionary theory doesn't contradict their beliefs about higher powers, they don't call themselves "intelligent design."
Exactly. On other hand Pew Research unfortunately repeatly used questions in their surverys where even these people are not unlikely going to choose the "intelligent design" option. E.g.: Someone who believes that God setup the laws and starting configuration of the universe and then stopped interacting with it, will have trouble choosing between:
He isn't unlikely to choose 2. and was counted as an ID beliver, even through his deist viewpoint has really nothing to do with ID.
Jan
> In what way does a computer specialist's job rely on the scientific method?
Aliens could use his computer to contact us. And NASA doesn't want him to be the first person answering to them (logically) and calling them "unnatural sons of Satan" or something along those lines.
You'll note that other than pointing out that if someone was trying to push their religion on me at work, I said nothing at all on the topic ... I certainly didn't use the word religionist.
I don't need to be scientifically rigorous about the falsifiable statement you attribute to me since I didn't make it -- I know someone with two Master's degrees and a PhD who is a devout Catholic. He has no conflict whatsoever between being an astrophysicist and being religious -- because the two things fill different roles in his life. The Catholic church said long ago that it accepts evolution as scientific fact. Not everyone has difficulties reconciling their religion and science. But, some people believe since their religion contradicts science, the fault must lie in science. I call those people morons.
My entire post was about whether or not a computer specialist would be required to use the scientific method, which you asserted they wouldn't. I merely pointed out that you can't do anything requiring logical thought and use of hypotheses without bumping into the scientific method.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Strike against faith, imo.
my arguments against ID include knees, hemorrhoids, Alzheimer's, cancer, prions, Morton's neuromias, etc... if you want to easily probe someone's belief, ask them how old the earth is and why they believe that (what is their evidence... ) ID is an apologetic device to attempt to address the realities and difficulties that evolution provides to religious belief.
Hmmm. A pile of bricks self assembling to make a wall.
And amino acids aren't bricks, nether did they produce something "more complicated" for millions of years.
Just because YOU are clueless, doesn't mean you have to insist you're right.
"Intelligent Design (ID) is not scientific because if it where scientific it would provide a set of hypotheses which can be falsified..."
It's not incumbent upon a theory to provide its own hypotheses. Theories of self-assembly have not provided any hypotheses which can be 'falsified' or tested. The scientific process requires only that the scientist attempt to answer questions using objective measurable evidence. It does not require that anything that is not understood sufficiently to pose testable hypotheses cannot be true.
"ID claims the evolution is false and therefore ID must be true..."
No, it doesn't. ID only questions rather 'evolution' can even provide a mechanism for the origin of life. As mentioned in the earlier post, a self-assembling theory of creation (which is not evolution) is not substantiated by any work to date. Studies have identified such things as formation of amino acids, self-replicating RNA structures and the formation of crude non-functional artificial membranes but no study to date has ever shed any illumination on a process by which a functioning biological cell might have been formed. The process of evolution, on the other hand, is substantiated by countless studies of fossil evidence, and relationships among living creatures.
", we should be trying to spread the Good News. "
yes, the Good News is we don't need superstition anymore as we don't approve of genocide, homophobia, etc etc. We've moved on from the dark dark ages.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Christians do not believe that infants who die at birth are damned. As far as us non infants, most of us (not you of course) are selfish, hateful, lustful, prideful people. Jesus isn't for you. You can save yourself. He's for us screw ups. So don't worry about it. :)
First you give a verbal off the record warning. Then on the record, then written. If none of that makes the point, demotion is the next logical and necessary step. If even that doesn't make the point, termination becomes the only option. Keep in mind that if you do nothing, then you are up for a lawsuit from everyone else for allowing a hostile work environment.
God screws up all the time producing babies that are deformed or mentally damaged.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Sorry you don't understand what Occam's Razor is, such that you don't understand what "passing" it would me
I used passing in the sense of handing off, not satisfactorily completing. As in, passing it from one question to another. Sorry, I thought that was clear.
Occam's Razor simply says, -all else being equal-, the simpler description is preferred, for the purposes of human conceptual economy--and says absolutely nothing, ever, on any subject, about what is -true-.
And all else is equal. We have one universe and two competing explanations for its origin. One is unnecessarily complicated, non-testable, and non-falsifiable. It applies.
As for "parsing it", it's quite simple--if -you yourself- thought "magician" is an equivalent term to "God" in this context
First of all, if use use fewer quotes, hyphens, commas, etc it might be easier to keep track of what you are saying. Second, I never used the word magician. Another poster did. I commented on why the scientific concept of god is ridiculous. So the rest of your weird rant about my psychological issues is just well, weird.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Sorry, but no. My belief in God does not preclude me from wanting to understand how the universe works. ID isn't "an attempt to explain something" it's an attempt to attack evolution because we don't like evolution because it tells us that the Adam and Eve story is, at best, metaphorical. That's its base and all the fancy sounding pablum that ID advocates spout comes from that initial base.
So, uh, can we call this a straw religion since you're attacking something that doesn't exist? Se my response above. Don't worry, a logical, honest, unselfish, giving guy like yourself don't need a Savior. You've got it all figured out. Jesus only came to save us hateful, selfish, lying, lustful sinners. So you're fine.
Galileo you ignorant fucker
It depends on his job.
If his job was to do things like write navigation code or code to dig through radio signals to remove noise, his views on ID, however unfounded and (IMHO) ignorant, would not seem to impact his ability to do his job in any way.
If his job was to write code to model evolutionary processes in space aliens and he kept invoking his Would_The_FSM_ID_Allow_This() method throughout his code, his beliefs in ID would become relevant.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Hey, don't knock it, they can come in handy!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If your humours are out of balance, you're belly laughing the wrong way.
Jonathanjk.com
Hilbert space continuum, fuzzy logic, quantum theory, multi-universe theory, big bang theory, you name them, compared to the simplicity of the GOD, all of them looks ridiculous.
Yes, some are counter-intuitive and strange. So what? The Catholic Church has supported the Big Bang Theory. Quantum Theory is supported by all available evidence. Did God make the universe this strange? What does that say about your creator?
All the math and physic laws are EQUAL in both cases, so, i am asking you, who made the difference??? Who made one object moving, and another staying still???
This is so strange a question, I suspect you just really have no idea what you're talking about and I've give you too much credit. For starters, you're using a leading question. Do you still beat your wife?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Certainly, at some point, it becomes hard to "be the better person," and just walk away from someone who insists on espousing completely irrational beliefs. But, if they are dead-set on being ignorant, and refuse to engage in a calm and rational discussion in an attempt to become less ignorant, or convince you of the correctness of their own beliefs, then all you can really do to that person is agree to disagree, walk away, and let reality be the final judge of who's correct.
If somebody irrationally clings to a belief that they can fly by jumping off a cliff and flapping their arms, despite all your arguments and rational demonstration to the contrary, then they are either blindly irrational and ignorant, or they are mentally ill.
Mocking the mentally ill is generally considered rude and insensitive; Mocking someone who is irrational and ignorant is sort of like running into a farmer's field to insult a cow for not having opposable thumbs. The sad fact is that no matter how much you yell, the cow isn't going to feel stupid.
People who feel the need to announce to the world their superiority over the irrational and the ignorant - as if being "smarter than an ignorant person" says something profound about their own intelligence - are really saying more about their own deep-rooted insecurity and need for external validation than they are about other people's ignorance.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution
Correct. He was fired for his correct understanding of creation.
"Seeing as how Mt. St. Helens is practically a mini model of the Grand Canyon and was formed in 3 days over the span of a year and a half certainly raises some interesting questions, questions that are fun to talk about. "
I recognize the words, and the words appear to form sentences. And yet, I can parse no meaning from them.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I agree. We don't need those things, but I was talking about the need for a Savior to forgive us for our sins. I know it's offensive to the perfect people out there. After all, what business does Jesus have saving jerks like me when he should be high fiving morally perfect guys like you who have it all figured out. Don't worry about it.
stuck between a rock *and* a hard place
Yes, that is what it is. I had some other phrase there, but then I changed it to "between" and just assumed the rest of the phrase would make sense. I should have proofread more.
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Only if you consider humans intelligent... granted, Dr. Norman Borluag was probably a stellar example of the species.
Modern physics (astro included) is about formulating theories that CAN be tested. Not sure why you'd think otherwise. String theory too.
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Well, to be fair he worked in IT, which relies less on the scientific method and more on shamanism..
I believe their legal theory here is that it doesn't matter whether ID is a religious theory. They've taken the approach that it only matters whether the employer thought it was a religious theory. In other words, if the employer fired him because of what they thought were his religious beliefs, it committed unlawful discrimination whether or not those beliefs are actually religious. This theory has apparently survived motions to dismiss, which usually weed out crazy or obviously wrong legal theories.
Caveat emptor, I'm basing this on second-hand reports and haven't read the pleadings myself. My thoughts are worth exactly what you paid for them.
"Unfortunately there is a large contingent of people who believe they are in fact tasked with beating Jesus into everybody else."
I agree with you that this is against what the Bible teaches in 1 Peter 3:15-17, where Christians are admonished to live a life that causes unbelievers to ask questions about that believers faith. A question that gets often asked is: “why is it that you can keep so calm, on an even keel under severe pressure and stress?” In answering questions, a Christian can then give good reasons why Jesus Christ allows them to keep their head, when everybody else is losing theirs.
That said, there are a considerable number of people, who get quite torqued out of shape, when matters of faith in God, especially Jesus Christ are mentioned, even in casual conversation. If such a pushed out of shape religion hating person happens to be some kind of a boss, he/she will often go to great lengths to “punish” a Christian. This can and does include demoting and/or firing.
If a Christian does not live a Christian life in the power of Jesus Christ, he should keep his mouth shut. If he/she does live a life totally dedicated to Jesus Christ, then the people around such a person WILL notice and start asking questions. A sincere questioner with an open heart will then often come to believe in Jesus Christ as a result of the answers he/she is given.
ID is just an oblique way of slipping God the Creator into the conversation. Believers in ID of necessity have to believe in an “intelligence” that is doing the design.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
If you insist on using 3.00000000000 where your employer wants you to use 3.14... then you may be terminated.
Actually, you don't even need to have it impact your work performance. An employer can generally fire you for insisting that pi is 3 without it even impacting your work performance.
Everyone is so into this post-discrimination "you can only be fired for work performance issues", that they forget that employers (generally) still have wide latitude to fire you for anything except for a very narrow range of circumstances where discrimination has been heavy and socially disapproved of.
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And all else is equal. We have one universe and two competing explanations for its origin. One is unnecessarily complicated, non-testable, and non-falsifiable. It applies.
.5 probability (not even a challenge), reports of personal experiences (of which there are thousands), takes care of this immediately.
Ah, no, all else is -not- equal. The slightest evidentiary distinction entirely overrides Occam's Razor (as it always does), and we certainly have that. -Any plausibility- given to NDE's, accuracy of all prophecies being greater than
Again, though, you must have -some- model of explanation of the Big Bang, and while alternate conjectures to theism exist, they all would have their own complexity of description on the level of physics. Even with your inaccurate overstatement of the principle, you must include this in evaluation of the alternate model's "complexity".
Ah, okay, well since you aren't taking a stance on whether you agree with the previous poster or not, do you want to start by showing the slightest way in which it is "ridiculous", using your own words? Given the majority of people on Earth say directly otherwise, your characterization is absurd on its face. Do you have a particular personal argument to overcome that?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Again, people seem to keep calling into this wonderful Utopian belief that you can only be fired for issues impacting your work performance.
I'd love for the whole world to be on this train. But not everyone is, and there is generally no legal requirement for this to be the case in the USA.
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You can be fired for dunning your coworkers (and especially your subordinates) with your Loch Ness Monsterism repeatedly, especially if you are trying to convince them to change religion over it. Even more so if you have been informed that they are uncomfortable with your discussions.
Looks like his job devovled. Of course this is all part of God's plan to bring the light of science to simple minds, or they devolved back into the primordial job soup.
It does, although the more mainstream view (and the one held by this guy) is that God did the deed.
Raelians are an interesting aberration in that ID to them is base on aliens, and some of their positions could actually be conducive to scientific work. It's one reason why I think that beliefs aren't alone a good reason to exclude. In his case though, he certainly appears to be the annoying guy in the office who's never more than a minute away from whipping out Jesus.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
What if, one believes God created us, but still uses evolution as the best way of gaining insight into the process (that we have available to us)?
It doesn't seem to be contradictory to me that we use a known, but flawed, model over a complex or even unknowable one if it works. This is why we are still taught the law of universal gravitation even though we know it is wrong (even Newton had data that refuted it, namely Mercuries orbit; though he chose to ignore it).
For context: "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." [Heb 11:1] NASB. Conviction may also be translated as evidence (among other words, you'd need a concordance to do a best case word study). NASB tends to be relatively literal.
The chapter then proceeds to outline several "heroes of the faith" who did their thing with the expectation that God would make good on His promises as the heroes saw them, and concludes by pointing out that God did one better and met the promises as He saw them - with an implementation in excess of what man would have been able to understand.
It may be worth noting, for this discussion, that faith is forward looking the while dwelling on creation mechanisms are not. I've found that the underlying fear among literal 6-day Creationists tend to be related to the fundamental validity of scripture (Bible); there are many of the literal 6-day crowd among ID types. I personally find their fears and their interpretation of "long view" consequences to be lacking robustness; and among the better educated, faith. (Fully exploring this topic and my thoughts on it are well outside the scope of this post).
Nevertheless, we do find ourselves with an existence which is rather improbable. There are plenty of cosmological papers which bring this topic up, including some which point out our current universe (as it is understood) needed some outside energy expenditures to wind up the way it seems to be. Ultimately the current state of scientific understanding regarding our origins leaves us in the realm of speculation. David Brin does some interesting thought experiments in his short stories (particularly those in "Otherness") about how universes may evolve to be self propagating with respect to initial conditions and physical laws. I fall on the other side and believe that we exist due to a creator who helped spin up this universe in its current state. Who knows, maybe Einstein would have felt OK about God using loaded dice?
Furthermore, (both for full disclosure as well as establishing a credibility baseline for this particular argument), I do fall into the category of someone who keeps to a fairly literal translation of the Bible where appropriate (poetry is poetry, parables are parables, literal-truth is literal-truth, and complicated-realities-explained-in-a-way-which-convey-their-truthful-essence-without-leading-people-into-confusing-irrelevant-technical-details-beyond-even-modern-science are complicated-realities-explained-in-a-way-which-convey-their-truthful-essence-without-leading-people-into-confusing-irrelevant-technical-details-beyond-even-modern-science).
Science is a tool with which we explore physical realities, Christianity (religion) is a tool in which we explore metaphysical reality - reason and faith are the tools with which we make unified and consistent laws. There is some overlap (such as archeology) but for the most part, the tools reside in separate jurisdictions.
"And yet we do expect hydrogen and oxygen to self-assemble into water."
We expect chemical bonds to form and separate based on our current understanding of chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and entropy. We don't expect hydrogen molecules or oxygen molecules to self-assemble into some sort of unbelievably complex self-replicating machine.
lol, no problem with that either.
the paradox is that the same people who are critical of this guy for pushing his views on others, are the same ones who push their views on others here at /.
Well, it depends on which views that they're pushing. If they're pushing the scientifically validated point of view that the Earth is quite old, that the species originated due to evolutionary selection, and that global warming is happening... then it's not our own views, we're just assaulting people with reality.
However, indeed, there are a lot of people here on /. bludgeoning people with non-(scientifically validated) points of view (also known as "opinions"), but I don't think the people complaining about this guy are the same people who are berating people for being liberals, conservatives, non-objectivists, non-austrian school, or non-distributivists...
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"We, as a species, seriously need to weed out the nutjobs."
Like the saying goes: “everybody is crazy except for you and me and I'm not so sure about you”
Whom do you expect would be the best type of person to convert a scientist? (If conversion and not simply discussion or debate was what the process was about)
Here's an interesting question: unless you're a sex worker, what specific relevance does your sexuality have to your job to begin with, and why would you bring it up, or feel the need to "come out" at work? You're there to do a job. I don't tell sit there and make you listen to my stories about ogling girls in bikinis on vacation, and how badly I wanted to bang this one chick with cans like POW, and I'll thank you to not sit there and make me listen to you telling stories about ogling boys in speedos on your vacation, and how badly you wanted to bang this one dude with an ass TO DIE FOR.
The question of "are you straight or gay" simply is irrelevant in any sense in a workplace (again, unless you're a sex worker, in which case it would probably be quite relevant to your work output.) You were wrong to bring it up, your mentor was wrong to share his opinion of your homosexuality - you were both out of line. Though I'm curious how the conversation actually went where he "kind of told you straight to your face that he thought you were living in sin."
If you want a world where "Person A is wrong to share his personal views on a non-work-related topic," then making an issue of your sexuality in the workplace is just as wrong as someone else making an issue of their religion.
Having your own religious beliefs is one thing but trying to promote those beliefs openly to others in the workplace can be disruptive to day-to-day operations. Many places (including where I work) have written guidelines, strongly discouraging such behavior.
Strictly speaking, if you were trying to "convert" someone, would you go where you are likely to find people of opposing viewpoint or someplace where everyone is already pre-disposed to your belief?
Indeed. Just imagine the computer guy going around to the astrobiology people claiming they were all incompetent and that they could learn why by watching a DVD and subscribing to his newsletter.
And another thing that may justify NASA firing his ass all in itself: some guy going around refering to himself as a NASA team leader and, under that authority, making all sorts of bold claims regarding intelligent design.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I believe their legal theory here is that it doesn't matter whether ID is a religious theory.
Ah yes, indeed. I forgot about the perceived part of "real or perceived" in the protected status codes.
This theory has apparently survived motions to dismiss, which usually weed out crazy or obviously wrong legal theories.
Yeah, I wasn't making any sort of argument to dismiss the case legally, but rather pointing to the unintended consequences of claiming that it is a religious belief, (or perceived as a religious belief) while at the same time other advocates are doing everything possible to claim it is not a religious belief.
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The Theory of Natural Selection basically states that if a mutation helps you in survival, you are more likely to mate and the helpful mutation will propagate, which will eventually lead to great changes to the specie over time.
There is nothing in this theory that says ALL mutations are helpful. I don't know where you got that idea from, but perhaps not drinking from the ID kool-aid will help you in that endeavor.
There is no such a thing as bait and switch in science. Either your theory is supported by evidence or it isn't. ID has no evidence nor a way to test it. It is not science. Evolution is a fact, Theory of Natural Selection is a well proven theory.
The case is being funded by the `Alliance Defense Fund', a fundementalist Christian advocacy group. Coppedge is highly active in the `intelligent design' movement and serves on the board of Illustra Media, which produced the videos that he distributed at JPL. I wonder what would the responce be if he hung round churches and passed out copies of Richard Dawkins books?
AccountKiller
To me it is more of a process thing. If you believe that, let's say, aliens built the pyramids, i could be due to some misinformation. Adequate explanation s should suffice to convince you otherwise. If they fail, they show a verifiable inability to reason properly and could/should be basis for expelling you from a scientifically rigorous job. It is not your fault having false beliefs, it is your fault to have faulty reasoning.
But... the future refused to change.
I've _personally_ seen amazing things that scientific research has made possible.
I've also _personally_ seen how religion can destroy families by privileging a 3,000 year old text over reality.
I hear this standpoint all the time, that subjective truth is just as valid as objective truth. It's rubbish.
Subjective truth predicts nothing. What does assuming your sky wizard exists or not enable me to do? Absolutely nothing except hate myself because god hates fags like me.
What does assuming dark matter exists enable me to do? Nothing except provide a possible explanation for why there's gravitational lensing in a picture of distant stars where there really shouldn't be.
What does assuming that different materials have different properties and assuming that mathematics is sound enable me to do? Build bridges, skyscrapers, better farming tools, more fuel-efficient cars, better looking video games, etc.
Well, I suppose, unless you believe that suspension bridges are something that your sky wizard just shits out on occasion. If you do, that's your choice. However, I sure as hell wouldn't hire you to design a new suspension bridge.
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In this case, the lawsuit began a few years before the termination. It sounds as if this employee felt he had been actively discriminated against well before this amendment to the suit (wrongful termination).
IANAL, but in my understanding, significantly modifying his behavior at work would mean his religion defense would be weakened by failing the conviction test (toning down or changing strategies would probably be OK, but stopping altogether would not). I don't think the personal conviction test has any hard and fast rules, but I've heard it said that one needs to persist in belief (as evidenced by behavior) in the face of pressure from: peers, superiors, family, law, threat of physical harm, and threat of physical death. Obviously there are differing levels of conviction, and one could make a successful lawsuit on the basis of discrimination from a supervisor who perceives one to belong to a class (even if the actuality is different).
The only question should be how was he doing his job.
Someone who feels the profound need to nail his beliefs into other peoples' heads usually falls into a subclass of folks who are opinionated, stubborn and won't be dissuaded by silly things like proof or physical reality. A person like that in a technological profession will almost certainly find that this particular set of behaviors is antithetical to doing their job and in a position where logic is the foundation for making valid choices and selections a person who puts their beliefs and personal feeling first is going to step on a lot of toes and be a general aggravation to his coworkers.
There is also a certain air of self righteousness and arrogance. These are highly off-putting character traits. If he feels obliged to share his religious views, he should consider working at a place where people believe the same things. Is there a church in his denomination that needs a person with his job skills. In such an environment of closed minds he should be happy as a pig in a wallow, and the rest of society can avoid the imposition of putting up with his uninvited opinions.
Faith is sort of the intellectual "The Buck Stops Here". It says there is a door here, you can't see through, your not suppose to see through, you get to go through when you die, but don't think you can know anything, what you were saying is you may not know anything past that door.
Well that is why some religions are desperate to rely on Faith, because they don't know but have a script and a story and they can't get off that script of that story, because they don't know and can not know. If the script and the story are real, they will stand up to scrutiny, if not they won't and as science has progressed, idea's proposed by "the infallible Pope" like the earth being flag, or the center of the universe, or ... well as science has progressed, the veils of ignorance have been pulled back to show the full glory of creation. That continues, the ID is a frantic attempt of a group that wants to keep the story and script they learned alive and to claim it is the truth in the face of overwhealming evidence to the contrary. It is not a winning strategy. Truth is what religion should be about not old incorrect scripts and stories. Nasa is part of the progression of scientific knowledge, the exploration of new places and new realms not visited before. That is scary stuff for people locken in a flat earth mentality. And seems incompatible with the basic premise and job description of the agency.
-Any plausibility- given to NDE's, accuracy of all prophecies being greater than .5 probability (not even a challenge), reports of personal experiences (of which there are thousands), takes care of this immediately.
I give NO plausibility to personal exerpiences, that are as non-testable, non-repeatable, and non-falsifiable as the scientific idea of god itself. You are using circular logic. God exists because people believe it. Try again.
Again, though, you must have -some- model of explanation of the Big Bang,
Yes, the scientific one supported by the Catholic Church. The Big Bang singularity represents the beginning of our universe since the laws of physics break down at that point, and nothing that happened before it is relevant. It may have been another universe that went through a Big Crunch, an infinite series of universes going through that cycle, nothing at all, or something completely different. There is no evidence for and no need to call in any creator to explain anything.
Ah, okay, well since you aren't taking a stance on whether you agree with the previous poster or not,
I'll take a stance. Calling God a magician is simply using a metaphor. It's like saying someone is a dog. They are both a dog and not a dog at the same time. What's the big deal?
do you want to start by showing the slightest way in which it is "ridiculous", using your own words?
I find the whole thing ridiculous. That people like you try and defend the ancient superstitions of illiterate scientifically-ignorant goat-herders as superior to modern directly observable scientific evidence. I find it deeply insulting I am expected to give any credence to these primitive superstitions and find it appalling that our eduction system allows people to move through with such a lack of critical thinking skills.
Given the majority of people on Earth say directly otherwise, your characterization is absurd on its face.
Appeal to mass opinion, a common logical fallacy. Millions of people smoke, believe in pyramid power, and are unable to name the closest star to earth. Millions of people are stupid. Try and do a little better.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
But someone fired for insisting on 3.00000000000 may still go and sue their employer for religious discrimination afterwards. Much in the same way that someone who was proselytizing at work might sue their employer for religious discrimination. I suppose the closer example is the person who grudgingly uses a close approximation of pi, but never misses an opportunity to tell everyone, ad nauseum, that they should be using 3.00000000000. That really would seem to be enough interference with their job and workplace environment to warrant dismissal.
He probably thought you could turn lead into gold with the proper application of liquefied horse dung, too.
Well, if by "liquefied horse dung" you mean "hydrogen atoms produced from horse dung by chemical breakdown, then flung at incredible speeds through a cyclotron towards a small quantity of lead", you might get a little bit of gold. Maybe. ;)
I don't know if the grandparent post was making a subtle joke, but Sir Isaac was actually a devout, practicing (though almost certainly unsuccessful) alchemist and almost certainly did try to turn lead into gold (or at least, "base metal" into gold).
He was also one of the greatest real physicists and mathematicians ever.
Go figure.
Actually, he maintained computer networks and troubleshoots technical problems, so I don't know if he was any more of a scientist that any other sysadmin, but he was also written up for harassing coworkers about religion, and was let go when the mission was over and budget cuts required them to lay off somebody.
I would like to think that if he was an Amway salesman who had been written up because people complain that he shouldn't be handing out Amway pamphlets at work, and annoying others with his campaigns to demand more Amway friendly laws be passed, and whose main project just got cancelled, that he would be several steps closer to the chopping block when budgets get cut.
I have known some people who are regarded, and rightly so, as leaders in their profession who when approached about religion/politics become raving lunatics.
Oh, do you know many politicians?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
>You can be fired for believing the Loch Ness Monster exists? That's news to me.
Really? You are unaware that there are states that are "at will" employment states?
In California, your employer can terminate your employment for just about any reason they like (or no reason at all) barring specific prohibited reasons (can't fire for religious beliefs, can't fire as retaliation for refusing sexual advances, etc.).
Here is a list of reasons you could be legally fired in California:
*You believe in the Loch Ness Monster
*You refuse to believe in the Loch Ness Monster
*You wear red shoes to work
*You refuse to wear red shoes to work
*Your boss' wife overheard your wife call your boss an asshole
*You remind your boss of some bully who he didn't like in 3rd grade
And on and on and on...
To try and explain what you say you believe on faith is to admit you do not in fact believe so much as you want it to be true but you need more proof.
And that is a bad thing?
"Arguments from authority are worthless." - Carl Sagan
made me LOL, thx medcalf
True, but one should always remember (especially in discrimination cases) that written complaints may be also filed by bigots who have a less than appropriate degree of tolerance (i.e. "that [insert minority here] is too dirty himself to ever get our bathroom clean, they should be fired).
Besides, if this guy's religion says that he must tell other people X or part of the burden for their damnation will rest on his soul, then he's perfectly allowed to hand a guy a DVD in the elevator or talk about the eternal condition of the soul over coffee or lunch. (He's allowed to do that even if his religion doesn't say so). This country does have a limit on free speech, but you can inflict a heck of a lot of annoyance before you get even close to criminal harassment (e.g. picketing a funeral with "hate speech"). Work places are a little more reserved, but you get a lot of leeway in the Federal system. Holding an awkward conversation or inviting someone to think of a socially uncomfortable topic doesn't even get close to the line.
A team lead requiring underlings to attend seminars or buy his father's book would be crossing the line, but according to the article: "David had this reputation for being a Christian, for being a practicing one. He did not go around evangelizing or proselytizing. But if he found out that someone was a Christian he would say, 'Oh that's interesting, what denomination are you?" - Becker. What the article lacks is a quote from coworkers (which would be extremely tight lipped if the JPL follows anything near SOP regarding ongoing litigation).
Whoa. Your particular religion isn't too much into converting others to join. I'm not sure your religion is a good frame of reference for comparing to a Christian, or a Muslim, for that matter. Those two religions make it a point to tell their followers to spread the good word.
And does your loving God condemn anyone to an eternity of unimaginable torment and torture? If so, you are a monster (and can't read Koine Greek to save your life either, but that's neither here nor there). Think very carefully about the content of your belief claims; this way lies the path to Calvinism.
Evolution killed your gods get over it.
Nice try, but no. There have been plenty of theories which have been postulated well in advance of any technical ability to test them being even on the horizon. In fact, we're STILL trying to prove some of Einstein's theories. Perhaps you've heard of Gravity Probe-B?
GP-B was designed to measure two key predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity by monitoring the orientations of ultra-sensitive gyroscopes relative to a distant guide star.
I give NO plausibility to personal exerpiences, that are as non-testable, non-repeatable, and non-falsifiable as the scientific idea of god itself. You are using circular logic. God exists because people believe it. Try again.
It makes not the slightest difference what you grant. It has plausibility, as a statement of fact, given the evidence present and reviewable at will. Your ignorance of facts doesn't alter them.
That people like you try and defend the ancient superstitions of illiterate scientifically-ignorant goat-herders as superior to modern directly observable scientific evidence.
Then I'll pose to you the same challenge I made earlier. Your guess as to the maximum lifespan of man for the next 3000 years, starting with an overwhelming information advantage for you relative to a "goat-herder"? Within two years, please, interpreting absolutely every aspect of the question in favor of making it as easy as possible for your side of this challenge.
As for your attempted false-dichotomy fallacy, I do not, and have no need to, present that science is an inferior "alternative" in any way. I'll happily compare qualifications with you in knowledge of either domain.
Sorry, words have specific meanings. You have claimed it is "ridiculous". Back that up, with actual content, since the only other metric (preponderance of opinion) is squarely against your claim.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
If that comment were porn, it'd be giving us all two-day boners. Well said, and about as balanced as it can get.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
As a taxpayer, all I can say is that firing this guy was a bad idea. There was already a discrimination lawsuit in place, now it will get even more complex and since NASA is a Federal agency, we the taxpayers have to pay for the lawyers on the NASA side. This was a government job, so there is a property right in question here. There is a freedom of religion question as well (whether you agree with him or not). The guy is having his side paid for by a Defense fund, so he is not going ot run out of cash.
So there are 2 probable outcomes: (1) This guy wins and we the taxpayers have to give him a ton of money. or (2) He loses and the case gets appealed, and appealed and appealed. This will be in the 9th Circuit eventually which means they will side with NASA based on their track record then it goes to the Supreme Court who is likely to hear it since there are a few Constitutional questions here, and whether he wins and gets a ton of money or loses and does not get any money, we taxpayers still have to waste all kinds of taxpayer money funding government lawyers.
Maybe I should have mentioned phosphorus automatically self-assembling structures with a distinct inside and outside that look and act like cell walls? You are missing the point, which was that saying that we do not expect a certain thing to happen does not mean we do not expect other things to happen. Your logic was simply invalid. Your claim (a disordered thing does not lead to an ordered thing, therefore another disordered thing does not lead to another ordered thing) is not a logical inference. Do you mean to say that it is not possible for order to spontaneously arise from a disordered medium? If you do, I have numerous counter-examples. If you mean something else, please say what you mean.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Sure, "At Will Employment" is just that, at the (your will && employer's will) == true intersection.
That said, if you believed Pi was 3.00 and you dutifully used 3.14 in your calculations, then I highly doubt that your employer would bother using that as the grounds for termination. Logically possible, yes, probable? not so much.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I read the article. He wasn't fired for "believing" in ID. He was fired for harassing coworkers about it. He created a hostile work environment where he harassed workers and created conflict and division. He was asked to tone it down, and then committed strings of insubordination. Freedom of religion includes freedom from religion, and he infringed on his coworker's rights. No less than if he dressed as Jesus every day in conflict with a non-religious-based dress code, and refused to abide by the dress code and danced around the office shouting "I am Jesus, worship me" at the top of his lungs every 15 minutes.
He wanted to make a scene, and did, repeatedly. He was fired for harassment. Your right to speak doesn't mean I have a requirement to listen. No means no.
Learn to love Alaska
If there was intelligent design then a) he would never have been hired b) he would never have been fired. He is the living proof that he has no proof. He is the design that disproves intelligent design.
Why? Is "freedom from religion" one of those amendments written on the back of the bill of rights in pencil, like the right to free health care?
He was no doubt fired for constantly making an ass of himself. If he was fired for the religious content of his speech, that's certianly unconstitutional - that's one of those non-imaginary amendments.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Thanks. I was afraid that was too subtle.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Before I address your statements directly (because I do not 100% agree with you), I want to also give some background into where I'm coming from.
Honestly, Creationism is NOT the same thing as ID. Creationism is a religious/philosophical stance that disregards scientific discoveries/claims that do not fit its view of the world. Intelligent Design, regardless of whether you believe in a god or whether you believe in evolution appears to be a genuine attempt to marry faith with scientific discoveries. Honestly, from my own research, they appear to be much more intellectually honest than most evolutionists.
Before I go much farther, I must admit that I don't really have much of a horse in this race. I care only that people are intellectually honest to themselves and others. Finding out today or tomorrow that the world DEFINITELY was created or DEFINITELY evolved from single-celled organisms won't really change what I do day to day. So I just don't really worry about it. However, living in a world where people make conclusions based on inaccurate information or unfounded beliefs DOES affect me every day.
From my own research and reading, I can see merit in Intelligent Design methodology. Granted, I assume that all schools of belief are going to subject to some amount of bad science that should be weeded out (hopefully :/ ) over time, so anecdotal instances of bad players shouldn't sway me (I'm human...I'm sure no matter how careful I am I will always have bias), but persistent covering up of facts or promoting of bad science should be a sign that something is amiss. Arguing that something is wrong or bad science because it does not agree with the theory of evolution though is intellectually dishonest and, well, bad science itself. The articles that I've read coming out of the Intelligent Design community have all appeared to me at least to be well done and thorough. They attempt to show that there IS evidence for possibilities other than evolution. They've also attempted to debunk some bad science by evolutionists.
This also could be due to the fact that the evolutionist community is much larger than the Intelligent Design community and so would be more susceptible to a small group of bad players (read scammers or people that just aren't good at their job but are good at hiding it from their employers) stealing limelight from the good work of other scientists. Regardless of whether you are Christian or not, at the end of the day, you have to make some sort of decision as to whom you trust and why. As long as you are honest to yourself as to why you believe these things, I can't really question you too much. You aren't going to agree with me a lot of the time, I am sure, but if you aren't being honest to yourself, it does concern me because your dishonesty to yourself may one day have an effect in my life.
I just wanted to establish where I'm coming from so that we can discuss this issue rather than flame about it.
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Indeed... really the only way he would have a case in the first place is if Intelligent Design is admittedly religious belief. I know that the Dover School trial established that it was, but ID proponents keep trying to argue that it has nothing to do with religion, in an effort to get it into the schools.
So, really, creationists are stuck between a rock in a hard place. Either it's not religious so it can get into schools, or it is religious to get protected belief status. (You cannot be fired for being Christian, or expressing belief in Christian dogma. You can be fired for believing that the Loch Ness Monster actually exists.)
Now,
Yes. But when I tell some Christians that if God exists, he seems to work through processes that can be understood by humans, not miracles. They don't take this well. I gave up discussing it with them. The only people you can really reach...oddly enough...are teenagers.
OK, you do not understand ID ;)
It doesn't work like that: imagine evolution were "guided". This means that there exists a progressive path from the past to now. If this path exists, it only requires that each step on this path is ever so slightly advantageous to dispense with the guiding.
ID surmises that the path does not exist, and that therefore external intervention is required for the implementation of some biological features which cannot be decomposed into simpler systems which would be individually advantageous. You could prove ID if you could identify such system. The reasons IDers are not scientists is that whenever they find out some candidate, they refuse to search for the evolutionary path.
Which, every single time, has been identified. If they spend their time looking for irreducible complexity and disproving false candidates as they came and finding new ones, they'd be welcomed amongst the community of scientists as doing useful and valuable work!
You're assuming my interpretation. The AC said he never espoused any support for ID. That was not factually correct. Further, Einstein actually derided anthropomorphic religion. Try actually reading what he said rather than jumping to your own conclusions.
Stop trying to put words in someone else's mouth.
What are you, a robot? Actual human beings that spend large amounts of time together, as in say a work environment, tend to engage in this human ritual known as "getting to know each other". That is, we share little bits of information about who we are, on a personal level, in order to connect to our fellow human beings, on a personal level. One common one, especially on Mondays, is "What did you do this weekend?" If one engaged in a social activity with another human being, generally that information is shared. If that other human being is what we call a "significant other", their name tends to get repeated due to multiple weekends spent engaged in social activities with this person. If one is uncomfortable with the idea of revealing that one is in a homosexual relationship, this common form of human interaction can become stressful. I must either lie about the exact nature of this relationship, or attempt to avoid too much discussion of it in order to avoid the natural human curiosity repeated mentions of "Bob" will bring about in my coworkers.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Oh, and they are ridiculous because their stance is: "ooh, this looks complicated, therefore god did it". If they said "this is complicated, and we tried to explain it in ways a, b, c and d and it didn't work", they might have a claim to being scientists.
As is, it is a pure ignorance-as-proof argument.
If you're stupid enough to believe in a man who supposedly lives in the sky and controls everything, then you're not smart enough to be an engineer in our firm.
NASA drew the line when he insisted on using alternative equations for rocket trajectories that supported his flat earth model. Also his proposal for launching rockets by pushing them off the edge of the world was not well received.
"In my opinion if you can accept an entity that no one has ever seen or heard except by third party reports is behind EVERYTHING that happens in the universe AND still has time to stay hidden, 'lightning hitting rocks is just as acceptable."
Not all knowledge is accessible to the perception of our senses or their extensions. Only that which is physical, tangible can be perceived through the scientific method of observation and experimentation. Some knowledge can only come to us by the route of REVELATION. Before our modern age, “science” was defined as ALL knowledge, whether observed or revealed.
Since this is a technology forum mostly dedicated to computers I will give an example pertaining to the difference in hardware and software. If you examine an ordinary computer physically in the minutest detail possible, you can never discover how that computer works and what it does. The only way you can gain knowledge about that computer, is to turn it on and have the software stored in it REVEAL what the computer actually does
Software is exempt from certain laws of physics. The characteristics of a computer are not determined primarily by its hardware, but by its software, which is intangible and invisible. It is not subject to gravity nor the limitations of mass and therefore can travel at the speed of light.
Life is no different, even physical life. All living things are composed of atoms which are identical. Their arrangement is determined by the INFORMATION stored within DNA molecules. This is the software of physical life.
In our everyday experience, all software, without exception, originates in a MIND, something which possesses intelligence. In the case of software for computers, it originates with human intelligence. The question ID asks is simply this: “where did the information stored in DNA molecules come from? Did it, similar to computer information, come from a mind, an intelligent mind?”
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
If I say something ridiculous, yes. If I say something and I am backed by logic and overwhelming consensus amongst scientists, you are taking a risk.
But this is the point of public fora. We put out our ideas, and if they are found to be silly, next time, we come up with better ones!
My belief in God does not preclude me from wanting to understand how the universe works.
I am fascinated learning how the universe works. ID doesn't however help me understand how the universe works so much as tell me how it was made from a religious perspective. Science and religion don't have to be mutually exclusive BTW. Think about this for a minute...One theory contends that the universe was created by a large (really really big) explosion commonly referred to as the Big Bang theory. Judaism purports that the universe was created when God spoke. It's not hard to imagine an all powerful being's voice commanding such a presence as to be explosive.
ID isn't "an attempt to explain something" it's an attempt to attack evolution because we don't like evolution
And here I was thinking Jesus told us God is perfectly capable of defending Himself.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
What? ID is perfectly consistent with aliens - there's a whole sect about that. ID cannot be a "flawed theory" - it's not any kind of theory, and can hardly be flawed as the entire point is that it's not falsifiable. ID is a story, and while talking about it is about as fun as talking about reality TV, and while neither correlates strongly with "intellectualism" (a word used mostly by people who wish it wasn't "intelligence" that mattered), those ideas are simply irrelevant to science.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The harassment is a different thing, and what he was actually sacked for - not, as the thread starter suggests, his lack of utmost belief in the scientific method.
Problem is, mockery simply exacerbates the problem: it makes the person being mocked dig their heels in, and gives them a "victimized minority" status to cling to in their irrationality and ignorance.
Chances are, the person being mocked was never going to change their beliefs to begin with. The purpose of mockery is to let others see just how ridiculous the ideas being mocked are, and hopefully to prevent the ideas from spreading.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
It has plausibility, as a statement of fact, given the evidence present and reviewable at will. Your ignorance of facts doesn't alter them.
I'm hardly ignorant of the facts. Studies have repeatedly found no evidence of prayer having any effects, presence of ghosts, or anything supernatural at all.
Your guess as to the maximum lifespan of man for the next 3000 years, starting with an overwhelming information advantage for you relative to a "goat-herder"? Within two years, please, interpreting absolutely every aspect of the question in favor of making it as easy as possible for your side of this challenge.
WTF are you talking about? Not only did you not pose this question to me, but I have no idea what you are getting at or the relevance to anything at hand. I have absolutely no idea what you are asking or how to respond.
Sorry, words have specific meanings. You have claimed it is "ridiculous". Back that up, with actual content, since the only other metric (preponderance of opinion) is squarely against your claim.
I've done so, but you have refused to acknowedge it. The scientific idea of a non-testable god as an explanation for the universe is ridiculous. You may not think so, but don't accuse me of not answering your question. And preponderance of opinion again, huh? Are you aware this is a logical fallacy? When Christians were the minorty in Rome, was it not as true then? The fact that you present this ridiculous argument not once, but twice after being reminded it's a logical fallacy, just emphasizes my point about lack of critical thinking being taught in school.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
And does your loving God condemn anyone to an eternity of unimaginable torment and torture?
No but he does allow people the choice to do so willingly...But what does marriage have to do with this conversation?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
There is an underlying faith in science: that the universe is coherent and that there exists a set of rules which explain it.
It may be that this is not the case. Just not very likely.
But where did I use an argument from authority? Or could you not resist the urge of making an (admittedly funny) joke. I can't tell.
The "simpler description" of Occam's Razor is apparently too simple for you. Maybe one of the long versions will help your understanding:
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate
"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."
Are you calling religious people mentally ill?
Can't tell if devil's advocate, or really that ignorant...
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Ah, you're one of those people who define "intellectual" as "people who agree with me". Anyone who disagrees with popluar ideas is an idiot, right? Oh, I got that wrong? Ahh, I see, anyone who disagrees with those ideas that a popular with the right people is an idiot! I see, I see.
How's that Prius working out? Indie bands sound fine on the sound system? Ride not so harsh as to spill your latte? Doing your part for global warming? It's comforting agreeing with the right people, yes?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Exactly so. And it is unfortunate, too, because it would be a nicer world where people could be convinced through reason and facts.
That some segments of the population have taken to making up their own facts gives me hope, though. There is a feel of desperation to that.
Sure, "At Will Employment" is just that, at the (your will && employer's will) == true intersection.
That said, if you believed Pi was 3.00 and you dutifully used 3.14 in your calculations, then I highly doubt that your employer would bother using that as the grounds for termination. Logically possible, yes, probable? not so much.
-nB
Well, most people are reasonable employers. Or at least they are until they want to fire someone...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
No, the purpose of mockery is to announce to others that you're a superior, discerning person with superior, discerning tastes, hopefully leading to the rest of the world to validate you for having a different "right-thinking" opinion on a matter.
Anybody who accepts others' mockery of an idea as a substantial critique of its value is one of the irrational ignoramuses you seem to think you're fighting by mocking them and their ideas. This line of thinking is exactly why partisan echo chambers have become so prevalent - why argue ideas on their merits, when you can just dismiss an entire segment of society as silly and inferior with a joke, right?
For someone who's ostensibly speaking on behalf of a group of people who like to claim that intellectual rigor and rationality are their thing, your argument rings pretty hollow.
It wasn't related to his beliefs. If he were promoting the SPCA with the zeal and harassment he used to promote ID, he'd likely have been fired faster. They took extraordinary steps to cross every t and dot every i when informing him that he was illegally harrassing his coworkers and creating a hostile workplace through his confrontations and harassment. He was fired for that behavior, not the content of the things in his hand while he was abusing his coworkers.
Learn to love Alaska
If you believe in a scientic theory that you can't personally understand in depth, you're taking it on faith. As there's too much for anyone person to understand everything in depth these days, we're all taking important stuff on faith.
Even logic is based on faith - faith that logic is meaningful, since of course there's no way to prove that logic works. Personal experience tells me that it's darn useful, of course.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Have you _personally_ seen an electron?
There are any number of objective experiments that prove electrons exist.
Let me know when you come up with an objective experiment to prove ID.
Even birthers don't deny that Obama is a US citizen; they just deny that he is a natural citizen. Not all birthers believe that Obama is a Muslim, and not all who believe that Obama is a Muslim are birthers.
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes.
Umm, wouldn't those fall under racial/genetic/color protections?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Actually, if you want to convince people, you need to make the emotionally prone to supporting your ideas. This comes from negative reinforcement (people will laugh at me if I expound certain tenets of my faith) as well as positive reinforcements (there is beauty in knowing that the elements which form your body were synthesised by fusion in the heart of stars for the lighter ones, and in the relativistic jets spouting from supernovae for the heavier ones).
Sadly, you need both, and they are both unsatisfactory because emotional rather than rational. But faith is a fundamentally emotional issue.
Let me restate the relevant part of what I wrote for you, specifically, the part I borrowed from another poster:
STOP. BEING. DICKS.
...he was fired for being a fucking idiot.
He just went full creotard - you should never go full creotard.
If his behavior (proselytizing) is the problem, then his conviction is unimportant. If NASA can show that either he was reprimanded for his behavior and he [persisted OR that his termination was completely unrelated (project ended, budget cut, etc) then his suit should fail. I say should because the courts are sometimes indistinguishable from a high quality random number generator.
By appealing to scientific consensus. Consensus is meaningless in science; it is the argument that if enough authorities believe something, that makes it true. That argument irritates me.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I once frequented a coffee shop run by a pair of brothers who were Jehovah's Witness. (...) but they got it, that religion is not barred from the workplace,
Assuming they were running the place and not only worked there, they could have a church with a coffee bar if they wanted. Not really the same situation at all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm hardly ignorant of the facts. Studies have repeatedly found no evidence of prayer having any effects, presence of ghosts, or anything supernatural at all.
Okay, so ignorance of both the facts and how a valid scientific study would work, then. How could a control group of "people who we know nobody is praying for" be established? However many people are in each group, they are statistical noise compared to the prayers including one or both groups, e.g. prayers for "all the sick people of the world". You do know how a control group works, right?
Since you're going to go ahead and assume nobody should feel they need any evidence for -your- claims, I'll await an actual citation for a "ghost" study, and actually provide evidence of my statements. Here's a peer-reviewed study on NDE's, which, indeed, in direct indication of conscious experiences during EEG flatline, is definitely evidence of something "supernatural". Note: before you try to change the subject to what I haven't said, this is evidence, not a claim to "proof", and as you'd already know as you started down that road, whether it is proof rather than the evidence it is, is irrelevant to anything in this thread.
http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivio/TheLancet_NDE.htm
There is simply not the slightest thing ridiculous about a "non-testable" God--a god that is just enough to hand you everything the moment you bitchily demand it, for no effort. Even apart from that, even you can't actually think "god + not testable by my methodology whims = ridiculous". As for the -overall- claim it is untestable, it is testable via a long-standing methodology, and has been repeated thousands of times. That test is, as you might guess, to ask the relevant entity hypothesized for evidence. Knowing that whether it corresponds to -your preferred- methodology matters not in the slightest way, have you tested it?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Have you _personally_ seen a troll? Not even when you shave?
So truth is immaterial? Everything is just opinion? knowledge has no value?
BTW, US debt is immaterial, it is largely money you owe to yourselves. Also even if it mattered, certainly the absolute numbers would be utterly irrelevant. Thank you for providing such amazing example of untruth.
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. (..)
As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } (...) it is not a protected status
Eye color is definitively genetic, I think left handedness too so one of those statements must be false.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Let’s look at this in a cold dispassionate way. This person claims that evolution (That is science) is rubbish and we were somehow created by a superior being. A superior being that is allegedly eternal, almighty, perfect, full of love and goodness. This superior being has created everything in the universe, including the children dying of starvation in Africa, multiple diseases and is somehow responsible for all the weapons of mass destruction and all natural disasters. How it comes this person has not been sent to a mental institution?
WTF are you talking about? Not only did you not pose this question to me, but I have no idea what you are getting at or the relevance to anything at hand. I have absolutely no idea what you are asking or how to respond.
As for this, you've described someone who accomplished specifically the claim I noted as one of "illiterate scientifically-ignorant goat-herders". It's quite simple. Make your prediction, maximum lifespan for the next 3000 years, and demonstrate yourself not vastly mentally inferior to that person, who actually accomplished this with -no comparison- in information resources at hand. I'll happily provide you that (remarkably accurate) prediction and exactly where you can look that up, but I'd prefer your attempt, first. They're "ignorant", right? You have the whole internet for worldwide statistics across hundreds of years. He had nothing. Beat within-two-years accuracy, along with your reasoning by which you make that estimate, if you think you can.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
...priest fired for not believing in God, sues church. DERP!
Sorry, if you publish on a public forum, you are going to be read. If I say something stupid or offensive, I get called on it.
This is good. There is no reason for certain kinds of opinions to get a free pass. There is this attitude that everyone is entitled his opinion, and that somehow they are all worthwhile.
This is not useful. Some opinions are informed and some are not. Some are out-there bat shit insane. I am not saying, and I said nowhere, that you should attack people. Their opinions, however, are fair game.
Being ignorant is wholly different than being mentally ill. It is a completely minor character flaw which is readily cured by reading the appropriate parts of wikipedia. Being ignorant with the attitude that it's OK and doesn't preclude me from spouting opinions is a larger character flaw, and can be cured by being mocked and reading the appropriate parts of wikipedia. Being ignorant, proud of it and having that define who you are is a major character flaw which I am not sure can be cured. But you then make a wonderful target for mockery, and you deserve every bit of it. You might not get cured, but it might prevent contagion.
I also believe in intelligent design, and fully agree with you. The only people at work who know what I believe are the ones who specifically asked, or made it obvious they shared the same beliefs. I have no problem working with the atheists here. I don't let their beliefs interfere with mine, and I don't let mine interfere with theirs. If they wanted to know how I feel on such matters, they would ask. But even then, the work place is probably not the best place to talk about issues like that. Even when you agree with your co-workers, it can still be disruptive.
How could a control group of "people who we know nobody is praying for" be established? However many people are in each group, they are statistical noise compared to the prayers including one or both groups, e.g. prayers for "all the sick people of the world". You do know how a control group works, right?
Do you? Ask some people to pray for their own health, and some not to pray. Ask some to pray for specific people, etc. Ask many people to pray for one person. NO observable effect, ever. Or is your position that prayer is non-testable as well? How convenient that it's impossible to verify your beliefs.
here's a peer-reviewed study on NDE's,
This is just baffingly ignorant. NDEs have been scientifically explained by neurological phenomena. I actually thought this was common knowledge. And you accuse me of being ignorant.
Knowing that whether it corresponds to -your preferred- methodology matters not in the slightest way, have you tested it?
Have I asked god for evidence? Yes, and have been disappointed. I was raised a Christian and reluctantly becamse an Athiest as an adult when I was convinced of the evidence.
No asnwer about using the Appeal to Mass Opinion fallacy twice? Do you actually tthink that's valid?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
My response was simply opining on if his belief in ID would likely impact his job performance.
Clearly, at least under federal law, anyone can be fired for almost any reason, no matter how irrelevant, unless it was done because they are a member of a protected class (race, religion...) or in retaliation for certain acts (such as union organizing). (Yes, it's more complicated than this of course -- law makers and regulators need to justify their existence by writing tomes of rules and imposing them on their subjects).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Nobody in history has ever been made *more receptive* to an argument against their beliefs or misconceptions by being belittled and disparaged. People tend to double down on their beliefs when they're publicly humiliated over them - if they own the humiliation, then they have to also own the fact that their beliefs are wrong. So they become even firmer believers because then that humiliation fuels the "minority victim" status they can create for themselves in their head.
You can't truly believe that a grudgingly silenced dissent - "I better pretend I believe this, otherwise I'll be ostracized" - is the same as understanding & acceptance of a new point of view. Is the racist guy who still crosses the street to avoid being near black people less racist because he doesn't *say* that's why he's crossing the street? Is he less racist because he only makes racist jokes in the privacy of his own home, where only his friends can hear him? No, you're just allowing him to fashion an image of himself as a repressed minority who's being silenced by an oppressive mob - you've created a martyr with a persecution complex, who also happens to espouse irrational beliefs.
But your feelings of superiority and the approval of your same-thinking friends on account of your enlightened views does nothing to eliminate a single shred of the ignorance that you claim you're fighting.
If no, then you take them to exist on faith.
Nice try, except that the existence of electrons can be demonstrated empirically. The existence of dark matter/energy can be inferred based on other established facts. They are no more an article of faith than my belief in gravity or air; suggesting that being unable to "see" them with my naked eye makes them so demonstrates a woeful misunderstanding of science.
Nor is it arrogant to assume that my "faith" in something which can be objectively demonstrated to be true is more valid that someone else's "faith" in something for which they can present no empirical evidence. If you genuinely believe that all propositions are of equal value regardless of evidence for their veracity then allow me to present you with this: Humans don't need to breathe. Air is poisonous to our souls and if you stop breathing, after a while you'll ascend to a higher level of consciousness.
Presumably you're still breathing, because you have ample objective evidence that breathing is in fact necessary and I've presented no evidence for my subjective claim. How arrogant of you.
Now, I am relatively happy to live and let live when it comes to religious persons, but the idea that religious and scientific worldviews are compatible is simply incomprehensible to me. Science demands the acceptance of a hypothesis be based on repeatable observation. Subjective personal experience, faith and 'revelation' do not cut it under the scientific method. Yes, religious people can live alongside science-minded folks, hell, scientists can even be religious, but regardless of how much we ignore and hand-wave out of social convenience they are fundamentally incompatible philosophies.
[I have chosen to believe there is in fact an omnipotent/omniscient/omnipresent being who created everything and loves everybody equally ]
There are those who are convinced that their faith is supported by the evidence that history provides. Many Christians asserts their beliefs are on the foundation that the resurrection of Jesus is supported by sufficient historical evidence which indicates God's guidance and existence . And that event stands upon the foundations laid by Moses and others which state God intervened in key specific moments in history, for example, at the Exodus events and the giving of the Ten Commandments in front of all the tribes of Israel thus creating empirical evidence stemming from the sheer number of witnesses.
This is further augmented by continued public incidents, such as Joan of Arc, Fatima 1917 , Padre Pio, to perhaps include the Shroud of Turin and the Medjugorje Six.
The common thread here seems to be that God has not just required faith by providing no evidence and demanding belief, but has indeed provided evidence to buttress belief and faith.
Nevertheless, in a workspace such as NASA, and other places too I would imagine, it would be inappropriate to be be expressing belief or compelling adherence to such in a way as described in the article quoted.
Nostradamus made lots of predictions too. With retrospect, it's easy to pick and choose which predictions you want to reference. You've left out all the predictions that were wrong. What do those say? I am blown away by your complete lack of understanding of everything you've attemted to use. Go learn science. I'm done with this stupidity.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
But when I tell some Christians that if God exists, he seems to work through processes that can be understood by humans, not miracles.
Actually, he does both.
"God told me to fire him. It wasn't my idea."
Table-ized A.I.
Apparently they were already "excepting" Jesus. Allegedly what he wanted them to do was accept Jesus.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
In fact both terms are complete garbage anyway since nobody can define "religion" or "physics" or even "geography", "history" or "art". The world can't be so simply partitioned and so to attack somebody in the name of one of these banners is just foolish.
And I haven't once said that "everybody's opinions are valid." If you disagree, by all means, disagree. But the way to disagree - if you claim to be the standard bearer for the intellect - is not through mockery. It is through calm, rational discourse with the person who is espousing ignorant ideas.
Let's look at the fallout from Rush Limbaugh's comments on Sandra Fluke. Do you think he's "learned" anything, and become less ignorant, from his public shaming? Not one whit. His comments after days of mockery: "I acted too much like the leftists who despise me. I descended to their level, using names and exaggerations. It's what we've come to expect from them, but it's way beneath me."
Congratulations, you've just created a persecuted martyr. He doesn't believe what he said was wrong, he's paying lip service to the idea because the mockery has cut into his bottom line a bit. Is there anybody in the world who is surprised that he's not embracing the viewpoint of his opponents? And is it any surprise that this is the sort of rhetoric he embraces, when the self-proclaimed "right thinking" people proclaim that fighting fire with fire is the appropriate way to combat his ignorance?
If you care about reducing ignorance, you engage people in a rational, calm discussion. You don't call them names and hope that public shaming will magically "correct" their thinking.
But the point is this: the guy cannot be made not a racist. In some sense, his beliefs don't really matter. What matters is that they do not propagate. Wouldst thou that we be kind to racists for fear that they might feel oppressed?
People don't take for their own beliefs that other people hold but are ashamed of...
I think that you are working on the assumption that people can in fact change their beliefs. I don't actually think that. Or rather, I think that any such change is gradual and influenced by the Zeitgeist of civilisation: your beliefs converge towards those of the mainstream., and beliefs in the mainstream tend to converge with what can be verified/makes sense.
Thus, my position is that ideas should be attacked, those that survive, because they evolve good defences, or because they are very solid will survive, and the rest will join phlogiston and the divine right of Kings in the dustbins of history. Again, I am not advocating people, but ideas. If people take personally criticism of their ideas, well, too bad.
It would be too much of a loss in the value of public discourse if feeling offended was enough to silence those that would disagree with you.
True but you have a quite varied bunch of people that claim to have experienced or been witness to miracles, that is events that can't be explained in terms of the laws of nature as we know them. If you consider those eye witnesses to the work of God they're about on the same level as eye witnesses to aliens. It's not like the part from believing in God to believing in ID is the leap of faith, it's believing in an omnipotent deity in the first place. Once you believe that all other bets are off because you know... omnipotent.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
NO observable effect, ever.
Okay, just understand this is simply your blatant lie, and that many people reading this who -know- there has been an observable effect, simply know it to be what it is--a blatant lie. Conveniently, it is also -impossible-, formally, for it to be other than a lie, because it is epistemologically impossible for you to review all people's experience, and note the -absence- of an effect, for all those people. This is a claim to psychic powers on your part. It is possible for you to know something. It is -not- possible, ever, for any topic, for you to know -nobody- knows, or has experienced, something.
I am not in the least claiming that prayer is non-testable. I have tested it, and thereby verified it. I think what you're missing is that, your hopefulness for it aside, there is simply no reason that a "test" must follow your requirements to be a test. This is simply your application of inapplicable criteria, given the domain, to make sure you could not get what you say you want to get. If you have a hypothesis that an employee is stealing from you, and you test it by installing a webcam, it is in -no way- necessary for a third-party to be informed of this, or for it to be a replicable situation, for a validating test to have absolutely occurred. Facts are a wider and distinct domain from laboratory scientific method. This negatively impacts the status of facts as facts, in no way.
Sorry, I'm used to the recognized actual fallacies of philosophy--not made-up ones. Is "Appeal to Mass Opinion", per its made-up nature per google, supposed to correspond to an Argumentum Ad Populum? I suggest reading what I said, because I generally mean what I actually said rather than what you'd prefer I said. I in no way made a strict logical inference that it -is unquestionably true as a matter of logic- that my premise is true--rather simply that is is evidence of such, as it is. The considered opinions of the majority is evidence, though, indeed, not a definitive determination of truth-status in itself--had I actually ever said that.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"There are statements that can be made that cannot be reasoned with logical steps, that are nonetheless true or false." - Goedel. So fuck you with your implicit assertion that "illogical" is a synonym for "religious".
But Limbaugh would never have changed his opinion! The point is that he is becoming a liability for his network. Hopefully, he might be let go. And then there is one less strident voice adding only madness to the public discourse.
To use religious imagery, he cannot be saved, but his listeners may be saved from him. The ideas, the memes he carries become less potent, and have now a larger chance of disappearing. No one cares about Limbaugh, or no one should care. What is important is that his ideas die.
And, it is sad but true, ideas die when no one say them aloud. At least those not grounded in reality.
So... total cop-out then.
Fair enough. Come back whenever you get the... confidences... to back up your statements in the obviously called-for way.
And yeah, I already know massively more about science, and philosophy of science, than you do. Enjoy.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
I don't believe science and religion are mutually exclusive. ID is a shell game with literal Creationism as the pea. It's not religion. It's not science. It's a political attack on evolution. ID was designed to make teaching Creationism a politically and legally viable alternative to teaching evolution in biology classes.
As for Jesus, as much as I'd love to believe God Incarnate, I'm not convinced Jesus was Him. My belief in God isn't guided by blind faith. The faith I place in God is that I can trust Him, not whether he exists. I "believe" he exists because that seems to be the simplest explanation for the sort of miracles I've seen in my life. I know he exists the same way I know the sun will rise in the morning. Will I ever convince anyone else? No. Do I care to? Not really, no.
I'll probably get modded down, but I will point out 2 things:
You pointed out three things.
You _do_ know that a Catholic priest gave us the theory of the Big Bang, right?
This is completely irrelevant. It's a strawman argument. So what? That's like when Ann Coulter says Hitler was a vegetarian whenever she discusses vegetarianism.
a) You ignorant to assume that the Scientific Method is _mutually exclusive_ with Religion (the latter which is _supposed_ to be the Science of the Mind when it is not corrupted, but I digress.)
And
Have you _personally_ seen an electron?
Grammar failure there. Do you mean to say You are ignorant? Anyways, nobody says everything about religion and the Scientific Method it is mutually exclusive. There are some things that are mutually exclusive, but not all.
b) It is arrogant to assume your objective "faith" is somehow more valid then someone else's subjective faith who has a different set of assumptions. It would behoove you to spend less time criticizing others who don't think like you and focus on solving problems.
Anything that is testable is scientifically more valid than that which is not testable. We know that nobody can disprove the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but that electrons can be tested and disproved. Therefore, electrons are scientifically more valid than the Flying Spaghetti Monster, even though a regular layman can't test or disprove electrons.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
But you weren't arguing from truth. You were arguing from peer pressure.
"Truth" as that word is normally used hasn't much to do with science in the first place, science is about predictive models, which is why it's not so big of a deal to correct one slightly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The argument from implausibility that ID is, is because if your belief system says the world is 6,000 years old, evolution as an explanation for Nature is ridiculous on its face. Of course it's impossible for evolution to branch simple life out into a bush of various phyla if you've only got 6,000 years to do it in.
Scratch an IDer and you will find a Young Earth Creationist.
--
BMO
Allah is the same as God, it's the Arabic word for it, same as Dieu is French for God, look it up. So no need to repeat yourself.
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes.
Umm, wouldn't those fall under racial/genetic/color protections?
It wouldn't qualify under racial protections, as long as it is applied to everyone. Namely, you fire black and white people if they have green eyes, or are left-handed. Unless you can prove that it was specifically done to exclude or unduly affect a specific race. Like firing anyone with black hair, knowing that it will exclude almost all black people.
As for color, I'm willing to suppose that a court would likely totally agree that eye color fits this protected class.
Now, as for genetic? ... Eh... this is a harder one. The law was specifically written to prevent employers from gaining genetic material from people and analyzing it to make employment decisions. But there are a lot of things that people are genetically predisposed to that would be reasonable terms under which to fire someone, if you did not gain the information about their condition through genetic testing.
Let's presume for a second that psychopaths and sociopaths are 100% genetically determined (I know they're not, we're assuming things here for hypothetical purposes to construct a test case). Would it be wrong for an employer to then fire someone when they found out that they were a psychopath through the behavior of the psychopath? I mean, if the psychopath starts throwing people under buses (figuratively) and creating workplace tension, and conflict, then it would be perfectly reasonable to fire them. "But they are genetically determined to such behavior, so you can't fire them for that!" Indeed... I couldn't look at their genetic sequence and fire them just because they have the gene for being a psychopath, but that doesn't mean that I can't fire them for their behavior.
As such, firing people for being left-handed is an interesting question that a court would have to evaluate, and has not yet evaluated. I'm currently unaware of any suits that involve genetic information discrimination that was obtained through non-genetic analysis. But then I will admit that I haven't gone out of my way to look...
Also, one last matter. Say someone is genetically disposed to being apathetic, and unmotivated, and thus requires constant supervision to keep them on task. (Basal ganglia deformation.) More coloquially, people just label such people as "lazy". Should a company be able to fire someone for being lazy, if it is possible that their laziness is actually a neurological condition? (The current answer is that one must usually self-report a disability to the HR department in order to receive protection, and reasonable accommodations... but should a company have to make reasonable accommodations to support someone who is lazy, even if it is a neurological disorder?)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
The brothers were owner/operators.
It really is the same thing at this level. If they drove away the customer base by badgering them with religion, they'd be out of business, the same result as being fired: no more income.
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You realize that many of the beliefs you or I would consider "decent, right-thinking" beliefs today were, at one point, held by a small minority of people who did so secretively, and at great expense to their public image if they were found to hold them, right? Sexually active women were regularly branded sluts, whores, adulteresses; people who argued that gay people should enjoy the same rights as straight people were viewed as abominations in the sight of god; people who believed that black people deserved equal rights were viewed as crazy people who just didn't understand the white man's burden to educate and uplift the backwards and ignorant races of the world; people who doubted religion and the supremacy of the king, pope, czar, prophet... were excommunicated, and publicly shunned (or worse); The mainstream ideas of today were beliefs people were publicly shamed for holding to 200 years ago.
We were not "shamed" into accepting that other races are equal - we were convinced that we, as a society, were wrong. We were not "shamed" into accepting that gay people deserve equal treatment under the law - we were convinced that we, as a society, were wrong. And in many respects, that evolution of ideas continues today, and there will likely never be a perfect endpoint where "everybody believes in equality, and there's no such thing as racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. etc."
People change their minds when they are convinced they're wrong. Not when they're shamed into issuing a grudging apology and sent home to brood over how they've been wronged. In fact, public shaming has never proven an effective deterrent against adopting new ideas, even those that are iconoclastic in the current mainstream mindset. Calm and rational discussion is the way to combat ignorance. Mockery and shame simply provide the proponents of ignorance a convenient cover - "If you think you're so right, why do you have to attack people who don't agree with you? What are you so afraid of?" Don't give the ignorant that excuse, expose their ideas as empty and fraudulent, and their ideas will die.
I would fire the person in both of the above scenarios. Proper form would use M_PI as found in math.h.
They can fire you because you're left-handed. They can fire you because you have green eyes. (..)
As belief in the Loch Ness Monster is not a religious belief nor is it real or perceived { gender, sex, race, color, disability, age, genetic information } (...) it is not a protected status
Eye color is definitively genetic, I think left handedness too so one of those statements must be false.
Just because it is genetically deterministic does not mean that it is definitively protected. As originally designed, they would have to secure your genetic material and analyze it for the specific gene in order for it to fall under the original design of the law. The issues with "but it's genetically determined" weigh heavily, see the cousin post by me.
As a specific to your argument, there's some indication that homosexuality has some genetic predisposition, in that there is a statistically significant positive correlation between the sexual orientation of identical twins. Does that mean that sexual orientation is now a federal protected status, because it is partly genetically determined? (The answer is a resounding "yes", if they're scanning your DNA for a supposed "gay" gene, but the answer is a resounding "no", if they're just targeting you because you say that you're homosexual.)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
BZZT! Try again. There are LOTS of Intelligent Design crazies out there from all corners of the earth. and all kinds of religions.
The radical Christian version just happens to be the most loudly debated and gets in the news all the time. Please don't pretend there's any other reason you've even heard the term Intelligent Design.
If you're going to get your hate on, make sure you know who it is that actually believes in what you don't like.
This crap gets modded +5. Despicable.
This is like torture!!!!
Everyday, your co-worker brings bible, texts, videos.......
you don't want to be rude
Make yourself clear.......
But the person don't give up.......
Should have some protection mechanism......
I don't want anybody fired...
But my mental sanity has it's limits...
CITING YOU: ".............Quantum Theory is supported by all available evidence....................."
Man, you read too, way too much yellow pages. For all empty talk, there is still NO evidence supporting your blah-blah talking. I repeat: NO EVIDENCE. Actually, i am making double joke of you, but don't bother finding out what it is exactly. Keep reading yellow pages.
The Dover School court decision proved beyond a preponderance of evidence that ID was just repackaged Creationism, in order to cut ties with "religion" in order to get around a Supreme Court ruling that Creationism is religious dogma, and thus has no place in public education. The people who were "creation scientists" prior to the supreme court ruling are now "design proponents".
You speak of the honesty of ID proponents, but fail to acknowledge that ID wasn't even a thing until the Supreme Court ruled that Creationism was religious dogma, and thus cannot be taught in schools (outside of studies of religion). ID proponents that are pushing so actively towards dismissing the most well supported theory in science (beyond even the theory of gravitation, because the theory of gravitation lacks details), yet will rush to cut off connection to people who believe in alien design, rather than divine design.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Why does the scientist need to be converted at all?
Good question. “Salvation” is to be saved or rescued from the power and domination of sin in our life and from an eternity separated from God. Put simply, when born again Christians talk about being "saved", they're talking about being freed from the power of sin (I am not enslaved by sin any more) and being rescued from the ultimate consequence of sin (being eternally separated from God, ie hell, lake of fire).
Now as to the new born baby, the Bible does teach that all of mankind is born with sinful nature (tendency to rebel against God) because of Adam's sin. But we are only accountable for our own sins. When a person is too young to be aware of dishonoring their parents, stealing, or lying, etc, they're not accountable because "to whom much is given, much is required" and "the same measure you use to judge, you will be judged" (ie if you know enough to think of someone else as a lier, then you will be held accountable in the same way).
Some were yelling one thing, some another. Most of them had no idea what was going on or why they were there. Acts19:32
Apples and oranges, because the business of Catholic hospitals is not about health insurance.
Catholic hospitals are primarily secular in nature. If I go to St. Mary of the Holy Land of Virgin Blessed Heart hospital for an X-ray of a broken arm, I don't care if the technician is Catholic, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or Pastafarian. I just want the dang X-ray done. Furthermore, the contraception decision is simply that these primarily secular institutions cannot interfere with the individual health care decisions of their employees, who are (statistically speaking) most likely not Catholic (Catholics are only 23% of the US population). The contraception coverage issue is a business decision that mostly impacts the employee, and one's employer should have no say in it since it has no direct impact on one's ability to do one's job. That should be true even if the employer is religiously affiliated, provided that the main societal function of the employer is not religious. Note that I'm not suggesting employers can't make aggregate budget decisions regarding their benefits' packages. Catholic hospitals should (and can) work out those numbers as they see fit. (Curiously enough, covering contraception actually reduces costs for the employer, as that employee wouldn't have to take time off for, you know...having a baby.) Simply put, my employer should not be interfere with my private health care solely on the basis of a moral objection.
And the whole objection of the Catholic hospital paying money for contraception is a red herring. They're paying for it anyways. The only difference is whether they hand the money to their employees (who then forward it to the insurer) or do they pay it directly to the insurer. The end result is simply that the employee has to pay more without direct coverage. So, in essence, the Catholic hospital wants to fiscally shame their non-Catholic employees into following Catholic morality.
A more appropriate comparison would be whether or not a Catholic hospital would have to keep an employee who was handing out Christopher Hitchens books to co-workers.
Being religious doesn't necessitate being irrational.
Yes, it does. Perhaps you manage to be rational about some things but have failed to apply the methods of logic to your religious beliefs. If you did you would find it impossible to be a christian.
Basically, the way I think of it is this: the Young Earth Creationists are ignoring any scientific evidence that doesn't fit their faith; the IDers are trying to fit the evidence into the mold of their faith
IDers ignore evidence that doesn't fit their faith: in denying evolution, they're denying a lot of evidence.
At the very core of the idea of ID, there is no arguing with the premise, that evolution was sparked and guided by a superhuman power.
ID is that some features of life either couldn't have arisen through natural selection, or are best explained as not having arisen through natural selection.
Many (most? all?) IDers outright disbelieve that evolution could possibly result in the current complexity of life. They pull out "irreducible complexity", they claim complexity can only come about through intelligence, and so forth. These are actually falsifiable claims, just as YEC is.
He's a computer scientist! Every computer scientist think he's the most intelligent designer ever to have lived. That's the stuff NIH is made of.
Actually, in some way, you can think of him as being humble, admitting someone was more intelligent than him.
If he's a competent, intelligent programmer, then half a day playing with a genetic algorithm would be enough to convince him that evolution works. If he could claim the contrary after doing so, I'd doubt his sanity, his honesty and/or his intelligence.
Erm, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are by definition concepts that have not been fully explained yet. They're used to fill in gaps in hypothesized equations. So no, no one has seen Dark Matter or Dark Energy, and no one even pretends to know what they are. They call it "Dark" simply because it sounds more cool and more intelligent than "Unknown."
Far as the rest of your post, as others have mentioned, electrons etc are the result of reproducible experiments, religion isn't.
Religion, or a belief in a god, are not conclusions arrived to by logical thought, and your obvious outrage at the implications as such only strengthen my point. If you cannot logically arrive at a conclusion it is an illogical conclusion, pure and simple.
I got here through a series of tubes
When I see these "polarizing" types of stories I like to change the subject to see how tolerant and open minded people are. So a story about a black being unfairly treated I imagine a white being mistreated and see how the comments hold up. For this one, lets switch the ID guy with a homosexual and keep that in mind when reading the comments. Just make that small change in your head and read the comments.
Conclusion... Liberals are not tolerant, are extrememly disrespectiful of other people's beliefs, and are generally hate filled towards people that don't tote the liberal line.
You've hit the nail on the head and your post has made today's visit to slashdot personally worthwhile. It seems to me that only those with an axe to grind indulge themselves in "witty" attacks on religion or science (on slashdot it's usually the latter).
In fact both terms are complete garbage anyway since nobody can define "religion" or "physics" or even "geography", "history" or "art". The world can't be so simply partitioned and so to attack somebody in the name of one of these banners is just foolish.
Physics is the study of how the universe works at a fundamental level. Geography is the study of how geological processes work. History is a description of humanity's past, what happened in the past, why it happened, and so forth. That wasn't very hard.
...sounds like one annoying motherfucker.
And THAT is why he was fired.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I sincerely wish you were right. Because I think that if what you say is true, the world is a nicer place than I think it is.
Personally, I think that people get convinced through social pressure. Now of course, ideas evolve and are invented, and some stay, and others die. I believe that if an idea is true, in the sense that it explains the world and therefore is advantageous to people who hold it, it will survive and eventually become dominant.
Of course, it means that for a long period, these ideas exist and are held by the minority. But all the ideas of the enlightenment where born that way, and discussed violently, and ridiculed, and these ideas that were right survived and became dominant in western civilisation. And even at the time (actually, pretty much for as far back as we have significant bodies of literature), atheists were mocking theists. Dom Juan, the Dangerous Liaisons mock bigoted idiots. They have morals tacked onto them at the end, but are in many ways scathing criticisms of bigoted and small-minded people. Candide, by Voltaire is a criticism of the idea that there is a benevolent god.
I actually think we were shamed into doing the right thing for all the good examples you gave, because not doing the right thing became shameful. Being a sexist jerk is frowned upon. So is being homophobic/racist/xenophobic. Many people still believe those things/want to act upon their belies, yet they are shamed into not expressing them. In general, the good and bad is enforced by society.
And so the next generation is not exposed to people defending these ideas, and they disappear.
I respect your idealism, and I do believe in rational discussion. I just don't think it actually makes sense with a lot of people. And there is a single attitude that makes me really angry: "I don't know, you can't make me know, and it's my right not to know". To that, mockery is the only valid response, as discussion has been explicitly refused.
Were it that more people were like you.
As a side note, a debate is possible only if there is an agreed-upon framework to figure out the truth. Certain ideas are explicitly outside any such framework. They cannot be exposed as empty or fraudulent through logic.
Under general relitivity pi is a variable not a constant, if the gravitational well is strong enough a circular orbit around it will be less than 3.14... times the diameter of the orbit. Not sure if the effect around a black hole is strong enough to reduce pi to 3.0, but the effect for Earth is that the circumfrance of a circular orbit is about a centimeter less than it should be if pi was a universal constant.
Disclaimer: I don't think god lives in a black hole, I think the human authour just rounded it down for literary convienience.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
No she doesn't
http://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/0743286391
And more who would support belief more than atheism.
"The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres." --Albert Einstein
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298,00.html#ixzz1owehfaA6
http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Life-Universe-Walter-Isaacson/dp/0743264746/
"The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.".......... The two go hand in hand.
I think what's at issue here is whether or not he was trying to convince other employees that Pi == 3, even when they had told him they knew there was more to the number than that.
Or to use another analogy, he was going around the office telling people that they needed fuzzy dice hanging from their rear view mirror in order to keep elephants away from the office. Then he claims that his belief in this protective measure got him fired, where it's really that people were fed up with how he was conducting himself in the office.
The big question is: were there harassment complaints on file? Were others let go at the same time as him? Was there a legitimate reason given for letting him go?
My guess is he was downsized due to budget cuts, and was picked to go because he didn't get on well with others in the office (losing him would be less of a loss to the company than losing some other equally talented person).
Allah is the same as God
As a somewhat informed atheist, I must slightly disagree with this. For (almost) all Christian sects, God is three-in-one: the father, the son, and the holy ghost. Whereas it is a fundamental tenet of Islam that “Allah is one.” Being an unbeliever, I am in no position to attempt to explain the difference, but from the outside, it seems quite significant.
I wouldn't let anyone who believed in ID near signal processing code. How can you simultaneously understand information theory and believe in ID? Isn't 90% of it based on abuse and misrepresentation of information theory?
+1
People that think science is faith-based because they can't see electrons are hiding behind the real issue. Electrons can be tested and disproven, mathematics can be tested and disproven, and determining events that happened 5 million years ago can be tested and disproven, even though none of us were around.
Yes, you accept many scientific ideas on so-called "faith" because you don't want to test them yourself, but it's still possible to test scientific ideas and disprove them.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Cosmic Jewish Zombie Jesus, etc., cannot be tested and disproven, therefore they aren't science.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
Become disruptive at work, and you get fired. I'm sure if he had distributing Deepak Chopra DVDs the result would have been the same. He was making a nuisance of himself.
Beyond that, a workplace, even a government one, puts limitations on the exercise of your rights. It is not the commons and you're not welcome to take your soapbox and drop it down in the middle of the factory floor.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I've had many physics and engineering professors who ALSO believed in Intelligent Design. Should these people be fired simply because they believe there is a Creator the originated the Big Bang and Evolution?
I think your comment "demoted for rejecting the whole basis? ...Who would have thought," shows a definite prejudice against religious persons.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
How does Intelligent Design answer the why? Just about every ID document I've read (and I've read a few) specifically disclaim knowledge of who the Intelligent Designer is or its motives. The reason for this is, of course, because it's Creationism with all reference to God removed in the hopes that it could survive a First Amendment challenge when little Johnny Atheist's dad got pissed off at his son being taught by some nutjob school board with Of Pandas and People.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Do you really need some bibliography listed here? How about you take good math foundations, then learn about scientific method, then learn about quantum theory, then see how physical chemistry and atom theory follows from quantum theory, then go to organic chemistry, chemical bond theory, then learn about biology, cell theory, genetic and molecular biology, evolution, learn about diversity of life, astrobiology.
Yes, I've done that (well most of it - I hold Master of Sciences degree from Cambridge University). And yet I also believe the claims that the Bible makes about itself, about God, and about us. I believe that the historical authenticity of the text stands up to rational scrutiny. And I don't see any of the things you've mentioned as being contradictory to it. Exactly which religion is disproved by tectonic plate theory?
It is important here to distinguish between the core beliefs of the religion (and I'm going to speak specifically of Christianity, i.e. what the Bible says) versus the traditions, practices and interpretations of strictly human origin (dogma as you put it). Somebody else mentioned Galileo. Yes, he came into conflict with the church authorities when he showed that Earth was not at the centre of the solar system; but it wasn't a "disproof of religion" as the Bible doesn't make that claim. The suggestion that it did came partly from tradition of the prevailing mindset, and partly from an excessively literal reading of verses in Psalms or Ecclesiastes which say things like "the sun rises". (How can I say that one interpretation is excessively literal? Psalms is a songbook. The Bible is a collection of about six different types of literature, and you can identify the bits which are narrative and can be taken pretty much at literal face value, and the bits which are poetry and a more metaphorical approach is justified. When it says "the sun rises" in Psalms that's no more intended to be a definitive statement of relative motion, than when Rolf Harris sang it).
Not to say that all dogma is wrong - to fully understand the Bible would be more than a life's work, so I'm glad that people have given me a useful shortcut by summarising the flow of it. But I don't accept their words blindly - I check it for self-consistency, for consistency with the primary source (the Bible), and for consistency with my experience and understanding of the way the universe works - including my scientific training.
You claim "religion [...] makes a virtue out of accepting dogma" (and maybe some religions do - it's difficult to argue against such generalities) but mine doesn't, and I certainly don't think that's a biblical principle. On the contrary, there are number of biblical examples where people, on hearing something from their religious leaders, are commended for taking a sceptical (dare I say, evidence-based reasoning) approach by checking up on it first to see if it's true. (Acts 17:11 is the first one that comes to mind)
And then there is belief in something based on no evidence. You could say, it is based on ignorance. This kind of belief is called faith.
No, I don't agree that those terms are equivalent. Faithful Christians are no more ignorant for believing in God, than an atheist is for not doing so.
Sorry for not responding to every point in your post, but I have a feeling that I'd be here all day if I tried. Can I suggest if you're genuinely interested in how I might justify my disagreement with your points of view, that rather than try to continue a long thread in here, could I point you to a video of an Authors@Google talk by Tim Keller (author of "The Reason for God") in which he expresses similar ideas much better than I can.
Incidentally, I'm not typing this with any particular aim or expectation of trying to convince you that the Bible is true. I'm just arguing that believing it is at least rational, and compatible with a scientific approach. If there were credible contradictory evidence then faith would be preposterous, but I am convinced this is not the case.
Well, just the other day I was talking with one of my Brothers in Faith about how the other people in my office would be tortured for eternity by noodley appendages for not believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and a few of our coworkers took offense. But I can't imagine why; it's the truth and nothing they do can possibly change it and so they should just accept it and live with the choices they made. The FSM is forgiving, and if they'd like to repent and give up their false gods and return to the fold there's nothing stopping them. Casual conversation about religion should be totally allowed at work, in courts, etc. and I don't know why most of you hell-bound heathens get uptight about it.
Hah, I read that as "geology". Fun fun.
Yes, you demote people to 'give them a hint' if they're too fucking stupid to understand it after you 'pulled them aside'.
There is also a certain air of self righteousness and arrogance. These are highly off-putting character traits. If he feels obliged to share his religious views, he should consider working at a place where people believe the same things. Is there a church in his denomination that needs a person with his job skills. In such an environment of closed minds he should be happy as a pig in a wallow, and the rest of society can avoid the imposition of putting up with his uninvited opinions.
Sir, you win the prize to the best analogy of the day.
Why can't
Furthermore, (both for full disclosure as well as establishing a credibility baseline for this particular argument), I do fall into the category of someone who keeps to a fairly literal translation of the Bible where appropriate (poetry is poetry, parables are parables, literal-truth is literal-truth, and complicated-realities-explained-in-a-way-which-convey-their-truthful-essence-without-leading-people-into-confusing-irrelevant-technical-details-beyond-even-modern-science are complicated-realities-explained-in-a-way-which-convey-their-truthful-essence-without-leading-people-into-confusing-irrelevant-technical-details-beyond-even-modern-science).
Thank goodness I have the New International XML Version of the Bible with its convenient <parable>, <poetry>, <literal-truth>, and <complicated-reality-explained-in-a-way-which-conveys-its-truthful-essence-without-leading-people-into-confusing-irrelevant-technical-details-beyond-even-modern-science> tags, although I do wish they had abbreviated the last one in some way.
Religion, or a belief in a god, are not conclusions arrived to by logical thought, and your obvious outrage at the implications as such only strengthen my point. If you cannot logically arrive at a conclusion it is an illogical conclusion, pure and simple.
You are _still_ trying to attach this property uniquely to religion when it is a consequence of logic itself. The (logician) Kurt Goedel showed that there are statements that are true but unprovable in any logical system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Gödel#The_Incompleteness_Theorem (fuck you slashdot I can't be bothered to fix your umlaut shit)
I will put my "outrage" to one side and humbly hope that you take another look at your belief system.
I don't believe science and religion are mutually exclusive. ID is a shell game with literal Creationism as the pea. It's not religion. It's not science. It's a political attack on evolution. ID was designed to make teaching Creationism a politically and legally viable alternative to teaching evolution in biology classes.
In reality, it is an attack by a semiorganized group against anyone who dares not to follow their particular interpretation of the Bible (of course, suitable to be changed as it pleases/benefit them).
Their motto, as in the Middle Ages, is: "I tell you that God says this. You cannot challenge God (or if you do, you will be punished). So, I am right"
Why can't
Plus the idea of GOD adds no knowledge or understanding. Any and all philosophical questions which are answered with GOD generate equivalent questions with GOD substituted as subject.
This is the only argument I can think of against the idea of GOD because GOD is normally undefined in a discussion and not a primitive concept that any intelligent being intrinsically understands.
Christianity has the elegant yet infuriating solution of declaring GOD unknowable to man. As an extension, it implies that man cannot understand the world which is exactly what science is accomplishing.
In an effort to be more Christ-like I have told my two-year-old son not to play in the street (first with a clever picture-book I illustrated and left lying in his room and later by sending another clever toddler into his room to tell him not to run in the street, but that if he did and managed to return he would be forgiven) but I make no physical attempts to stop him from doing so. If he survives to the age of 18 I'll reward him with a well-endowed trust fund but otherwise he'll just get cremated.
Agreed, his actions were what got him fired, not the specific content behind them.
You're not alone in assuming I thought it was a wrongful dismissal considering the negative mods on the post...lol
I was just pointing out what I see as the hypocrisy of the religious right to want to have things their way when it helps them and scream when the same is applied against them.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Do you know nothing about advertising? If you don't buy my cars, chicks won't go with you. If you don't but my soap to clean your kids clothes, the other kids at the school will notice and they will lynch your sons....
A happy, fearless person is not a good customer. That has been known for millenia, here and in the Middle East
Now, about this "holy" book (and taxes and levies and everything else)... did you know that you are a sinner and that you will burn in Hell for Eternity?
Why can't
Atheism is the default position. You were born an atheist and had to be indoctrinated into a religion. Which one depends largely on where you were born (as I pointed out before). So, if you claim that you know something that the rest of us don't the onus of proof is on the side that makes the claim (see Celestial Teapot argument for more).
Besides it all comes down to some human mammal claiming to know the mind of god. They know precisely what god wants us to do, what he wants us to eat, on what days, who we may sleep with and in what position. Sorry, but some of us demand extraordinary evidence for such extra ordinary claims. Yet no evidence of any kind if offered.
You strike me as someone who never examined any of the arguments against your position. You do realize that bible is completely non-reliable non-historical, self contradictory text when it comes to crucial points, let alone minor ones. If you really care about that read something like "Jesus Interrupted" by a new testament professor at Chapel Hill. He does into much more detail than I can here. But suffice to say that there is absolutely no historical evidence that historical Jesus existed at all, the first historical reference occurs in first century CE but not directly to Jesus, but Chrestians, presumed followers of Chrestus. The earliest gospel was written in 70 CE at the earliest, and it was not written by any eye witness (it even says so itself). The others came much later. The mythical Jesus was made into a god much much later in 325 CE at the prompting of emperor Constantine who wanted to unify the empire and have one empire religion. At his prompting council of Nicea convened and created trinity and make Jesus into god incarnate. The rest is as they say history. All other religions were outlawed, evidence of their existence often destroyed, and this single minded culture and sense of entitlement continues to this day
But the biggest thing going against it is the required belief itself. We are all supposed to believe that god impregnated his virgin mother in order that he could die on the cross for what he condemned the humanity to and so he could make himself forgive the transgressions he invented, performed by the beings created in his own image. And his followers are required to eat his flesh, soul and divinity in a form of a cookie which magically turns into him after a few incantations. All that so that we could join him one day in a celestial North Korea, praising the dear leader incessantly, compelled to love someone we fear (essence of sadomasochism).
I am really glad there is no evidence for any of this, because wishing this to be true is wishing to live under dictatorship, wishing to be a slave really.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
You can have a God that works miracles, or you can have humans with free will. You can't have both. What's it going to be?
Catholic hospitals are primarily secular in nature.
In general understanding I would agree, however, given the recent controversy and Obama's 'compromise' I'd say that's pretty well in question now.
They specifically argued that because they are religious in 'founding' they should be able to choose what to do and what not to do regardless of employment law. Obama said "OK here's a different way so you won't pay for it", thus granting their argument's base of reason.
If I go to St. Mary of the Holy Land of Virgin Blessed Heart hospital for an X-ray of a broken arm
Talk about apples and oranges. The issue was with EMPLOYEES not with PATIENTS. PATIENTS already are denied care due to 'objections of conscience' and quite legally too. They have to be transferred somewhere that will provide the care, but St. Mary of the Holy Land of Virgin Blessed Heart is certainly not performing abortions for you.
Second apple - you used a standard medical procedure, a broken arm, to which just about nobody objects, to a controversial (to some anyway) procedure, abortion/contraception, that many object too.
My point is simple, if they take federal funds, they simply can't not provide the contraception coverage.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Physics is the study of how the universe works at a fundamental level. Geography is the study of how geological processes work. History is a description of humanity's past, what happened in the past, why it happened, and so forth. That wasn't very hard.
ok I walked right into that one, but that was hardly my point. Consider the Sistene chapel where art, history, an understanding of symmetry, biology, culture, religion, chemistry are all involved in its creation and even in our deconstruction of it through the modern eye. But do you really think that Michelangelo thought in terms of those meaningless labels?
Of course I understand that those labels usefully help us in teaching the next generation when there are too many ideas to fit in one persons head. But there is a danger that we start to believe that those labels offer a truth of their own and that we no longer need to examine an idea in its own right, just which "box" it goes in. Which then gives us carte Blanche to talk about "illogical religious maniacs" or "godless science geeks".
Which brings me back to my original point: there's no such thing as a universal definition of religion or science, not even close.
And this, folks, is why you shouldn't jump down the rabbit hole with a fundie. Especially one that intentionally uses horribly unclear language and plays word games, pretending that it's all an exercise in logic.
All reason has gone right out the window when you start hearing things like, "You've seen the evidence, you're just blind to it!" At which point it's not a scientific discussion, it's banging your head against a wall.
We're done here.
You strike me as someone who never examined any of the arguments against your position.
And you strike me as someone who uses ad hominem to bolster a weak argument.
Your "onus of proof", "knowing God's will" and "geographical default" objections are noted and argued in the video I already pointed to. And your version of the history of the New Testament is so inaccurate that even wikipedia is less cynical.
Your logic doesn't hold up. Many (but certainly not all) Christian sects believe that one of two things happen to each of us upon death: we go to Heaven if we're in good standing with God, or we go to Hell if we're not. It's a permanent condition of either eternal bliss or neverending torture. I would suspect that nearly all Christian groups who teach creationism also teach the doctrine of eternal, unchanging destination, and I therefore think it's completely reasonable to assume that Coppedge (the guy from the article) believed this.
In that scenario, what kind of a dick would Coppedge have to be to not try to warn his co-workers - some of them he presumably considered close friends after working next to them for years - that their current beliefs were putting them in danger of everlasting agony? If my house were on fire, I wouldn't choose whether to run in to save my children based on how smart they are. I'd do it because I love them and don't want them to be harmed, and I think you would, too. In Coppedge's case, that's almost exactly what he thinks that he's doing.
Note that I'm not defending his behavior. It's just that if you write him off as stupid for trying to share a likely deeply-held belief with the people closest to him, you're missing the whole point of his actions.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
So your entire argument that ACORN was corrupt was because on person in one office was found guilty of voter registration fraud? Mind you that's not the same thing as showing up and actually trying to vote with a fake identity, but rather filling out a form with a name like Daffy Duck. This because the employees were low wage workers, paid for the number of users they REGISTER to vote. While ACORN did have controls in place to flag potentially fraudulent registrations, and those were actually filed as required by law, they found that the system had flaws, but nothing to indicate intentional malice or to warrant criminal charges.
On a side note, they were in fact found not guilty. It's not that hard to find if you look outside of Faux News.
http://www.connecticutcriminaldefenseblog.com/2011/02/connecticut-acorn-found-not-guilty-of-voter-fraud.shtml
Although the actions of an individual may be criminal, they did not prove that ACORN was in any way attempting some systemic scheme to create voter fraud.
why would they fire them? they're more likely to get promoted to management...if they aren't already.
Sure, asking for evidence is "weak" argument. All I'm saying is we have plenty of evidence religion and god is man made, and plenty of science to explain how life and the universe can come about without supernatural involvement. Even Occam in 1300s CE England could figure it out before we knew any of the science.
What value are you getting out of clinging to the explanations that come from infancy of our species? Why aren't you confident enough in your faith to recognize it for what it is? Why can't you say, this is my faith, and I believe it despite the lack of evidence or evidence to the contrary. Why do the people who reject reason and evidence based reasoning still try to find some evidence and justification for their irrational beliefs?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
There is nothing in the least unclear about my language, or the in the least unclear in your own mind that you have no non-simply-knowingly-lying logical objection, or you'd make it.
Now, broad-brush dismissal of an entire thread of arguments and the person making it offered in lieu of actually addressing a single point meaningfully... wow. Never saw that one before. Original.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Honestly, Creationism is NOT the same thing as ID.
Nope. ID was created by creationists after the courts definitively ruled that creationism has no place in public schools since it's religion. ID is literally just a repackaging of the exact same stuff, but with overt religious references removed and "creation" replaced by "design".
Google the phrase "cdesign proponentsists" for more. Or look at this wikipedia page, which has that story and the general early history of the ID "movement".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Pandas_and_People
Creationism is a religious/philosophical stance that disregards scientific discoveries/claims that do not fit its view of the world. Intelligent Design, regardless of whether you believe in a god or whether you believe in evolution appears to be a genuine attempt to marry faith with scientific discoveries. Honestly, from my own research, they appear to be much more intellectually honest than most evolutionists.
Then you're not being very honest with yourself. Or your research is so shallow as to cast into doubt everything you say. There is nothing intellectually honest about the ID movement. Nothing at all.
Before I go much farther, I must admit that I don't really have much of a horse in this race.
Suuuuure you don't. (free tip for your future attempts: someone who honestly didn't have a horse in the race would never characterize real science as less intellectually honest than ID)
I care only that people are intellectually honest to themselves and others. Finding out today or tomorrow that the world DEFINITELY was created or DEFINITELY evolved from single-celled organisms won't really change what I do day to day.
That's great! OK, I can help you out with that. All life on this planet DEFINITELY evolved from single-celled organisms, using the process of natural selection. This has been proven to a ridiculous degree of certainty, especially in relatively recent times. Things were less certain several decades ago, but the ongoing revolution in DNA sequencing and analysis (and other advances in biochemistry in general) have established that common descent is the only plausible explanation for life as it exists today.
So I just don't really worry about it. However, living in a world where people make conclusions based on inaccurate information or unfounded beliefs DOES affect me every day.
That's great! So you'll be promoting science then? Science being the best known method for reducing the amount of inaccurate information and unfounded belief in the world? Sure, it's not perfect, but it has a pretty damn good track record compared to all the alternatives!
From my own research and reading, I can see merit in Intelligent Design methodology.
Oh... Guess you won't be promoting science then. Sadface.
Granted, I assume that all schools of belief are going to subject to some amount of bad science that should be weeded out (hopefully :/ ) over time, so anecdotal instances of bad players shouldn't sway me (I'm human...I'm sure no matter how careful I am I will always have bias), but persistent covering up of facts or promoting of bad science should be a sign that something is amiss.
Oh. Well then, you should convert to the science side, because the ID side is rife with people still repeating ancient long-debunked nonsense as if it had ever been relevant at all. Literal liars, because they routinely and undeniably lie about what science and scientists say about evolution etc., in order to have a strawman to knock down. And yes, we really know they're lying, not merely confused, because they've been called out about their lies countless times. They just keep on using them! Nothing bad ever gets weeded out in creationism / ID, because the purpose isn't to find out the truth,
In many (most?) states you can be "let go" for no reason at all. Not liking your hat today is a perfectly legal reason.
Obviously this isn't done very often, and no big corporations typically allow that sort of capricious at will severance, largely on the grounds that either A) if you are doing it you're simply a bad manager or B) fearing they will later discover that the hat was a yamaka*.
*so to speak; the point being that not likely you today (the at will employment termination) can't be used as a thin veil for racial or religious discrimination
Well; easily enough handled:
Him: "Would you like to come to church with me?"
Me: "No, but I will come in your hand."
Okay I kid. A little. Oh, but not much.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sure, asking for evidence is "weak" argument. All I'm saying is we have plenty of evidence religion and god is man made
No, the weak arguments are the misrepresenting the origin of the New Testament, the blind assumptions about my background, the claim that atheism is a default, the ignoring of documents dated earlier that you claim, and the gross lampooning of the intent of religion.
Asking for evidence is where we came in, when you asserted that "science is constantly proving religion wrong" and I asked what you meant. Nothing you've said since has backed up that initial claim.
people who reject reason and evidence based reasoning
Sorry, was that supposed to mean me? Please, just read the first paragraph of my first post again.
their irrational beliefs?
Do you not see that you are claiming the very same position of superior understanding that you're telling me I'm not allowed to have?
You have attempted to establish a false equivalency of trust. Unfortunately for you, in one epistemology--science, questioning is encouraged. In the other--christian superstition--questioning is actively discouraged. One method is known to be good for determining facts, the other not so much. So, no, it is not at all "arrogant" to accept facts coming from certain quarters as more reliable as facts coming from others. One faction is genuinely reliable; the other has an imaginary sky friend. Come now. Rilly.
[We can't observe the magical-thinking existence of "cures" based on someone praying to a dead carpenter on a stick.}
Yet we have:
"Among the best-known accounts by Catholics of faith healings are those attributed to the miraculous intercession of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary known as Our Lady of Lourdes at the grotto of Lourdes in France and the remissions of life-threatening disease claimed by those who have applied for aid to Saint Jude, who is known as the "patron saint of lost causes".
The Catholic Church has given official recognition to 67 miracles and 7,000 otherwise inexplicable medical cures since the Blessed Virgin Mary first appeared in Lourdes in February 1858. These cures are subjected to intense medical scrutiny and are only recognized as authentic spiritual cures after a commission of doctors and scientists, called the Lourdes Medical Bureau, has ruled out any physical mechanism for the patient's recovery."
Yes,other studies as described elsewhere show varying results as the list of articles found here describes
http://onlinesurgicaltechniciancourses.com/2010/25-intriguing-scientific-studies-about-faith-prayer-and-healing/
So your entire argument that ACORN was corrupt was because on person in one office was found guilty of voter registration fraud?
Math not your forte, huh? 7 != 1. That's also NOT the "entire argument". There was fraud, failure to meet grant requirements, failure to account for spending, failure to follow agreements.
On a side note, they were in fact found not guilty.
That's ONE case in ONE state. Out of hundreds of offices that received $48 million in public dollars, most of which went to primarily partisan activities. If, say, Tea Party Coalition of America got $48 million in Federal money and couldn't say how they spent it, would you be like "Oh, that's not an issue because only 7 people plead guilty to crimes, and the organization was acquitted, so it's all good!"???
they did not prove that ACORN was in any way attempting some systemic scheme to create voter fraud.
But what is CLEAR is that they were clearly involved in systematic fraud, using taxpayer money for partisan electioneering, that went so far that some people indicted and plead guilty of criminal misconduct, while others were sanctioned with civil penalties, and MANY were cut off for failing to account for the spending of Federal monies.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Do you actually have any evidence for any of your claims? Do you know who wrote the new testament? And in the end it completely does not matter. No amount of textual evidence can ever prove existence of god, Jesus, his resurrection (nor does his resurrection prove his teachings are right).
But since you say you are a christian, care to explain why? Why aren't you a Muslim or a Jewish for example? What evidence made you a christian? Care to show it to us?
Did god create the earth and the universe? Did god create humans? In the present form? Does the sun move around the earth (it says in the bible it does, and even more god paused the sun's motion around the earth so a certain person could finish its work)? Etc? Any physical or metaphysical claim made by religion is false. Are you willing to look at the evidence or are you going to remain willfully ignorant?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Yes, they are. We are terribly designed.
There are enormous flaws that kill millions every year. (example: Why do we eat and breathe through the same tube? An intelligent designer would make 'em separate and people wouldn't choke to death)
That in and of itself proves IDers are stupid.
Um, the latter, definitely. Because it would be more successful. Targeting those who are least likely to be convinced by your viewpoint is going to net you the least converts.
The enemies of Democracy are
What evidence made you a christian? Care to show it to us?
No, I'm not going to. Because you're not really interested, you just want to have an argument.
I'll give you my evidence for _that_ claim:
Does the sun move around the earth (it says in the bible it does
I already talked about this in my first big post to the thread - just search for Rolf Harris. If you were actually the slightest bit interested in reading anything I write, you'd have known that already.
I knew I should have given up on this thread when you brought up North Korea. Does Kim Jong-un have a Godwin equivalent whom I can invoke?
Erm, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are by definition concepts that have not been fully explained yet. They're used to fill in gaps in hypothesized equations. So no, no one has seen Dark Matter or Dark Energy, and no one even pretends to know what they are. They call it "Dark" simply because it sounds more cool and more intelligent than "Unknown."
Er, no. I'm sorry, that's just a terrible summary of dark matter.
1. It sounds like your "fill in gaps" sentence is you trying to say that there are new equations that need DM/DE. If that's what you intended, no. The origins of DM/DE are that there are galactic observations which don't make sense in light of known physics. One of the candidate theories to explain this is that there exists "dark" mass and/or energy which is not visible in telescopes.
The physics equations in question are not mere hypotheses, they're among the best tested pieces of human knowledge which have ever existed. Of course, this being science, people haven't restricted themselves to not questioning them. It's just that none of the theories which arose from questioning conventional theories of gravity have been as successful at explaining things as dark matter. So far, anyways!
2. The lack of visibility is why it's called "dark". It's not about trying to sound cool, it's literally because dark matter, if it exists, doesn't emit or reflect visible light, or any other part of the EM spectrum. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to interact with conventional matter except through gravity.
3. Recent observations have made a good case for dark matter existing, without explaining what it is. Google "bullet cluster" for more. The short version: gravitational lensing by a very large and invisible mass has been observed.
You know what's despicable? Trying to pretend that the U.S. ID movement (you know, what TFA is about and what the GP was clearly posting about) is not inextricably tied to fundamentalist, right-wing Christianity. "Intelligent Design" didn't even exist as a phrase in common use until Christian creationists in the US invented it. It is literally an artifact of them trying to repackage Christian creationism without quite as much religion, hoping to slide it past the courts who had struck down their earlier overtly religious attempts.
So please, take your fake outrage elsewhere.
cockamamie :-)
David Coppedge was not fired because he believed in a "tin foil consiracy theory", he was fired because after he was warned off the record not to harass his co-workers about their religious beliefs after his co-workers expressly told him to stop, after he was warned on the record not to harass his co-workers about their religious beliefs after his co-workers expressly told him to stop, after he was demoted for harassing his co-workers about their religious beliefs after after his co-workers expressly told him to stop, he finally fired because he continued to harass his co-workers about their religious beliefs. David Coppedge deliberately with malice of forethought is using the legal system to push his religious beliefs on everyone else. He, like the rest of his ilk, are the Christian equivalent to the taliban.
Isn't the core belief of Christianity some kind of "people can come back from the dead" thing? Jewish zombie anyone? Christianity is irrational if it holds this belief at it's core.
I agree. We don't need those things, but I was talking about the need for a Savior to forgive us for our sins. I know it's offensive to the perfect people out there. After all, what business does Jesus have saving jerks like me when he should be high fiving morally perfect guys like you who have it all figured out. Don't worry about it.
Dear offensively smug jerk who knows he's "saved" from something not even described in his religion's primary text (*) just because he bows and scrapes before a petty and immoral (**) sky daddy who does actually appear in said work of fiction,
Please stop lying by misrepresenting critics of religion as people who are claiming they're perfect. We know perfectly well that not believing does not automatically make us paragons of virtue, common sense, or decency. We merely recognize that the solution religion offers for this problem isn't a solution at all.
Thanks,
An Atheist
* - Seriously, hell isn't in there. Not in any recognizable form.
** - See: old testament. In particular, Deuteronomy, though there are plenty of other morally repugnant things there. Read your holy book thoroughly, it'll deconvert you if you really think about its implications.
Just an observation, but you've only ever made one post - this one - and your account is minty fresh. Sock puppet much?
Hate the idiocy, not the idiot.
Sure, blind use of labels is dangerous. You see it all the time in politics, and it gets really old really fast. But labels, and words in general, often do actually mean something. Science is a word with an actual meaning. It's not 'whatever I deem it to be', it's a system of discovery through empirical observation.
'Religion' is pretty damn fuzzy, that's true, but I've yet to see one that's based solely on empiricism. If there's a scientific religion, then the edge of blurry.
In any case, Unknown Soldier is arguing that the man's rejection of empiricism and embrace of subjective experience is as valid as the opposite. Whatever the case, that type of belief system is obviously not a scientific one. There's no grey there.
All those people had something else in common: when they spoke up, they would be severely (and often violently) repressed. We're not there yet, but if you look at recent cases of just simply speaking up for your rights (google Jessica alhquist) we see that mocking the willfully ignorant isn't that bad.
>NASA isn't just about flying rockets into space.
Yes, its core mission today is to build up Muslims' self esteem. They invented the number 0, after all.
.. are violating harassment laws.
Any talk about religion at work is considered HARASSMENT by definition. It is extremely uncomfortable to be around religious fanatics at work .... just as bad as being around a sexually explicit person. The worst part is that they become hostile and agresive when you respond to their religious crap ... which can easily be turned against you, even when you are the victim of the harassment.
Base on the story, it sounds like the guy's co-workers, management and HR had enough of the religious BS and gave the idiot the boot.
... is demoted for rejecting the whole basis, or showing that he has a severely flawed understanding?
Who would have thought.
Ok, I used to work with this guy... and I doubt his firing had anything to do with his religious beliefs. He was lead sys admin and pushed Cassini to use Sun servers instead of Linux when the rest of JPL was going to Linux because Linux was much, much cheaper... and he kept pushing Sun as the more established and safer bet long after it was clear to everyone else that Sun was going under. He kept pushing Sun even when it was clear that the Linux workstations available at the time were faster... Speed that would have been important for anomaly recovery scenarios... JPL laid off like 200 people last year, he made mistakes that cost the project millions of dollars and also had HR complaints about harassing coworkers... is it any wonder that he got on the layoff list.
Siddhartha Gautama aka The Budda aka Buddha is not a deity. The Buddha was simply a human being like all other human beings.
Buddha means "enlightened one".
One respectfully honors the memory of The Buddha but one does not worship The Buddha. Generally.
For the majority of Buddhists, it is not a religion, it is a philosophy.
Just sayin.. :-)
why would they fire them? they're more likely to get promoted to management...if they aren't already.
I would tell people to mod this funny, but honestly, it's one of those things that is no longer funny once you realize that it's true. :(
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
/sign
Thank you for reminding us that we don't have to suffer fools forever. We can, and should, insist on a slightly higher standard.
Sorry, but if you are going to describe intelligent design, at least use the definition that proponents of intelligent design use, rather than opponents.
The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
"It's part of a pattern. There is basically a war on anyone who dissents from Darwin and we've seen that for several years," said John West, associate director of Center for Science and Culture at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute."
--
WRONG. It's a war on anyone who crams their beliefs down others throats. It's a war on those who don't respect that other people MIGHT have a different opinion and not want to discuss such subjects for fear of oh, say LAWSUITS?!! i.e. leave it at home.
I should have attached my last post here. West is a perfect example of someone who thinks rejecting his beliefs is persecution.
Or, given that he works for DI, I'd guess that he's just cynically playing that card for the benefit of the True Believers, who are eager for an explanation as to why ordinary people reject their "obviously true" superstitions and supporting pseudosciences.
'
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The key concept behind 'Intelligent Design' is that someone or something had to create a plan and assemble the first few units which then began self-replicating and evolving based on the conditions they were living in.
And the arguments they offer to support that notion are utterly specious.
Why should the theory of biological self-assembly be the only explanation considered scientifically viable?
It's the only explanation out there that actually has explanatory value, while simultaneously conforming to observable facts.
You're welcome to introduce a new one, but the kind of dishonest arguments peddled by the Discovery Institute are not going to fly in *any* field of science.
Recent self-assembly theories have attempted (desperately) to identify certain rock structures surrounding deep ocean thermal vents as a possible substrate for self-assembly but any close examination of that mechanism makes it appear as so much scientific hand-waving due to problems with sequence, complexity, protein chirality, length of time needed, etc. making the Intelligent Design theory appear to be well-substantiated in comparison.
There is no Intelligent Design theory. There's just a collection of anti-evolution arguments that would only fool someone who is (a) ignorant, or (b) unskilled at critical thinking.
It's rhetoric - dishonest rhetoric - not science. It was invented as a wrapper for creationism to make it superficially look like science after the SCOTUS ruled that teaching creationism in public schools violates the Establishment Clause.
It's also propaganda for creationists, to make them think their Iron Age myths are "really true, because they're supported by SCIENCE!"
Human arrogance appears to exclude any extra-terrestrial origin based on nothing but 'We don't need no stinkin' outsider doing creation.'
Since the rise of the modern scientific mentality, religious nutters have been claiming that anything we don't know a natural mechanism for must be God's work. Apart from the logical fallacy inherent in that, we keep discovering natural causes for stuff that was formerly unexplainable. That "god of the gaps" view should have died in 1828, when urea was first synthesized from non-biological substances.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's not incumbent upon a theory to provide its own hypotheses.
Never in my life have I seen the confusion about what a scientific theory is stated so strongly and succinctly.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
NASA does research into exobiology, as well as areas of science which depend on the Earth/Solar System/Universe being old, such as cosmology, geology, geophysics, climate change and so on. Everything in science informs every other thing in science, which is why evolution-deniers are sometimes-to-often deniers of other areas of science.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
As a somewhat informed atheist, I must slightly disagree with this. For (almost) all Christian sects, God is three-in-one: the father, the son, and the holy ghost.
I think you may have missed the point. Christians who speak Arabic do refer to and address their deity as "Allah", and Muslims who speak English do call their deity "God". The same is, incidentally, true of Hindus.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The first amendment also rules that government must not promote a religion. And allowing someone to badger his coworkers with religious speech at work in a governmental agency could certainly be constructed as such.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The guy carrying the book will do that for the book. The book is like the force, it gives you power over the feeble minded.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It wouldn't qualify under racial protections, as long as it is applied to everyone. Namely, you fire black and white people if they have green eyes, or are left-handed.
I fail to see how "green-eyed" people are any less of a race than "dark-skinned" people. If you get racial protection for having brown skin, why shouldn't the same protections apply for having green eyes? Because it's a different organ?
Indeed... I couldn't look at their genetic sequence and fire them just because they have the gene for being a psychopath, but that doesn't mean that I can't fire them for their behavior.
The only argument I see that prevents you from firing someone over their behavior is if they have a disability. Now, if you started classifying "psychopath" as a disability (which may not be completely unreasonable) then you would have to start giving them special treatment/consideration as an employer.
but should a company have to make reasonable accommodations to support someone who is lazy, even if it is a neurological disorder?
This is an interesting and open question which we shall have to deal with in the coming decades. As neuroscience finds more and more that we are literally "unable to control", do we need to start making special accommodations for those who are at a disadvantage? It seems impossible to level the playing field, and yet it also seems unfair not to.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Ah, but you can be fired for droning on and on about it and creeping out your co-workers. His beliefs are not an issue, but even in his own words he was pestering colleagues. Sounds like he was laid off for committing the sin of being the manager no one wanted to work under.
So the main lesson here? Don't be a missionary at work.
The only question should be how was he doing his job.
Not strictly. There are things besides your job that matter. You can be great at your job, but if you are worst asshole this side of Kansas to everyone during your breaks, that can be sufficient reason to fire you. Because work is also a social environment and everyone else there also has rights.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Intelligent design answers more the 'why' than the 'how' that Evolution does. It's entirely possible to believe both at the same time, in fact.
No, it isn't. And to say that is a strong clue that you haven't understood either.
Evolution does answer the why. Soundly, profoundly and finally. The answer is that there is no why. That's a bit tricky for us humans to wrap our heads around, because our brains are wired to look for agents, and thus intent, in our environment.
ID and evolution don't mix because evolution denies ID the basic assumption it needs to work at all.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is America, right? Land of the free and all that?
Instead of whining to the courts (aren't all the christian right nutjobs for less government involvement?) he should grow some balls and go and prove that he's right in the true american (capitalist) way:
Start up his own company.
Beat NASA at their own game.
Prove them that he is right and they are wrong.
In other words: Build rockets based on faith, propelled by belief and guided by god.
When he successfully lands a rover on Mars where all the parts are based solely on faith and reject science in every design principle, I will immediately convert to christianity.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Its a new account. My other account is Obble. slashdot really doesn't like my opinions hence I get -1 troll status at first post and therefore censored. I am very surprised to have 2 in rating as I usually just get down voted into oblivion by people with other more common strong world views.
John 11-35
The correct answer to how the universe was created is "I do not know".
If you say anything else, I'll judge you as a moron. It's as simple as that.
You obviously have little clue about theory of natural selection and everything that goes with it. Perhaps you would have a better argument if you actually understood how evolution works.
I disagree. Please to any error in my statements?
The Theory of Natural Selection basically states that if a mutation helps you in survival, you are more likely to mate and the helpful mutation will propagate, which will eventually lead to great changes to the specie over time.
*I agree. The degree of change is limited to the variation in the species. Selection only picks out what is already there. Sometimes the change can be great, e.g. Great Dane vs chiwawa, but they are still both dogs.
There is nothing in this theory that says ALL mutations are helpful. I don't know where you got that idea from, but perhaps not drinking from the ID kool-aid will help you in that endeavor.
You are correct, But evolution requires a change agent and Natural Selection does not cut the mustard. In all it's flavors, e.g. specification with a separated population, (like flys in hawaii) are still just Natural Selection which only picks from pre existing information. Selection by definition filters information so the geane pool of the creature is lesser more specified. (thus less able to adapt later on) The only change agent in town now for "goo to you" is mutations.
There is no such a thing as bait and switch in science.
I agree, but if your terms are not well defined, then the layman will get things mixed up. Hence I try to explain the difference between Natural Selection (Survival of the fittest & proven), to Evolution (as in "goo to you", *not proven (*not counting devolution which ID and Creations agree with.)) Tell me, if someone came up to you in the street and ask what was evolution, would you say the theory of creatures changing? or the theory that everything came from a single cell? Because if you said evolution is the theory of creatures changing, that would make me an evolutionist. :-O
Either your theory is supported by evidence or it isn't. ID has no evidence nor a way to test it. It is not science. Evolution is a fact, Theory of Natural Selection is a well proven theory.
I would have to disagree with you here. With ID, they show examples of complex structures requiring all components to be working for it to exist and without there being any in-between forms for them to work therefore evidence of a designer. With evolution they require everything to happen by chance but Natural selection will remove the unfit half baked structures long before they would be established. Please show me evidence in a lab for evolution that is repeatable. The best example I know about is when for 30 years over 30,000 generations of bacteria were bread and through a 3 point mutation, they gain the ability to process citrus acid as a food source. The problem here is that that doesnt prove evolution as it actually broke a geane were they could already process citrus acid as food in an oxygen free environment. So NS favorited the defect but the gene is now stuck "on" making it less fit compared to the wild cussons. You might disagree with the evidence that ID has but it still there. Saying it isn't science, well how about evolution? it dogmatically chooses a materialist reason over logical reasons. Tell me, is you see a watch in the beach, would you say it's just wind and rain that caused the silicon and glass to take shape or would you say some kid dropped it there? saying something is design is a logical conclusion, rejecting a conclusion before you hear the evidence on the basis of a belief (materialism) would make you as bad the creationists :-)
John 11-35
I am a devils advocate and serious. I hate when a belief is passed off as science and then used to bash other opinions. So I am just pointing out the flaws in the science of evolution. Trying to show that the beliefs in it makes it a religion in itself. You may disagree with me, that is fine. I just want to raise the point that there are other serious opinions in logic other than we are just all mistakes of the universe. Most evolutions never hear an informed opposing view. Cheers.
John 11-35
'Religion' is pretty damn fuzzy, that's true, but I've yet to see one that's based solely on empiricism. If there's a scientific religion, then the edge of blurry
But isn't that exactly what religion attempts to do, come up with an explanation of the real world based on empirical observations? Whether it is the Elemental forces of paganism or the poly-gods of Greek mythology, man looked at the world around him and sought an explanation. Yes we think many of these explanations don't usefully model the world - there are no fire or water spirits - and so we see that those explanations have mostly fallen out of favor. That looks similar to a property that we usually attribute exclusively to "science" albeit at a much slower pace. Maybe in a thousand years time most of the planet will believe in just one or zero "gods".
Why the slow pace of change? Well I guess there are many dominant personalities, vested interests and much power at stake with movements such as christianity. And also where large numbers of people are involved it can be hard to change that momentum. But as we've seen changes do happen, but not because of some idea that is owned by "science", but because of rational human thought, bloodshed and personal sacrifice that is part of the human condition. Whatever ideas we have placed exclusively in the boxes labelled science and religion, runs as a thread through all of us. We knew this as recently as a century ago when learned people were much more all-rounders, but because of our obsession with division of labor, we have long since forgotten this.
And lest you think that "science" is exempt from irrational conflict here are some counter examples. Isaac Newton famously tried to eradicate the work of Robert Hooke, to the extent that there are no portraits left of him. Poincare wanted to abolish much of Cantors ideas on infinite numbers. And look at the opponents of string theory who deny that it is based on empirical discovery at all? No, empirical observation and discovery is open to wide interpretation and doesn't belong exclusively to some box called science.
"Religion bad, science good" or vice versa is quite literally, meaningless.
Also, I'm not using two different terms for evolution, there is no trick and I am appalled that you try to state that. That mutations are not often/usually beneficial is not a surprise or a hidden agenda. Nor is it that they are always passed on nor dominant. It's not a conflict. It's pretty damn obvious actually. Of course, no one, and certainly not I, claimed that all mutations are beneficial. I'm very confused that you even took it that way and am left to wonder what your agenda really is.
On one side, evolution, you have natural selection leading to the selection of genetic mutations. It's verifiable, testable and the theory fits the available evidence.
I read that line above and though you are using the term evolution in two different ways. You used evolution as in "Natural Selection" in an attempt to prove "Goo to You" evolution. Many people do this. I was just trying to show that this line alone isn't showing evolution, just features of natural selection. ID doesn't have anything against Natural Selection. It is required to explain all the different variations of life on earth. ID uses the first line to explain the world and your right that ID and creationists belief that mutations dont lead to a new "kind".
John 11-35
This whole argument has been iterated many times before. I feel one can only really assume a god exists. It is impossible to know. For one usually defines god as something that cannot be known and something that is outside our perspective, as a whole. The whole spiritual world cannot be known because it cannot be seen, measured or detected. So for arguments sake it's best to leave it out entirely. For we can only ever speculate. This is my problem in it's entireity. So many things have to be speculated on. An argument made for a god can be applied to any god.
---
This guy can believe all of the cockamamee(sp?) ideas he wants to, and shouldn't be fired for it.
Like gay/black people are subhuman? Well, he can believe it, but saying it in the workplace is unacceptable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I didn't mean to state that you trying to deceive, you seem genuine in your comments. please forgive me if I offended you, my words are not meant to insult you or put you down.
John 11-35
So are tying to say that religion is logical and true even though it is completely and totally unprovable in the purest sense of the word? Who's being irrational now? I think you're hiding behind an argument not intended for your select purpose to try to prop up a complete lack of evidence. Your anger at me positing so only furthers my point that religion and religious people are not reasonable or logical.
I got here through a series of tubes
I was very clear in differentiating evolution from abiogenesis. The "goo to you" is abiogenesis to evolution.
Secondly, this is the first result I find on "Goo to you" on google.
Mutations, adaptations and changes always result from a loss of existing genetic information. They never add new information. Evolution has never been shown anywhere in all of the fossil record. In fact, just the opposite: No transitional fossil forms have ever been found! Ever wonder why? Answer: Evolution is a lie! It's the man-made fairy-tale concocted for those who don't want to believe, or refuse to believe, that they were created.
Is that what you mean? Because the above statement is false. Mutations can and have been shown to add new information. And this link is 11 years old. Not that it's outdated, it's showing that 11 years ago there was information on the web showing the above quote as wrong:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html
I spent a year in Thailand, a devoutly Bhuddist country, so yes, I know that he was not a deity, he would be more like Muhammed than Jesus (AFAIK Christianity is the only religion with "god born as man"). But Bhuddism when I was in Thailand certainly WAS a religion. In fact, males in Thailand are expected to spend a year in the Bhuddist priesthood. What other kind of organization besides religions have priests?
Muhammed wasn't a diety, either, would you say that Islam isn't a religion?
Free Martian Whores!
I'm not sure i completely understand how you got
handing out religious literature at work and demanding his coworkers and subordinates read it
from
David had this reputation for being a Christian, for being a practicing one. He did not go around evangelizing or proselytizing. But if he found out that someone was a Christian he would say, 'Oh that's interesting, what denomination are you?
or
He is also a board member for Illustra Media, a company that produces video documentaries examining the scientific evidence for intelligent design. The company produces the videos that Coppedge was handing out to co-workers
It definitely doesn't look like he demanded his coworkers "read" that dvd. Oh, you didn't read the article did you?
As a completely misinformed athiest you are 100% incorrect. God is indeed Allah; the Jews, Muslims, and Christians sare the old testament, which the Jews call the "Torah". We all worship the same God, the God of creation. The son is Jesus, who came to pay in blood for all the nasty things you and I do. The Holy Ghost is God within us; see "communion".
Free Martian Whores!
I never once said that religion is both logical and true. I simply said that in any system there are statements that are true and statements that are false that nevertheless _cannot_ be proven with any series of logical steps. True for "mathematics", true therefore for "science" and true for "religion". So you can't single out "religion" as being somehow illogical. It may be, but it certainly wouldn't be exceptional.
Through your original quote from that esteemed philosopher Dr House you seek to portray religion as a synonym for "that collection of ideas that cannot be reasoned". As Goedel proved there many collections of ideas that cannot be reasoned in the most watertight branch of human thought possible - mathematical logic.
BTW don't fall for the trap that so many do here which is to assume that "if you're not with us you must be against us". You cannot tell my religious stance at all from my post so on this occasion you would be mistaken to further entrench your belief based on your perception of it.
^^^Get a load of this racist douche.
The simple fact is that religion is, by definition a collection of ideas that cannot be reasoned, otherwise there would be no need for faith. While you may set forth an idea proposed by a single individual that may or may not be accepted by a wide variety of people you cannot apply those ideas universally to all subjects. Indeed there are a set of facts that must be accepted as true without justification, those facts are often empirical in that they can be observed. 1 is 1 as you can observe that 1 is 1 and the logic of it cannot be reasoned or disputed, but the same cannot be applied to a series of cryptic beliefs based on an easily disprovable book which is its self based on folklore and shaky history.
So while you think I'm singling out religion because of some bias, I'm not I'm doing it because the simple fact is that religion is not based on facts and reason, but on faith and feelings. There is no observable evidence of religious fact outside of its own special realm of reasoning and logic which do not coexist with actual reason or logic.
BTW the assumptions I'm making about your religious affiliation are based solely on the fact that no one other than a religious person would attempt to categorize religious logic in with math and science other than to justify their own doubts about an obviously flawed system of logic. Its not an "us vs them" mentality I'm pushing, I'm just trying to state what is obvious to so many and you became angry to the point of using profanity (not that I really give a fuck about that) but it showed a level of offense that can only be taken when one feels they are being attacked personally.
So for a rundown of the points:
Math - verifiable by outside observation based on facts
Science - verifiable by outside observation based on facts
Religion - not verifiable by outside observation and based on faith, fear, and myth.
I got here through a series of tubes
IF that is the case WhyTF does everyone want to point guns at each other?
I would posit that while these may have been the same deity in the olden days, that is no longer true.
The followers of $DEITY have changed the meaning enough to consider them different.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Can you provide even one specific one of those "all ways" in which it is "ridiculous"?
If it is the I.D. argument, that life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone, and that there must have been an intelligent designer instead, then it is logically obvious, that the designer must itself have been a subject that is at least as complex as a human being, since we do know, that despite our considerable complexity, we are still not complex enough to fully understand the complex process of creating life.
The next question to ask would be, where did that designer come from?
There are, essentially, only two possible answers:
1) It evolved alone
2) It was always there
[3) it was created by another designer, and similar possible answers, are really only recursive...]
If 1) is true, then this contradicts the original statement that anything of that complexity can evolve alone, and therefore, the original assumption, that there must have been a designer, is invalid.
If 2) is true, then if anything of that complexity does not even have to evole, but instead could simply have been there ever since, the original assumption, that there must have been a designer, is invalid again, because life could just have been there ever since.
As you can see, the idea of any kind of designer (where, essentially, nothing else than our definition of "life" would apply as well) who created life is really only recursive and introduces additional contradictions and questions.
We have no reason to believe in something simply because we can not absolutely rule out that it does exist (if we did, then the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not less plausible than any other idea of "God" - or do you have any absolutely valid proof that the Flying Spaghetti Monster could not have created everything? It is obvious, that you can never prove that something does NOT exist).
As long as noone comes up with an Intelligent Design theory that is more consistent than Evolution theory, I will of course not believe I.D.
I'm just trying to state what is obvious to so many and you became angry to the point of using profanity (not that I really give a fuck about that) but it showed a level of offense that can only be taken when one feels they are being attacked personally.
I am not black but I would be annoyed if I saw racist attacks on a black person. It's not logical (ironically) to conclude my religious slant based on the fact that I am opposing your point of view. Nor can you use how outraged you perceive me to be to make that conclusion.
What you have done is _define_ religion to be that collection of ideas that can't be justified and you can't use a definition as proof - that's the real path to hatred. I tried to help you by showing you that there are ideas outside of religion that also belong to that collection. Ideas from the world of mathematics and therefore science. In other words I'm not promoting religion, I'm "downgrading" your assumption that logic that drives science is on as solid a footing as you think. BTW there is no such term as "religious logic" that you use in your post, neither is there "scientific logic". There is just logic.
Take your assumption about the number 1. You might think for example that 1 + 1 = 2 right? Established rock solid fact? Well Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to do this in their Pricipia Mathematics publication. And Russell questioned this act of addition, this strange juxtaposition of two neighbouring entities. Godel then showed that that publication could not be proven to not have contradictions!
Since the word "logic" underpins your arguments, you need to at least understand something of it. And if you can't do that at least recognise that there is much to learn. In fact I'm giving you more credit than you deserve because you didn't even use the word logic, you used the word "reason" which is a much more nebulous term that includes devices of persuasion outside of logic such as flattery, bullying and other forms of social pressure.
You can't have both.
Yes you can. Humans with free will can choose to request miracles, and God can choose to provide them... or not.
Questioning the validity of juxtaposing 2 neighboring entities doesn't change the fact that if I have 1 apple and I acquire another apple I then have 2 apples. And while you're questioning whether I really have 2 apples or just 1 and 1 apples you're missing the point. It doesn't really matter who posited otherwise. This whole argument is less about facts and more about evidence and there is no evidence for god, religion, etc, therefore the logical conclusion is that they do not exist. Attacking the idea of the foundations of logic does not somehow make god more real or the bible, koran, torah, etc, ad nauseum any less fictitious or their followers any more deluded.
So while my original argument of "religion is illogical and a conclusion that can be arrived at without emotional leanings (in a reasonable manner)" still stands you're just attacking the semantics of the argument.
I got here through a series of tubes
While I admit that you seem to have thought things through, which unfortunately not all religious people have, there is a weakness in your argument. You are comparing religion and science using a layman's explanation of "the big bang" (i.e. a big explosion) rather than the actual definition (it is btw possible that you are also using a layman's explanation of "voice" etc, I am not able to tell). By doing so, you make it easier to compare the two, but you risk oversimplifying the objects you are comparing to such a degree that it is impossible to draw any accurate conclusions.
An oversimplified car-analogy: A car and a bike with trainingwheels both have 4 wheels. Therefore they are the same thing.
Woah woah woah. Quiet down there snowgirl. You keep talking like that and people will realize that you have to change and adapt to fit into a working society. That everyone isn't really required to reward you for continuing to be the way you were born. That being born with certain predispositions doesn't provide a good reason for making everyone in the world accommodate you and that if you can adapt to society then it is your responsibility to do so. That being abnormal isn't just societies problem but is in fact one's own problem. Oh noez, your on a slippery slope here.
I fail to see how "green-eyed" people are any less of a race than "dark-skinned" people. If you get racial protection for having brown skin, why shouldn't the same protections apply for having green eyes? Because it's a different organ?
Because "race" is a quasi-defined legal concept, and it does not apply to "green-eyed" people.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Yes it is a slope, but not a slippery slope.
Honestly, it's a perfectly valid point that there are no reasonable accommodations that a company could make to permit a psychopath to be a complete asshole.
But then, this is the whole point, because it's a slope, and the legal world is deathly afraid of slippery slopes (so much so, that each Bill of Rights amendment has to be explicitly incorporated against the states, and as such it's still possible that your state could quarter National Guard troops in your house). And because they're so afraid of slippery slopes, they usually interpret protected classes in the most harshly narrow constraints possible.
For example, there is a protected class against sexism. But what about transsexuals? If they're being fired for being transsexual, then that clearly means that they're being discriminated against on account of sex, right? Nope, not according to US federal law. But what about women who dress too feminine, or women who don't dress feminine enough? Good news, the Supreme Court has ruled that discrimination as a result of not conforming to gender stereotypes is discrimination based on sex. But back to transsexuals now, they're being discriminated against because they're rejecting gender stereotypes and going to an extreme of gender stereotype non-conformance. Well, it turns out that now that we've said that gender stereotype discrimination is not allowed, "there is no point at which non-conformity with gender stereotypes becomes so drastic as to not be protected", so some federal courts have started holding that transsexuals are part of the protected status of sex.
The whole point of the matter is that the courts are super crazy careful about letting legal president avalanche down a slope, even when it's not a slippery one.
And it all also comes down to reasonable accommodation. Sure, blind people are a protected class of disability, but that doesn't mean that they have to be hired or kept for a job that involves say hypothetically, sorting M&M's. There is no way for there to be reasonable accommodations for that job.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
You can have a God that works miracles, or you can have humans with free will. You can't have both.
Maybe you can't. On what basis do you claim I can't?
Perhaps, but so far as I can tell, "Intelligent Design" offers no insight whatsoever in the search for extra-terrestrial life.
Have you _personally_ seen an electron?
Have you _personally_ seen Dark Matter or Dark Energy?
If no, then you take them to exist on faith -- based on another person's word. Science relies on Subjective Truth to establish an Objective Truth. Note the order and dependency!
I believe in them because there existence has been proposed and tested via scientific method. However as is the nature of science, we may discover that we were incorrect. We'll find some model that better describes our universe. And then we'll start believing in that model. What we won't do is stick to the old model because it's what we've always believed when faced with evidence to the contrary.
b) It is arrogant to assume your objective "faith" is somehow more valid then someone else's subjective faith who has a different set of assumptions. It would behoove you to spend less time criticizing others who don't think like you and focus on solving problems.
See above. It _is_ a more valid belief system. By the - Ones does not have "faith" in science because faith is belief without proof. We have sufficient proof that science works.
Nope. The fact is (unfortunately) that atheists remain some of the most intolerant people, virulently imposing their beliefs on whomever possible.
But isn't that exactly what religion attempts to do, come up with an explanation of the real world based on empirical observations? Whether it is the Elemental forces of paganism or the poly-gods of Greek mythology, man looked at the world around him and sought an explanation.
No. Science just describes what's observed, that's why it's an empirical system.
Religion's explanations and observations inevitably seem to involve something non-empirical. Explaining thunder as the beating drums of the gods is an explanation, but it's not a scientific or empirical explanation. Explaining that we hear thunder, but don't know what causes it, is scientific.
Let's say you pray for rain, and you get rain, so you conclude there's a rain god. Then you call him Bob, and form a religion around him. There's a few problems there:
1) Concluding that prayer leads to rain actually is at least an empirically-based conclusion. It isn't very scientific though, unless you conduct a proper experiment and try to avoid your own biases. Out of X prayers, how many actually lead to rain? This type of premature correlation is easy to get into, and we've even seen animals form superstitions in the same way, which is why science involves experimentation and reproduction of experimental results. This is one of the main differences between pre-science attempts at empirical explanations of the world, and scientific ones.
2) Concluding from this that there's a rain god and that his name is Bob isn't empirical, and certainly isn't scientific
Like I said, I've never heard of a religion based purely on empiricism or science. There's always some element of "I don't know, but I'm going to fill it in with something anyways".
And lest you think that "science" is exempt from irrational conflict here are some counter examples.
No, of course it isn't. Whenever humans are involved, irrationality will follow :P
"Religion bad, science good" or vice versa is quite literally, meaningless.
Just to reiterate what's above: Science is one thing, Religion is another thing. They do have actual meanings.
Result!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
There is nothing in this theory that says ALL mutations are helpful. I don't know where you got that idea from, but perhaps not drinking from the ID kool-aid will help you in that endeavor.
You are correct, But evolution requires a change agent and Natural Selection does not cut the mustard.
This right here says any opinion you have to offer about the topic is likely to be highly ignorant. Natural Selection isn't supposed to be what you refer to as the "change agent", you dunce! Nobody (aside from stupid creationists) has ever said it should be. Not even Darwin, the guy who came up with the idea of natural selection.
Natural selection is simply the mechanism by which changes do (if beneficial and/or neutral) or do not (if harmful) spread through populations. Mutations are the agent of creating changes in individuals which may or may not be spread through inheritance.
In all it's flavors, e.g. specification with a separated population, (like flys in hawaii) are still just Natural Selection which only picks from pre existing information.
No. Mutations happen, and continually generate new "information" to select on.
Selection by definition filters information so the geane pool of the creature is lesser more specified. (thus less able to adapt later on)
Complete nonsense. You need to learn a lot more about how genetic codes work, how they're expressed, and how changes propagate through populations. The real world is a lot more complex than "selected against equals 100% gone".
For example, animals don't have genes which directly encode the shape of an adult. Instead, they encode information about how the developing embryo's tissues differentiate from stem cells and slowly build up structure. Not blueprints, but processes. This means that surprisingly small changes to regulatory genes which influence things like how long a developmental step lasts, or how many copies of a thing are made, can have large influences on the resulting organism. Which means that tiny point mutations in regulatory genes can, and do, produce relatively large changes in body plan without losing any potential for other body plans.
Which, in turn, means that you can easily "lose" expression of something in a population and/or speciation event, but the information needed to bring it back is still all there, waiting for a tiny point mutation to express it again.
I agree, but if your terms are not well defined, then the layman will get things mixed up. Hence I try to explain the difference between Natural Selection (Survival of the fittest & proven), to Evolution (as in "goo to you", *not proven (*not counting devolution which ID and Creations agree with.))
So you like lying to laymen then? (Hint: evolution is firmly in the "proven" category, and "devolution" is a nonsensical idea and/or random absurdist weirdness from the band Devo.)
Tell me, if someone came up to you in the street and ask what was evolution, would you say the theory of creatures changing? or the theory that everything came from a single cell? Because if you said evolution is the theory of creatures changing, that would make me an evolutionist. :-O
So you believe in the nonsensical variant of creationism which tries to make nice with science by acknowledging that small changes can happen, but invents a bunch of ridiculous reasons to deny that larger changes are possible, even when the evidence is overwhelming.
I would have to disagree with you here. With ID, they show examples of complex structures requiring all components to be working for it to exist and without there being any in-between forms for them to work therefore evidence of a designer.
Let me correct that for you. In ID, they identify something which looks complicated to the layman, declare that it's too c
Hopefully NASA relies more on physics and mathematics than it does on evolution.
However, he wasn't fired for his flawed understanding of evolution - he was fired for being disruptive in the workplace. He would, hopefully, have been fired if he had been ranting on about how great natural selection was and passing around DVDs of pro-Darwin materials.
Dead on, pal! Dead on! I'm really shocked that most people don't consider this (the more sensible) perspective.
I'd like to see exactly how you intend to have the hypothetical omniscient god in your study unaware of which people are involved in the study.
I worked with a Mormon who was a EE. He was the only person I ever met who could calmly discuss opposing views without ever getting excited. OTOH I never knew him to start one of those discussions. He never would get into a discussion unless some one else initiated it. There really are people in different beliefs who do not push their beliefs on others. Some of the most obnoxious and irate if questioned have been members of main stream local churches.
Being of a different belief is fine, but when some one pushes it on others it's obnoxious. When they do it to a captive audience, it's almost criminal.
I agree with Joce640k. That's not the kind of person we should be spending our tax dollars.
Chaos theory tells us that the fluttering of an insect's wings in China can trigger or stop a hurricane in the Caribbean. If that's true, how can God go around working miracles without robbing countless other people of their free will?
Say God heals a cancer patient. Now the doctor's no longer needed. Maybe the lost income is enough to cause him to miss his malpractice insurance premium that month. Once his insurance lapses, he's dismissed from the hospital where he practices. Now the doctor's kid can no longer go to Harvard like his old man did, so he joins the Army to earn money for college...
Maybe you can't. On what basis do you claim I can't?
No man is an island. Any miracle that affects you has a good chance of affecting the lives of those around you, forcing people down paths their lives wouldn't otherwise have taken.
You can say that "free will" is just the ability to react to life's little twists and turns, however they're caused, but the concept rapidly loses all meaning once you introduce a supernatural being who reaches down and tweaks things every so often.
To me that sounds no different than today, where for example we would like to send probes out to mars in order to test theories but society hasn't released enough cash. And lets not forget there are many theories that have been pushed forward but not subjected to the rigour of experimental observation - relativity was an early one and experimentation continues to show a correlation between that model and the physical world. Newtons classical mechanics have been proved to no longer correlate with observations that we are now capable of. And who knows what will happen with string theory?
A much better attempt that would separate religion and science, and therefore serve as a basis for their definition, would be to conclude that religious folk are happier to sit on their theories for longer than scientific folk. But even then we are talking about an enormous sliding scale on which there are eminent scientists that have great trouble letting go of theories in the face of contradictory observation. And on the other hand there are followers of god who are more flexible about letting go of dearly held theories. So (in my very humble opinion) buddhism, paganism, christianity, islam, scientology, cosmology, science, Jedi are just cultural terms and it is possible to belong to any of these cultures and at the same time engage in a cycle of experimentation/observation/explanation to a varying degree. It is that latter strand that can run through all of us regardless of how much we dip into those cultures. Notice I threw in "Jedi", which for me proves to me that geeks themselves admit that it's not possible to define religion and in this case are using that fact for their own jocular purpose!
Why am I making a big deal of it? Well for one I love to debate :-) but also because there is a danger that when you put somebody in a box called religion or science then one might assume they know a great deal about them already and ascribe characteristics to them that are almost certainly not true. This can foster an adversarial atmosphere where hatred can thrive, because the label is an excuse not to find out anything more about the opinions that make up an individual personality.
IF that is the case WhyTF does everyone want to point guns at each other?
Considering that all three religions are supposed to follow the laws Moses brought, one would expect that none of them would ever point a gun at each other. But people are easily manipulated, and men who lust for power have a way of convincing people that purple is really yellow and red is really green.
Same reason the Catholics fought the Protestants in Ireland for hundreds of years -- greedy powerful men who pretend to be pious grabbing at everything they can get.
Free Martian Whores!
"reationists get by with this claim only by leaving the term "information" undefined, impossibly vague, or constantly shifting"
That is a interesting point. What is information. The problem here is that data needs to be interpreted. This is a vagueness about this as what constitute info and data. E.g. you would say Mozart's music is designed even if you heard it being played by a learner on a flute that got every 10th note wrong.
1. 1 increased genetic variety in a population i.e. Lenski
In this example they are trying to show how mutations have made the bacteria evolved.
The problem here is that it is devolution. That is a functioning gene got stuck on.
Bacteria ‘evolving in the lab’?
1.2 increased genetic material (Alves et al. 2001; Brown et al. 1998; Hughes and Friedman 2003; Lynch and Conery 2000; Ohta 2003)
The argument here is gene duplication is the technique used to gain "information" in DNA so things can evolve. The theory goes on the lines of "part/whole of a gene/chromosome" which is then free to mutate into something useful while the other picks up the stack.
I have just been reading up on this so I can reply to you (hence my delay in replying (that and work and doing stuff with the wife)), A creationist view here (I assume ID as well) is gene duplication does happen, it's proven many times over. But gene duplication is usually very bad in humans and animals. An example of gene duplication is Down’s syndrome. (the reverse is Turner syndrome). The genes *tend* interact badly with each other and when done artificially in mice, they dont survive. *Tends mean that I read a case where the double up of a gene helped out a lemur to process food when the doubled gene mutated.
I thought I should point out that although genes/chromosomes can duplicate, it doesn't mean it's evolving. As a classic example from a site: Gene Duplication
In regard to gene number, humans have about 25,000 genes,23 while rice has 50,000.24 In terms of genome size, the largest known genome does not occur in man, but rather in a bacterium! Epulopiscium fishelsoni carries 25 times as much DNA as a human cell, and one of its genes has been duplicated 85,000 times yet it is still a bacterium.25
What caught me by surprise is strangely it's seems to be very common and tolerated in plants, but when the plant does this it can suffer from a fitness cost like in mutations and natural selection.
:-( Rough shot at the subject, Unless they can show the same bacteria having 2 halves and another generation having it fused, they are just guessing about it's "evolution" pass. Also an alternate solution was it was a whole and a mutation split them into 2, another mutation can join them up. again sorry I couldn't be bother looking too deeply into this.
I thought I should also point out this plant which will revert it's DNA if it needs too.
1.3 novel genetic material (Knox et al. 1996; Park et al. 1996)
Sorry but I was having a hard time searching for Knox. I would like a last name so I could know what they are talking about.
1.4 novel genetically-regulated abilities
Just skimming by this. Nylon Bacteria
2. Two enzymes in the histidine biosynthesis pathway
Sorry my eyes glazed over while looking into this. I am not a chemist
Zha
John 11-35
God is three-in-one: the father, the son, and the holy ghost.
Catholics (about half of Christians) believe that and generally the others do not hold that distinction. Regardless they are just three aspects of the same thing. Kind of like a 'day' is actually a day and a night. All one and the same. Asking what the difference is between the three is then like asking if a day is 24 hours then how long is a night? It's a nonsensical concept.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
then he's perfectly allowed to hand a guy a DVD in the elevator or talk about the eternal condition of the soul over coffee or lunch.
And if I was the receiving guy I'd be perfectly allowed to jam that DVD up his stupid ass.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
>They can fire you because you have green eyes.
Actually, no, they can't. That one falls under a protected class.
you cannot use logic to counter an argument that was made without logic
Of course you can! Indeed, this is the first step of logical analysis: to determine whether a set of propositions is either (a) self-consistent or (b) self-contradictory. There's no point in entertaining an argument that fails even the basic test of self-consistency. Either the proponent of that argument has to fix it, or it will be dismissed as irrational.
Now, if what you're saying is that proponents of an irrational argument can't be reached through reason, that may be true. But who cares? That was never the point. The point is whether or not we are convinced.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I'm a little stuck between the definitions of atheist and agnostic.
I thought that atheists were people who have faith (aka a belief absent of evidence) that all religion is wrong and there is definitely not a god. They are 100% certain this is true, having faith that it must be true.
Agnostics realize that there may or may not be a god, and that the question is unanswerable with present evidence. All or no religions could be true, but without further evidence nothing can be concluded.
Hypothetically if supernatural entities stated interfering with our world right in front of our faces, atheists would continue to have faith that God and supernatural entities cannot be real, therefore some natural process must be causing what they are observing. Agnostics would take the new evidence and realize that supernatural entities are in fact quite obviously real.
> anyway since nobody can define "religion" or "physics" or even "geography", "history" or "art".
Agreed that it can be very difficult/tricky to try to define those -- but just because it is extremely difficulty doesn't mean it is not worth trying =)
Here is my attempt. It may not be very good, but it is a start:
religion: living the lifestyle necessary to prove your beliefs; it is the science of the mind
art: expressing oneself for non survival needs -- note that the medium is irrelevant be it body, canvas, CD, computer, etc.!
science: using subjective experience to reach objective truth by removing falsehood
history: the story of the winners (as opposed to...)
herstory: the story of the losers
> 'Religion' is pretty damn fuzzy, that's true, but I've yet to see one that's based solely on empiricism.
As a mystic "You are doing it wrong." Instead of looking for an external Religion, look for an internal religion.
Notice the difference the between big 'R' and little 'r'.
Religion: aka cult: Our way is the _only_ way to God! /sarcasm: Oh, BTW, please give money - you need heaven insurance, don't you know! You must call on the only name _we_ deem appropriate, be it Yahweh (Egyptian mood goddess), Jesus (mis-transliteration of Yeshua), or Allah, etc.
religion: I am exploring my own way to understand my relationship with this conscious, creative, energy that is inside ALL things.
Let me give you an practical example:
All religions teach the Golden Rule in one form or another. You don't need to follow a list of DO's and DON'Ts like a little child -- you are probably mature enough to figure out that how you treat others generally is mirrored back to you.
Another example:
When you study your favorite "Holy" book / scripture you will start to understand that it was written in 3 layers.
- The literal, which at some times is totally absurd. It is intentional written that way so your mind will go "This is nonsense, there must be a deeper meaning to this!"
- The allegorical / parable. You've heard of the parable of the boy who cried wolf? Whether that story literally happened or not doesn't freakin matter IF you learn the lessons
- The spiritual, where you have lived enough of the literalism to know what is meant to be literal and what is allegorical, and can see the spiritual pattern and laws.
I should point out it is worth studying Buddhism. It has its own flaws, but it has significantly less dogma then the other religions, and some find it possible to be an Atheist.
The point is, explore what works for you. If it doesn't, toss it out, but keep searching!
> science, questioning is encouraged.
You mean like how Watson treated Franklin?
http://www.brown.edu/Courses/BI0020_Miller/dh/guide.html
> In the other--christian superstition--questioning is actively discouraged.
Maybe you should try another religion where all questions are encouraged, instead of a bastardized fear-based one?
You seem to be confusing "Belief" with "Application" and not know when you should apply one over the other.
Please show where I said one should toss out Science, please?
Science is a very useful (applied) philosophy.
So is religion (noticed the difference between religion and Religion.) when properly applied as well. See my post about the Golden Rule.
Maybe you should try another religion where all questions are encouraged, instead of a bastardized fear-based one?
I should? I can't imagine why I should try any religion. Needing an imaginary sky friend is a form of infancy.
> 'Religion' is pretty damn fuzzy, that's true, but I've yet to see one that's based solely on empiricism.
As a mystic "You are doing it wrong." Instead of looking for an external Religion, look for an internal religion.
Nope, still not empirical. Of course there's value at examining your own mind and figuring out how you tick, but there's no reason to wrap that up in the term 'religion' when 'introspection' works fine.
And what is a mystic? Exactly what do you do, other than "debunking" science with nonsensical arguments?
You are ignorant if you think all religions teach a imaginary sky friend.
Ah, so you're the idiot that believes Time is Physical.
Please show me how I can put time in a bottle separate from the physical ...
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?
Epicurus (c. 341 - c. 270 BC)
Atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. Atheism is the lack of belief in a god, or the belief that there is no god. It is the opposite of theism.
Agnosticism is the stance (with regards to religion, anyways) that gods' or god's existence or non-existance is unknowable. It is the opposite of gnosticism.
A gnostic atheist 'knows' that there are no gods. They make a claim of absolute knowledge. An agnostic atheist does not believe in a god, but cannot rationally state that they know this with 100% certainty. They simply aren't convinced of the existence of gods. Most atheists fall into the latter category.
I thought that atheists were people who have faith (aka a belief absent of evidence) that all religion is wrong and there is definitely not a god. They are 100% certain this is true, having faith that it must be true.
What you are describing is gnostic, hard, or positive atheism.
Nah - that would be assault and would probably get you arrested and fired. But you could snap it in half, or throw it in the trash while the guy was watching. There's plenty of legal ways to be childish, immature, and insulting.
Not all. Just most.
It's physical as in it's described by physics, it exists in the physical universe, it affects and is affected by the physical universe. You can't trap it in a bottle the same way you can't trap gravity in a bottle, or can't trap wind in a bottle.
Trying to ascribe some sort of mystical supernaturalism to it simply because you can't touch it is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about when I was describing why religions are distinct from science.
Nah - that would be assault and would probably get you arrested and fired.
No. He assaulted me first with stupidity. I simply defended myself and gave him back what he assaulted me with.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
No, he can't, because he is a moron.
You wear a shirt about prayer to work and also wonder why the rest of the office laughs at you behind your back.
Wake up dumbass, you believe in an imaginary friend in the sky and use it as a crutch for everything. Your co-workers simply "put up" with you. No more, no less.
Sorry, no!
Allah is a moon God, not the God of the Judaism or of Christianity.
no big sig
(or at least implying it)
Not particularly. The bible, in that particular section, uses a measuring system derived from the length of body parts. Nowhere does it say the measurements are exact, as they did not have exact measuring abilities at that period in time.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
All three worship the god of Abraham. You're either ignorant of your own beliefs or ignorant of Muslim beliefs if you think otherwise.
equasion = equation + intelligent design
Allah, God, and jehova are all the God of creation, the God of Abraham. I don't have any idea where your "moon god" comes from, is that an obscure pun?
Free Martian Whores!
Mostly true, but not quite.
An American-born Muslim likely only speaks English. An Iranian-born Muslim likely only speaks Persian.
But both of them pray in Arabic. Arabic is the language Korans are printed in (many are printed in two languages, though) and it's the language of formal Muslim prayer.
Lots of Muslims become fluent in Arabic because of this, but many only become proficient enough to pray in the language and perhaps read the Koran. It's a bit like Latin in Catholicism used to be, or Hebrew with Jews.
English speaking Muslims may use "god" informally, but in prayer, and more formally, they'll all use "Allah" regardless of native tongue.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it.
1 Kings 7:23
Pi == 30/10 == 3
Yeah, he probably insisted on that too.
Mostly true, but not quite.
Nit fairly picked, though allow me to nitpick your nitpick. I happen to know about a dozen Iranian-born people (I don't know why, but there seem to be a lot around this workplace). Most of them speak English and Arabic, even the ones who aren't Muslim. If I had to guess why, it's probably to do with the alphabet; the primary barrier to learning Persian or Arabic for most European-language-speakers is the alphabet, which is not a problem that Iranians have.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});