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Religious Discrimination at Google

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Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#271

Post by azth »

eps wrote: post #123
ken47 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you prove the Big Bang occurred? If so, can you prove that nothing preceded a Big Bang? If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious answers to these are no. Are you equally appalled when you come across average people talking about these theories as if they are facts? I wonder.

Big Bang is the best available explanation of observed facts. This doesn't mean it's the right one, but other explanations are inferior. Especially those provided by religions.

Which religions?

The major monotheistic religions state that God created and initiated our universe, which does not contradict that a Big Bang happened.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#272

Post by lamontcg »

azth wrote: post #270
lamontcg wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh yes on the first one. The Big Bang definitely happened and all the details of the study of the CMBR (for one thing -- there's many others like the Lyman Alpha Forest) show that it did. The universe was once much, much smaller and the density was higher and the temperature was a plasma. You can try to hide being "did you actually see it happen?" kind of arguments, but there's a massive amount of actual evidence beh…

What happened before the Big Bang, and who or what initiated it?

That question isn't relevant to my life.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#273

Post by azth »

LinAGKar wrote: post #214
paganel wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is discrimination, and I say that as an atheist. Imagine asking a devout Hindu: “you really don’t eat beef? How crazy is that? Do you know how good it tastes?” or questioning a devout Hebrew about he not doing any work on Shabbat.

Not eating beef isn't something factually incorrect though, that's just a matter of personal preference.

What is factually incorrect then as far as this discussion goes?

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#274

Post by azth »

lamontcg wrote: post #272
azth wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened before the Big Bang, and who or what initiated it?

That question isn't relevant to my life.

Of course it is, because of the implications that come out of it.

Either it came out of nothing (a logically absurd claim), in which case nothing really matters.

Or, it was initiated by an entity, The Creator, in which case you'd want to know what He has to say about how we conduct our lives and what comes next.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#275

Post by ken47 »

lamontcg wrote: post #249
ken47 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you prove the Big Bang occurred? If so, can you prove that nothing preceded a Big Bang? If you are as rational as you arrogantly imply, then the obvious answers to these are no. Are you equally appalled when you come across average people talking about these theories as if they are facts? I wonder.

Uh yes on the first one. The Big Bang definitely happened and all the details of the study of the CMBR (for one thing -- there's many others like the Lyman Alpha Forest) show that it did. The universe was once much, much smaller and the density was higher and the temperature was a plasma. You can try to hide being "did you actually see it happen?" kind of arguments, but there's a massive amount of actual evidence beh…

Isn't it called the big bang theory, not the big bang fact? How many reputable scientists can you cite that would publicly declare the big bang as a fact rather than a theory?

I wonder if the person to whom I was originally responding finds your dogmatism as objectionable as dogmatism of a traditionally religious nature.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#276

Post by azth »

orwin wrote: post #187
paganel wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing one’s religious beliefs with believing in the existence of Santa Clause misses the point completely and it validates what the author of the article is saying, i.e. that contempt for religion and, in the end, religious discrimination, is widespread in tech circles. (if it matters I’m an atheist myself)

Contempt for all religion is only pushing christian values further. Polytheistic religions incorporated every new Gods, as they all could very well exist. Then a new religion appeared and decided only one god existed and other gods did not. Athon and his clergy then died with the pharaoh pushing him, but around the same time, a new religion appeared in the middle east, led by a certain Moses(weirdly, an Egyptian name…

Monotheism existed before polytheism.

The fact that monotheism "is better than polytheism for population control" is a completely orthogonal topic to the truth of the monotheistic claim. This in fact, is a logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy.

Your last statement is also a genetic fallacy.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#277

Post by azth »

quantified wrote: post #217
ekianjo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big Bang is the best available explanation of observed facts. Best available is not proof. The sun rotating around the Earth was also the best explanation for a long time in Human history. Traditional physics theory was the best until we started to observe things at the atomic level. Certitudes in Science don't age well, and should teach humility more than absurd dogma.

Big bang has a lot more supporting evidence than a magical seven-day wishing-into-existence spree 6400 years ago. Closer to home, it makes a lot more sense that animals lived, died and were fossilized over millions of years than that they were added as hidden sculpture during the creation. Come on. And that particular god is very good at being useless since the Enlightenment. One thing religions don't do is give up t…

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Islam doesn't say that the world is 6,400 years old, and as far as I'm aware, neither do most followers of Judaism and Christianity believe in that either.

> One thing religions don't do is give up their certitudes in the face of evidence

Which religions? All of them? Did you study each and every one in detail to be able to make such a claim?

> Or prove useful to human existence

Same question.

> abandoned the child

According to Christianity, but not to Islam or Judaism.

A very common fallacy I see by atheists or secularists when these discussions come up is how they group all belief and faith systems into one thing called "religion", then cast the baby out with the bathwater so to speak, not realizing how easily falsifiable some of their claims are, or how they generalize across that which must not be generalized. You don't have to be an expert about "religions", but don't pretend you're one by the implications you're making.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#278

Post by ken47 »

lamontcg wrote: post #272
azth wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened before the Big Bang, and who or what initiated it?

That question isn't relevant to my life.

As a casual philosopher, it seems like the big bang theory as the origin of everything falls apart under a trivial question. To you, such a discrepancy may be "irrelevant" to your life, but you're in the minority. The vast majority of people in this world are religious for a reason. They want to understand the bigger picture, and their curiosity does not stop when their finite logical facilities do.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#279

Post by azth »

quantified wrote: post #254
ken47 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that evidence is the state of the cosmos today? Are you a software developer? Imagine that, for testing purposes, you want to test a particular state T in a simulation app that you believe can only occur organically after a large period of time. Do you start the test simulation at a hypothetical t0 and wait to reach the desired state? Or do you simply bootstrap the simulation so that it starts in state T. Well, y…

And I can verify the software to some degree there, or (more usually) find the bugs. So this is the bug-free simulation? It's easier to run the simulation and see what happens, so much state to initialize. Without evidence, that's why it's called faith. There are thousands of unfalsifiable possible starting points, the Judeo-Christian one is laughable.

> Without evidence, that's why it's called faith

No one said faith should be based on blind belief. You can most certainly have faith based in evidence. It's not a dichotomy.

Re: Religious Discrimination at Google

#280

Post by anonymous_sorry »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #264
anonymous_sorry wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As another commenter has said, many great scientific discoveries over history have been made by Christians. Given that Christianity was the social norm in Europe and many European colonies for centuries, this statement is nearly equivalent to saying that many great scientific discoveries were made by Europeans. It's true, but only slightly interesting.

I respectfully disagree, given that the topic is antiscientific thinking within christianity. The fact that many contributions were made by that group is evidence regardless of the size of the group. If this is not intuitive, consider the hypothetical world where no serious scientific contributions were made by christian europeans at all: would we then be free to dismiss that fact as uninteresting as well?

You are right of course, it does suggest at a minimum that Christianity did not at all times and in all places where it held sway entirely suppress scientific progress. And in fact I believe that some Christian societies could be rather conducive to science within certain limits.

My point is that for most of recorded European history, professing Christian beliefs was the default. Straying too far from Christian ways would have required considerable intellectual effort and have been socially and economically costly. So there should be little wonder that many great European scientists were Christians.

But I don't think the historical facts can be used to draw strong conclusions about scientific or anti-scientific thinking in the population of Christians living in modern secular democracies, as the context is very different.

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