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JPL Employee's Firing Wasn't Due To Intelligent Design Advocacy, Says Judge
SternisheFan writes with an update to a story from earlier this year about a lawsuit in which David Coppedge alleged he was fired from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for his advocacy of Intelligent Design. Now, a judge has ruled that Coppedge was legitimately dismissed for performance reasons. From the article:
"n 2009, he apparently got a bit aggressive about promoting these ideas at work, leading one employee to complain. The resulting investigation found that he had also aggressively promoted his opinion on California's gay marriage ban, and had attempted to get JPL's holiday party renamed to 'Christmas party.' ... Coppedge was warned about his behavior at work, but he felt it was an infringement of his religious freedom, so he sued. Shortly after, as part of a set of cutbacks on the Cassini staff, he was fired. In court, Coppedge and his lawyer portrayed him as being targeted for promoting an idea that is, to put it mildly, not popular with scientists. But JPL's legal team introduced evidence that his aggressive promotion of it at work was part of a pattern of bad interactions with his fellow employees that dated back at least five years earlier."
An advocate of Intelligent Design who wasn't competent to work in a scientific organization? I'm SHOCKED!
Not really....
In other words, he had been acting like an asshole at work for years, and when cuts came around, they decided to get rid of an asshole. Guess what? If you act like an asshole at work, you MIGHT GET FIRED.
If you don't adapt......
There are still people out there who believe Einstein was religious?
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
But Einstein was not a fanatic trying to force his believes on others. Religion is fine if kept polite. The bible states 'neither cast ye your pearls before swine'. Dont waste your time on those not willing to listen. Freedom of religion is fine, freedom of speech is great. You dont walk into the center of the opposing opinion and start shoving your ideas down their throats and expect open arms and high fives. Bible thumpers can be a bit nuts, but atheists can be equally nuts. JPL justly fired a nut.
"In a letter to Beatrice Frohlich, 17 December 1952 Einstein stated, "The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve." [8] Eric Gutkind sent a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt" [9] to Einstein in 1954. Einstein sent Gutkind a letter in response and wrote, "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text."
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein#section_2
Let's suppose that somebody at JPL was promoting atheism, complained that the Christmas party should be renamed to the Holiday party, and suggested that California allow gay marriage. Would that be offensive as well? Be careful about piling on with "serves him right" when somebody is fired for what amounts to political incorrectness in the workplace. Without more detail I am skeptical of the accusations that he was "too aggressive" with this stuff or that it was a serious dereliction of his job. In my experience, many atheists are offended even by any public display of personal religious belief and practice, or any religious people engaging in discussion with others about it. They think religious people should be forced to maintain an appearance of secular belief when in public places, which is actually absurd and offensive in its own way.
As a religious person who works professionally with a diverse bunch of colleagues, I have experienced offensive pushing of personal beliefs from atheists much more often than from religious colleagues. And frankly, it's my habit to just smile and get along. I don't think my colleagues should be fired for promoting atheism, gay marriage, abortion, or what have you.
Let's assume that he is even right for a moment on all his issues. He is in an environment of people who really don't like any of these positions; yet he keeps bringing them up and pushing them in others' faces. Can you imagine what this tool was like to work with on normal issues?
I suspect he was fired for not being able to read others and play well with others. In an engineering/science world this would be quite an accomplishment to stand out by having poor social skills.
I know a parent at a private school who was equally religious about her health-food lifestyle and was always pushing it down people's throats. The other parents suddenly had important texts to send when she showed up. Where she crossed the line was when she began to try an enforce her view on the other kids arguing it was unfair to her kids to have to see them eating junk food like milk, wheat based bread, and cheese. The school asked her not to enroll the next year.
There are people who don't understand boundaries and they can create a poisonous atmosphere.
It is like fat people being angry when skinny people eat donuts. Fat people aren't the problem, donuts aren't the problem, it is the fat people imposing on the skinny that is the problem.
According to Prince Hubertus, Einstein said, "In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views." [16]
Einstein had previously explored the belief that man could not understand the nature of God. In an interview published in 1930 in G. S. Viereck's book Glimpses of the Great, Einstein, in response to a question about whether or not he believed in God, explained: Your question [about God] is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things. [17]
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein#section_2
It is interested that practicing and promoting Christian sharia law while accepting taxpayer handouts is acceptable, even mandatory, by the wing nut right, and considered protected speech, but any other religious law is considered illegal activity. Case in point. We have holiday parties because some don't want taxpayer money to be used to indoctrinate their kids into the some Christian ideal that physical gifts, not love or the acceptance of the savior is the critical parts of Christmas. We see this in the fact that many Christians want Christmas sales, not holiday sales, to cement the connection between manufactured secular good and a very important, at least to some, Christian festival. This promotion is to such a point that many have called such separation between religion and the money changes a 'war on Christmas.' It seems simple enough to say we don't like sharia law, and it is cause for termination to promote it, but obviously if one is Christian wasting taxpayer money to annoy your workers is a god given and constitutional right.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Im still not really clear why anyone should care about the religious beliefs of Newton or Einstein.
When religious people try to back up their (bogus) scientific arguments, they like to cite religious scientists as if it the existence of scientists who are religious makes the arguments more compelling. "Famous scientist X was religious, so shouldn't you accept my religiously-motivated supposedly scientific arguments too?" It's basically an argument by authority.
It's irrelevant, of course.
Without a doubt. I lost one job because my boss was a Catholic nut job. He decided once he found out I was gay that I wasn't needed anymore. Of course couched in terms of performance.
Religion is like a penis. It's okay to have one, play with it, show it to people if they wanna see it, but you just can't whip it out in public and start cramming it down peoples' throats...
Alchemy and occultism in Newton's sense meant "I'm a scientist but I don't know what science is." He wanted to understand the world, even though the methods for doing so weren't worked out very well yet. In an era when we didn't have any clue how causality actually worked, sometimes that meant entertaining bizarre notions which we know only in hindsight were superstitious.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
That's just cuz God unfriended him after Einstein stopped showing up for his Farm.
Einstein rejected the label atheist, which he associated with certainty regarding God's nonexistence.
even so 'short' a time ago as this, people were threatened (death threats and other, uhm, career-limiting things) if they did not go along with the mainstream religion.
you cannot go by what someone says, if they felt fear for what might happen if they were honest.
only very brave folks would dare admit that they were athiest.
and back then, it was extremely uncommon to 'fess up' about your true feelings on this subject.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
What makes you think a "present-day scientist" in any less superstitious than any other human? What makes you think the conclusions being reached today are not in fact stupid and wrong?
The scientific method.