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Comment by cs1717p | Hacker News Reader

Can a vegan work with someone with a non restricted diet?

Can an atheist work with a muslim?

In either case, the answer is the same: if the individuals behave professionally, yes.

If the married gay couple are the ones freaking out at work about my hiring someone who posted against gay marriage on his blog two years ago, they are behaving unprofessionally and should be let go.

If it is the anti-gay marriage advocate who is making snide comments about his colleagues at work (or, in the context of a non work environment, in a shared community forum), then it is he who should be excluded.

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Your examples aren't analogous. An analogous examples is:

Can a Muslim person work with someone who believes the practice of religion should be outlawed and is working to make that happen?

Can an atheist work with people that believe that they will be, justifiably, tortured for eternity?

Again, not the same thing. As far as the atheist is concerned, that belief is ridiculous. You're conflating belief with action. A better example would be an atheist working with someone trying to impose religious law.

It seems like you're analyzing all of these situations assuming that one side is correct. If you already know everything then obviously you're going to be a benevolent dictator.

There's no obvious delineation between belief and action and a the gist of what I was replying to was along the lines of 'can people work with each other even tho they have strong and significant differences in their beliefs or opinions'.

There's no way to even know a person's beliefs without some action on their part.

Take Brendan Eich – he donated to a group that was engaging in 'speech'. Are you claiming that all 'speech' is action? So how exactly is someone stating that they're a Muslim not an action in the same way? Are you saying it would be fine if Eich believed that gay marriage should remain illegal as long as he never expressed that belief in any way to anyone?

>It seems like you're analyzing all of these situations assuming that one side is correct.

I don't believe I've made any assumptions about who is correct. I simply stated that there is a difference between working with someone who holds a belief, and someone who actively lobbies for that belief to be legislated. I think that's true irrespective of what those beliefs are, and the question of whether or not I agree with some specific belief or not is separate from "holding a belief" being distinct from "lobbying for that belief".

>There's no way to even know a person's beliefs without some action on their part.

Indeed, and this is one of the most vital distinctions between "discrimination" based on belief and aspect. You cannot not express your race or gender, or perhaps you can, but it requires expending significant effort. This is not true for beliefs, you can always not express a belief, even a strongly held one. I do it all the time.

>Are you claiming that all 'speech' is action?

I'm willing to claim that a donation to a lobbying group is an action. Would you disagree?

>So how exactly is someone stating that they're a Muslim not an action in the same way?

Does you being a Muslim convey any kind of information to me about the opinion you hold of me? Does you stating that convey any information to me? On the other hand, does you stating "I hate people with the username joshuamorton" convey any information? I'd say no, no, yes. That's the difference.

>Are you saying it would be fine if Eich believed that gay marriage should remain illegal as long as he never expressed that belief in any way to anyone?

I mean I absolutely do think that would be alright. I by no means think that people should be forced to express their views, so yes I would have zero problem with Eich choosing not to express his views.

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