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Ask YC: Are you religous?
11–20 of 125 posts
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#12No. I consider the scientific method valid and not something to be taken on faith.
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#13If you believe in God, especially if you're a Christian, you're going to suffer all sorts of censorship and ridicule on all the socially moderated hacker sites such as YC, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc... For examples, you are not allowed to say anything against atheism, materialism, evolution, the big bang, CO2 global warmning, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, time travel, etc... You must fall in line and contribute to the myth that science and technology belong to atheists and atheists alone.
I am a Christian and I am as passionate about science and technology as anybody else. If that bothers you, fuck you and the atheist mule you sleep with. How about that?
Now, censor this. LOL.
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#14I hold Christian faith. In some ways, I hesitate to label myself as "religious," as it seems to me that a great deal of stuff that has been done and said in the name of Christianity is a bunch of rubbish -- while I believe Christianity itself is good, I also believe that a lot of cruft and misinformation has been tacked on over the years.
Even amongst Christians, there is a regrettable amount of division. This group believes X, this group believes Y, this group believes Z, and none of them want to have anything to do with each other. It's a mess, and I really don't understand why folks act that way. But it makes it hard to discuss matters of religious belief, because as soon as you present view X, those who hold view Y are prone to get angry or cut you off or whatever. Then adherents of view X get angry, and adherents of view Z think X and Y are both wacky, and... sigh
Certainly, not all religious people are like this; I don't mean to claim that at all. It may just be, like in many arenas of life, a vocal minority really can't get along, giving the more sensible majority a bad reputation.
Several years ago, I participated in a reasonably successful online forum about Christian music production. After a couple of years, a few people totally ruined it for everyone else by turning the forum into a religious flame war, and the forum was eventually shut down. My guess is that online communities centered around religious topics could only exist both peacefully and for a long duration with heavy moderation.
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#15Alternate theory: The Internet is a dangerous idea – cf Raganwald last post. Religions would probably prefer to keep followers away from the web and in a place of worship, where there is more direct idea control; therefore would be less interested in devoting resources to developing websites. Second, I’d suggest that the average hacker puts reason before faith, so is less likely to believe in a supernatural creator.
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#16Why do you care? If you draw any generalizations from the replies on this forum, then you are committing every statistical fallacy in the book.
As for your hypothesis, the Hacker News community is built around Hacker News and not religion or the lack thereof, so I find it hard to see how it fits in. I would agree that online communities built around religion are of little interest, but only because I find the subject matter so tedious.
If you could flesh out your argument and make it a little more clear, I'm sure you would get better replies from this community.
Personally I try to never judge the people I socialize with based on their beliefs in irrelevant subject matters. But I am an oddity, being born without the seemingly common gene that causes most people to derive pleasure from meddling and prying into the personal affairs of others.
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#17Is there anything interesting to say about religion?
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#18I feel like online applications and communities built around religion are pretty poor...
Your use of the word "poor" here is not merely delightfully ambiguous, but one of its meanings helps to explain the other: A lot of charities have poor websites because they are poor. Building sites costs money, as does maintaining them. And many people take a dim view of charities who spend more money trying to appear less poor than they spend on... the poor.
Of course, as the web matures nice websites cost less money. A lot of charities are turning to Drupal, for example, which in its simplest incarnations can be pretty straightforward to maintain, presuming you know how to set it up in the first place. ;) But beware the feeping creaturism...
I'm also pretty dubious about the facts of your statement -- not that online religious communities are poor, but that they're especially poor. A lot of online applications are poor, full stop. We're not going to run out of things to build anytime soon.
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#19Alternate theory: The Internet is a dangerous idea – cf Raganwald last post. Religions would probably prefer to keep followers away from the web and in a place of worship, where there is more direct idea control; therefore would be less interested in devoting resources to developing websites. Second, I’d suggest that the average hacker puts reason before faith, so is less likely to believe in a supernatural creator.
Religion and the internet are interacting, but not just in the ways you think. For example:
http://www.opensourcejudaism.com/ (NB: I'm not particularly well-informed about Judaism, but I heard Douglas Rushkoff talking about religion and internet culture, and that was one example. Just passing it along.) Authorities who want to keep those under their power uninformed of alternatives are in no way unique to religion.
Also, I'd wager that some religious hackers don't bring it up much because some hackers are really outspoken athiests, and it's a really tedious debate.
Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?
#20I have seen this post on here several .
The answer, its always the same.
I know Ruby coders who wont go near python.
We all have our own religions, some believe in trees others god, its all the same, experience.