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Ask YC: Are you religous?

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51–60 of 125 posts

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#51
post #49
post #9

Nope. Edit: As Dawkins pointed out, most Christians are atheists in regard to Thor and Zeus. Atheists just go one god farther.

Most realists believe in only one observable universe. Solipsists just go one universe farther.

Most baseball fanatics pull for only one team. People who hate baseball just go one team farther.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#52
post #40
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

created that initial micron of matter Just curious, does this mean you believe there was an absolute, finite beginning of time/space?

its more of the evolution approach, the belief is more of: it probably started out with a tiny spec that was created due to special circumstances and the universe grew from it

cliche but: and what created the creator?

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#53
post #3

I'm not religious and religion makes me somewhat uncomfortable . This may be in part since religion is largely considered a private/personal matter in Canada (or at least Ontario :P).

Perhaps because people's beliefs are so diverse. In Toronto, there is about 8 groups of beliefs (if no affiliation is a group in itself) with over 100,000 members. That is in a city of ~2.5 million

I personally find that sort of mixing of cultures is fantastic for a city.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#54
Maybe most good hackers are pragmatic? I'm spiritual, but not religious.

The biggest tenet of my philosophy is "I don't know". I've always found that those people that turn to religion with dead-set certainty are usually running away from something and using religion as a shield.

The one point I have faith in is that we do not live in a random universe, that there is some design and point to our existence. This is actually a purely pragmatic point of view.

Either something happens after we die that can be influenced by the way we live, or nothing happens. If nothing happens - who cares? So, I choose to believe and seek whatever it is that is our species' purpose and follow it.

The problem is I have no idea what that is. So, I try to take care of myself first, my family second and my community next. The problem is just getting by on the day to day life is incredibly time consuming.

I hope to resolve my financial pressures (insert shameless startup plug here?) and then worry about these things when I'm a bit more wrinkly.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#55
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its more of the evolution approach, the belief is more of: it probably started out with a tiny spec that was created due to special circumstances and the universe grew from it

cliche but: and what created the creator?

in our universe nothing, has been around from the start, in another universe? when god's parents wanted another bundle of joy the father inserted the primary tentacle into the mother's secondary nasal orifice, he then triggered the deposit sperm function in his iPhone, which then sent the message to his tentacle and initiated the release of sperm and BAM creator got created.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#57

Why 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…

I wasn't really looking to conduct a survey, I was just hoping to get a few opinions. True, hacker news is not about religion, nor is it a good way to conduct statistically signifcant surveys, but it's still nice to hear what people think.

I could think of lots of explanations for the shortage of religious sites...and I was looking for some opinions. A few possibilities include (A) there is no shortage of sites, i'm just ignorant, or (B) there are a relatively small number of religious hackers, or (C) there isn't really a pressing 'need' that has been identified, or something I didn't think of at all.

I hope that this wasn't construed as being a judging question - I was just curious.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#58
post #10
post #7

I took a fair amount of religion courses in college, but I am not religious (believe there is no God, etc). However, I do find religion very interesting. The irony here is that the tech community is extremely "religious" in another context. Vim or Emacs? Mac or Linux? Java/.NET or Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP? In that sense there are a ton of religious communities.

Fanboy is probably a better term for that

No, religion is much deeper.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#59
post #42
post #4

No, there are plenty of religious hackers, it's that they don't talk about it because there is nothing much to say: every single religious argument has been argued over and over for thousands of years. What's the point in doing it again?

I don't find this convincing. The arguments are thousands of years old, but most of the relevant data is <200 years old. The reason most religious hackers don't talk about it is that they know better - that unless you're sufficiently vague, believing in supernatural stories born of bronze age cultures is logically indefensible.

I've been down voted, but I only say this because it's been the case in every one of the (literally) hundreds of discussions I've had on the topic.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#60
> Are you religous?

Nope. Religion implies belief in something/somebody. I for myself don't believe in anything at all. I can only assume. And I assume that there is no any god, life has not any sense and everything in this world can be understood and scientifically proved. From this point my position is safe, because it would be incorrectly to ask me prove my assumption just because it's assumption. Religion/belief, in contrary, is not about "assumption of anything", rather it's about "assertion of anything". And if someone asserts anything, he should be ready to prove his proposition if he would be asked(and of course he couldn't do it).

Such point of view is very much spread among technical/scientific guys. So, I don't think your hypothesis is right.

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