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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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
Sounds to me like he was fired for being a jerk, and continued acting like a jerk after he was fired.
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.
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).
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.
Tell him it was God's will that he was fired, and if he pursues the lawsuit he's doubting God's plan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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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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.
"...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.
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? How do you square that with:
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.)
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
The whole "Intelligent Design" thing is just Christianity in disguise. Please don't pretend it's anything else.
No sig today...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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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
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.
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."
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
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
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
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.)
... 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.
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
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.
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
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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.
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
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I wonder...If scientist ever figure out how to create life, will it be considered Intelligent Design?
It will be called "engineering".
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.
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
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."
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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
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.
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.
If your humours are out of balance, you're belly laughing the wrong way.
Jonathanjk.com
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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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.
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
"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".
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?)
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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.
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