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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."
Why not? Albert Einstein was an agnostic, and to the best of my knowledge never espoused any support for Intelligent Design.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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."