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Ask YC: Are you religous?

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Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#111

Post by mattmaroon »

tjr wrote: post #104
crocus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd have to say "did not" rather than "does not." 200 years ago many well-educated people owned slaves. That doesn't allow us to conclude much about whether slave ownership and intelligence/education are intrinsically compatible.

I think you'd have to say "does not" rather than "did not." Don Knuth is Lutheran, and has done some of the most excellent academic work of anyone alive today. Guy Steele holds Christian beliefs of some sort, and his work has been extremely influential in the programming world. Just two examples off the top of my head, but I think enough to keep the verb in the present tense. We would be remiss to claim that religiou…

Depends on the field. To my knowledge, no religious beliefs conflict with any work being done in computer science. (Maybe some AI or something.)

On the other hand, certain very commonly held beliefs would totally hinder work in biology or possibly physics.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#112

Post by mattmaroon »

Andys wrote: post #103
mattmaroon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person's religion says a lot about their epistemology, which in turn says a lot about them. You have to pick and choose your friends somehow (this is not unnecessary meddling) and there are few more substantive ways. I'm a non-militant atheist, so I generally don't "look down upon" religious people or feel it's my duty to convert them. But I also have a hard time really relating to anyone who is willing to base the…

In a sense, it would be very logically unsound to base faith in God on just a book, even if it is "The Book". Isn't it because faith transcends logic and reason? This is my understanding of the word "faith", any way.

Right. It's essentially believing in something because you want to, rather than because evidence or logic points to it. Faith doesn't transcend reason, it is its opposite.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#113

Post by ltbarcly »

tjr wrote: post #104
crocus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'd have to say "did not" rather than "does not." 200 years ago many well-educated people owned slaves. That doesn't allow us to conclude much about whether slave ownership and intelligence/education are intrinsically compatible.

I think you'd have to say "does not" rather than "did not." Don Knuth is Lutheran, and has done some of the most excellent academic work of anyone alive today. Guy Steele holds Christian beliefs of some sort, and his work has been extremely influential in the programming world. Just two examples off the top of my head, but I think enough to keep the verb in the present tense. We would be remiss to claim that religiou…

I agree, but that is not surprising to me. I suspect that Knuth and the others would be able to fully follow an argument against holding the beliefs they do, but that they would short-circuit it by 'answering' any such argument with the idea that religion is somehow a special topic not subject to rational inquiry, or that religion is based on 'faith' or something. To me these arguments are silly and obvious rationalizations, but some people cannot bring themselves to honestly evaluate religion using the same vigor they bring to other fields.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#114

Post by ltbarcly »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #95
ltbarcly wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you do have a logical defense then? Or are you just spitting into the wind and claiming that "there could be a logical defense, so we shouldn't say there isn't?

I submit that there can't be a logical defense. This is not because of a weakness in religion but rather because of a weakness in logic. To get to the point where logic becomes relevant you have to build up a set of shared assumptions. The beliefs from which you argue are formed from a set of experiences. Unless you have something of a common experience it is difficult to share a set of beliefs from which to argue. T…

Ahh, you have totally destroyed your own argument.

If to argue using logic depends on building shared assumptions, the basis of all religion is to accept an entire laundry list of assumptions without questioning them. There is no reason to suspect that a soul or spirit exists, therefore what you mean by 'a spiritual' process is unclear.

There are no 'religious experiences' that you can demonstrate to exist. At best, you can show me a group of people claiming to have a 'religious experience'. Can you define even a single way a 'religious experience' is different from any other emotional group experience?

Please don't patronize me with your nonsense. You are hiding behind nice sounding phrases like 'religious experience' and 'weakness in logic', but these are merely rhetorical flourishes, there is no meaning to them. They are effective only because they are often repeated in discourse. You might as well tell me that I need to open my soul to the forces of goodness.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#115

Post by ltbarcly »

tjr wrote: post #99
xlnt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. I bet YC is much more atheist than the general population. But I know a religious YC poster who's hesitant to express that kind of idea here; I also bet YC is a bit more religious than it appears.

I think it's also interesting that, up until the past century or so, many well-educated people were also openly religious. To wit, holding religious beliefs does not prevent one from doing excellent academic work... religion does not go hand-in-hand with stupidity or ineptitude.

Actually, the leading thinkers in all times were very often either atheists are extremely a-religious compared to contemporaries. They had to be publicly orthodox. That is because there has never been a religious authority with the power to do so that has refrained from using the force of the state to enforce orthodoxy.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#116

Post by saundby »

I'm religious, but I'm seldom willing to discuss it in technical forums because of the responses it draws. Specifically those who feel it their mission to, first, tell me what it is I must believe, then, tell me why it's foolish to believe those things.

There are a lot of folks who feel tech forums are an appropriate place to make atheistic comments or anti-religious statements, probably because they feel like they're among a receptive audience. I think this gives an unbalanced impression of how far the split is to one side or the other. For myself, I just ignore the statements. It's not about what I'm in a tech forum for. And I don't consider it any more indicative of where the group mind is than statements on, say, film preferences.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#118

Post by dhbradshaw »

pchristensen wrote: post #101
dhbradshaw wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people would call me religious. I'm a practicing Mormon. I pray and believe that God answers my prayers. However, I hesitated to answer your original question because the label "religious" is mildly distasteful. It seems more external than internal, more political than spiritual. As a practicer of my faith, I get plenty of chances to interact with people of my religion. So I don't feel much of a need for a 'reli…

didn't mean to downvote - fatfingering on my new iPod touch. I'm Mormon too, glad to know I'm not the only one. Email me.

Done.

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#119

Post by TransientMuse »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #95
ltbarcly wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you do have a logical defense then? Or are you just spitting into the wind and claiming that "there could be a logical defense, so we shouldn't say there isn't?

I submit that there can't be a logical defense. This is not because of a weakness in religion but rather because of a weakness in logic. To get to the point where logic becomes relevant you have to build up a set of shared assumptions. The beliefs from which you argue are formed from a set of experiences. Unless you have something of a common experience it is difficult to share a set of beliefs from which to argue. T…

I don't understand how shared assumptions being the basis of logical argument constitutes a flaw. Could you explain this further?

We argue about experiences in science all the time. We do this by documenting steps regarding how we rendered our experience so that other people may also experience what we did and perform measurements and comparisons and analyzations, et cetera, and once we've done that, we can apply other intellectual tools we have, like logic.

How do I render a religious experience for myself?

Re: Ask YC: Are you religous?

#120

Post by TransientMuse »

mattmaroon wrote: post #68
Prrometheus wrote: post #16

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…

A person's religion says a lot about their epistemology, which in turn says a lot about them. You have to pick and choose your friends somehow (this is not unnecessary meddling) and there are few more substantive ways. I'm a non-militant atheist, so I generally don't "look down upon" religious people or feel it's my duty to convert them. But I also have a hard time really relating to anyone who is willing to base the…

"A person's religion says a lot about their epistemology..."

Where do you draw this from? Have you any citations you can make? This seems like something I'd be interested in learning more about.

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