Poll/Form: What is your religion? | Hacker News Reader

Poll/Form: What is your religion?

docs.google.com

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Results are available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgbUoWpkXDCGdGhheGFTVTlPQ3hKenVOazVjZEJac0E&hl=en_US#gid=0

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Node.JS isn't a language, python is just as compiled as java is, etc.

Results are available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgbUoWpkXDCGdGh...

can you please make a summary out of it and share that too? Something like this: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewanalytics?formkey=dHhwMm...

If I can figure it out, absolutely.

Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color

The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods. Details of belief as taught or discussed.

Atheism (movement regardless) is the strict belief that a god does not exist; hence a religion.

Agnosticism/Non-religious is more not a religion.

I think you'd find it pretty difficult to find an atheist who claims to strictly know with any kind of certainty that no gods/creators/things outside the universe exist (except maybe Hawking, but he's definitely not representative). Sure, plenty of people claim to know with certainty that specific religions are false, but there's a big difference between the two that is often confused and glossed over by people making the argument you're making.

By that argument, a belief that Santa Claus (as an actual being who lives at the North Pole and on Christmas Eve delivers toys to all the good children) does not exist is a religion.

Santa Claus is pre-determined to not exist; and as far as human culture is concerned Deities are not pre-determined to be non-existent.

Though yes, there is the strict belief that santa claus does not exist and that is a belief.

Atheism is a religion because people who self-declare atheism are normally people who strictly believe that no deities exist.

Either way, whether is a religion or non-religion, it is something people cite as their religious views, hence the inclusion of it in this form.

Correct, but the survey has to have some option to specify non-belief so I think it's valid to include it as a choice. It's like saying: "Religion: none" and null is technically a valid value in this case.

I have a personal set of beliefs that doesn't fit in any organized religion (though it takes a lot from budhism and juedo-christianism). I'm not sure how to complete the poll.

Very interesting, looking forward to analysis of the results.

You missed Orthdoxy. Really? The true Christian Faith, kept untouched and not-updated by modernity since Christ. You need to document yourself a bit more before such a poll.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodoxy http://orthodoxwiki.org/Main_Page

Regards.

It's a text field, you can type whatever you want.

Everytime you give options you 'suggest' answers ;) Come on... everybody knows that. Atheist is 1st. IMHO, no programmer can be atheist.

why not?

Because a programmer knows the complexity of intertwined systems and the probability of randomness leading to it. Then he sees how the entire world interoperates and regulates itself, sees the pure perfection and knows it cannot be the product of chance.

My code doesn't write itself, by chance.

Nature doesn't either. It tries something. If it works, then it continues; if it doesn't, it tries something else.

And thus x amt of monkeys were able to randomly recreate the works of Shakespeare.

Monkeys know better.

PS: And I'm so framing your comment! It's priceless.

A programmer should, by that logic, see the complexity of God and see that He cannot be the product of chance.

Perfect, omnipotent beings don't just appear by chance. Where did He come from?

There's no beginning or end my friend. There is no time. It's just a limitation for us before eternal life. Who'd want to live forever? It's like the 9 month in the mother's womb.

That's where human logic fails and leads you places you don't want to go. And when there's no time, the entire concept of causality (creation hence existence) just fades away.

Alternatively, a programmer can see the seeming complexity that emerges from many, many permutations of seemingly simple operations and extrapolate that over millions of generations to consider how, perhaps, we're all just the result of simple compounds joining and rejoining in a trillion different ways.

I cannot upvote this enough. If anything, programming reinforces the idea in my mind that complexity arises, emerges, from the infinite combinations of atoms of simplicity.

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