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.
They act that way because when 2 people disagree, and there is absolutely no way to determine who is right, the only way to convince the other person is to coerce them.
If I say "Santa has a blue suit", most people would say it's actually a red suit. Fine, lets go find santa and see what color his suit is, that is how you determine the truth, you go find out. But crapola, there is no santa, just fictional images of him, and if I take my 'facts' from a different fictional source than you, we will disagree forever because we are both hopeless morons.
But frankly, you don't have any reason to believe in Christianity. If believe you have talked to Jesus or an Angel, you need medical help. If you believe in these beings without having witnessed them then you are just buying into a very old rumor with no evidence whatsoever.
The ones who chose spiritual were much more pleasant to be around. My spiritual friends usually let me know what time their churches' main events kick off and that I have a standing invite if I decide I'm interested. Most of the time I forget they go to church X until I ask them to do something and they have prior plans involving their church. They also don't brag about their work within the community. They tend to be the type who will say "Glad I could help" and really mean it when someone thanks them. In contrast, my father-in-law is proud of how religious he is and gets upset if he feels he wasn't properly recognized for his good works.
I've noticed that certain types of communities (usually the mainstream ones aimed at moms) tend to also be more religious than not. They're ok communities until something that has a religious aspect comes up and then it's witch hunting time. I've also run across a few niche Christian sites when looking for things related to my hobbies. They don't seem to have flame war issues, but they have closed forums for the main discussions and public forums to vet new members.
Without even knowing what my religious faith is, in one broad, sweeping generalization, you've told me that whatever my faith is, it's logically indefensible because of evidence from the last 200 years.
Those sorts of comments are usually voted down on Hacker News.
How, then, do we argue about experience? Either we discuss things and times and places that neither of us have witnessed, or we discuss and evaluate each others experiences. Perhaps we are fortunate and both accept a common ground distilled from some set of experiences. Maybe we are both physicists. But no such set of shared experiences seems to be broad enough to properly answer questions of religion.
If you truly want to begin to discuss intelligently then you have to seek a shared set of religious experiences. But that might be dangerous. Change can happen at that point.
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?
Although I said "weakness in logic," I didn't mean to say that logic is weak or flawed. I really meant that it is insufficient to use logic in the absence of shared assumptions. As you point out, sharing of assumptions can come through communicated and shared experiences.
I think that your description of how learning comes about in science is a powerful one. I believe that some aspects of it should apply to religion.
In my particular religion, the process of gaining faith, and then of moving from faith to knowledge is framed almost as a science experiment. You apply particular principles and see what the outcomes are. As you see the outcomes your faith grows. (See Alma 32:26-36 in the Book of Mormon--available online through LDS.org.) Faith is a word for something less than knowledge that becomes knowledge only through experience. You might look at it from a Bayesian perspective and say that with more data uncertainty grows smaller.
"How do I render a religious experience for myself?" This question strikes me as a little bit odd, and that may be because of a weakness in the metaphor between science and religion. Science studies things. Religion studies the Divine. What I mean is that religious experience may be more of a conversation than a solitary experience. Conversations happen by mutual agreement. However, it is still a good question because it shows progress from worrying about a tool that processes information to worrying about how to seek new information.
Here is a simple religious experiment: pray to God and ask if He can hear you. Document your frame of mind when you prayed. Did you actually want an answer? Were you willing to accept the possibility of no answer? Document any answer or lack of answer you experience.
In science, we generally come to knowledge only slowly, over time--although sometimes things progress more quickly than other times. It is the same in religion. The most likely answer to such a prayer is a gradual one, something spoken quietly to the heart. Such an answer is partial, at best. Maybe you manufactured it mentally. Maybe you didn't even hear anything. It was so quiet. Was anything really there? But something was there. At least enough to follow up on. And you move forward from there, performing experiments, seeking answers, asking questions and listening and acting. Just like a signal, over time, can appear out of noise, so religious truth, over time, arises out of uncertainty. You talk with others and compare notes. But in the end, for something this important, you really want to know for yourself. You have to perform the experiments, you have to have the experiences, you have to gain the knowledge for yourself. Besides, it's not like physics. With religion, everybody seems to be saying different things than everybody else. So it becomes up to you.
LDS missionaries seek to guide one person at a time through experiences that lead to enough personal knowledge of the gospel to warrant baptism. As far as I know, this is the only way that they can be effective.
If your understanding of the nature of things was largely formed more than 200 years ago, chances are that it's wrong.
Science has a pattern it goes like this: you discover something and you find out more and you understand it fully. (Religions get bashed here.) Every single time that happens you find out a little more and you realize how much you don't actually know. (No more bashing.)
If you think you know everything about a topic then you actually don't. You don't really understand something until you know what you don't know about it.
You're treating religion as the natural fallback hypothesis, which should make it fairly easy to convince yourself that you're right.
> believing in supernatural stories born of bronze age cultures is logically indefensible
Unless of course it actually happened.....
Which you'll never believe, and I won't convince you, so why talk about it over and over?
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.
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.
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 'religious' forum.
On the other hand, I do hunger for forums and other forms of social media where the standards that I hold are widely shared. I tried Reddit. It was great to have news and education combined. But in the end it wasn't worth wading through so many headlines, articles, and comments that were (to me) degrading in one way or another.
I love it here. I wouldn't call it at all religious. But the dialog is respectful and the people are interesting. I could use more places like this.
I'm Mormon too, glad to know I'm not the only one. Email me.
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 their morality or political/life decisions on such silly things as the Bible (see http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/... for explanation) or logically unsound principles with no factual evidence. Their epistemology is just too different from mine.
Isn't it because faith transcends logic and reason? This is my understanding of the word "faith", any way.
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.
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.
Also, not to derail, but I think that it's pretty ambiguous whether buddhism counts as a religion, per se, according to the (generally unstated) assumptions in discussions like these. Some schools of buddhism are athiestic or agnostic, some are not, etc.
Historically, buddhism has partially melded with the local worldview as it has been carried from culture to culture: Theravada in India seems to have a lot of elements from Hinduism in it, Mahayana in China and Japan incorporated Taoism and Shinto respectively, Tibetan Vajrayana melded with Bon, etc. It seems to me that buddhism in America has been absorbing psychology, though it may be too early to say.
Also, I think another reason for the relative popularity of Zen / Mahayana here is that some of the Beats, particularly Alan Watts, attracted people to Shunryu Suzuki and the San Francisco Zen Center. Other buddhisms are common in immigrant communities, for example, but the Zen Center had a head start.
And I believe that organized religion is nothing more than a huge thousand year old scam. Make lots of money and convert as many people as you can to make even more money. 400 years from now Scientology will be on the same level as Christianity.
created that initial micron of matterYour 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.
Note this is different from having "no belief." I also feel this way about God, because intelligence, which is a kind of organized complexity, does not just spring into existence without some stage of organization such as evolution, at least as far as we know. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but it would take more than empty assertions to do so.
So that makes me an atheist. Of course, someone claiming "no belief in God" is also an atheist, but one of a different flavor. (You know, strong versus weak atheism).
To agnostics, I have only one question: If you are agnostic about God, are you also agnostic about the invisible leprechauns dancing around your feet?
That said, I have become convinced that some sort of order exists in the universe. Things work out so elegantly so often... Perhaps that is a "god" of sorts, though not the sort of omnipotent (or even self-aware) being that is held up by most religions.
The point of Dawkins' "atheists just go one God farther" is that the difference between monotheists and atheists is one of degree, ie monotheists are skeptical but not skeptical enough. On the contrary, the difference is one of kind, two alien cultures that require some deep translation to speak to one another's concerns.
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.
I think this is too cynical a view of religion. Most religious people I've known value truth as much as any atheist, and would know it if they were the subject of this sort of idea control. I know there are plenty of counterexamples, but I think we only see the worst side of religion through the media.
(fwiw., I'm atheist, and I've read Dawkins, but I don't get the whole "militant atheist" movement.)
Most religions have, built into them, a meme for spreading (evangelizing) themselves. There is no such meme for atheism to spread itself. The idea is to put atheism on a more equal footing. Being open about atheism counters conformity:
On the second point, I agree that atheism doesn't have the same self-spreading mechanisms, but most religious people I know don't make any effort to convert other people either. They see religion as a personal thing, are respectful of other people's religion or non-religion, and do not try to push their belief on others.
For instance, I could point to Linux's superior X in comparison to the X provided by Windows.
I cannot make similar arguments in defense of my Christianity however, without going through a lengthy process of communicating first with the person, determining what they consider important, reaching mutual agreement on a set of criteria by which to compare different religions (and atheism) , etc. Only then, given a hammered-out base to build on, could I then communicate clearly and succinctly why I believe "X".
Surely you can see that this would be a great amount of effort to expend in a forum, and probably would be best handled through one on one exchanges rather than allowing some random user, to whom my comments were not originally addressed, to jump in at any time.
I respect people of every faith, (and no faith) that have developed for themselves a systematic theology/cosmology that has some modicum of internal consistency. I have no time to talk to or debate those who can't be bothered and just go around believing "by faith" whatever they feel like.
I personally find that sort of mixing of cultures is fantastic for a city.
On the flip, there are many hackers who are religious. Despite popular consensus, hackers are people and some 80%+ of the world population claims one religion or another. It only serves to reason that some of this 80%+ of the worlds population would call a scientific discipline, such as programming, their trade of choice.
Although a generalization for sure, there is likely a grain of truth and logic to the posed argument - specifically, fewer hackers are religious than is the case with other disciplines (such as, say, insurance agent).
I know a great number of hackers who claim to be "religious", though philosophical discussions often show them to hold concepts more akin to agnosticism. My (unscientific) theory for this phenomenon is the "fire insurance" argument - i.e. If a particular religious system is correct, denouncing the legitimacy of said religion will ensure them a place in hell. If the individual does not formally denounce said religion (despite the religion not necessarily syncing with their true beliefs), they can still claim a place in heaven as a 'believer'. The "if there is a God, I am good, if there is not, what did it hurt to pray?" defense.
To each their own I say. If it works for you to believe, then by all means, believe. Concerning science and religion, evidence suggests if there is a God, he like to play dice - something that many notorious religious scientist were uncomfortable with. Myself, I find comfort in the randomness.
Incidentally, your "fire insurance" argument is generally referred to as "Pascal's Wager" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager), in case you (or another reader) is interested in reading further along those lines.
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.
With religion morality is supposed to be the norm. For Christians, Jesus feed the hungry not because it made Jesus feel good but rather to model "normal behavior". This goes on with Jesus saving the woman from stoning, the son coming back to his father and his father forgiving him (for demanding his inheritance early and blowing it on hookers), and so on.
Morality in the real world (without religion) is an excercise in making yourself feel good (and feel you are "better then others") without any self-examination.
* Which may or may not be considered a religion, depending on how you define things; it's not necessarily theistic, for example.
But have you looked at sites like,
My wife participates in several online communities associated with our faith. They're technically a lot like most other such (could be better but quite adequate), and they cover a range in quality of discussion.
I run an online community of Christian web professionals/volunteers/whatever.. Our website is awful. I inherited it from the previous operators and haven't had time to redo it. I'll be taking the site in a whole new direction--i.e., new applications, not just a prettier face--but it's not there yet. Our community (which operates mostly via mailing list) is quite pleasant and mutually helpful.
You'll see competition and innovation most anywhere there's money, which is why you can find any number of automated website management services directed at churches (for example). But a lot of religion either is inappropriate to online expression, has no easy path to monetization, or both.
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.
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.
We all have our own religions, some believe in trees others god, its all the same, experience.
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.
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 religious beliefs imply academic stupidity. We would also be remiss to claim that lack of religious beliefs imply academic stupidity.
On the other hand, certain very commonly held beliefs would totally hinder work in biology or possibly physics.
YC's a bit right-leaning on economic issues, but left-leaning overall.
And righties think McCain's more militaristic policy will save lives (because the question is when not if to fight).
Infact, I am something of a militant atheist, but I am a very moral person. I would happily tolerate religions of all types, if only they would tolerate me and mine. But, as they won't.. then neither shall I.