I try to cheerfully bring Christ and the Christian Faith into every dimension of my life, public and private, because I believe it is a good thing to do, regardless of what others may think of me and my words and actions, or whatever consequences may ensue. Of course, I try to practice good manners in every circumstance and to give due regard to the Savior's words: "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16)
I can hardly imagine a better "place" than HN to share, even in some small way, the light of the Crucified and Risen. Also, I'm passionate about software development and information technology, so the HN scene is a natural place for me to hang out and share my ideas and concerns, on a variety of topics.
Except Christianity is now a debunked lie, a failed hypothesis. So you mindlessly repeating the same old lies over and over again, like no one ever heard of them before, gets really tiring really fast.
Perhaps instead of giving up to the mind virus so readily, you should try and read up on why Christianity is false and try to learn something we do know about the universe we live in.
Amazing how every single time Christian sheep just downvote any dissenting view, but no one ever has the curiosity to ask "how do you know that" and what evidence is there to debunk Christianity, yet again confirming this whole "evidence based reasoning" business is completely foreign to them, which is why they are religious in the first place.
Actually, I'm downvoting both you and Mr Online Evangelist. You know, people who really believe in naturalism and science don't feel the need to wave flags for "ATHEISM(TM)" or yack about "Christian sheep". You know why? Because we know damn well how the world is, so we don't have to BELIEVE(TM) in it. It's just how the world is.
And one of the things about how the world really is, is that you can't change people's minds about the universe by calling them "sheep" or "sharing the Light of the Redeemer" or any such methods. None of this engages anyone in the intellectual and emotional calm needed to actually change their views based on reasoned discussion, nor does any of it provide evidence for, well, anything in particular.
So please, just head off to /r/DebateReligion or something.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. Yes, we do know how the natural world works but it is tenet of Abrahamic religions (and Christianity in particular) that naturalism is not true. And I would not really care about it if these people left it at that.
But these people get to vote too you know. What person believes influences strongly what they do and what they want. There is no such thing as a private belief. What you believe about the physical world and what you base your beliefs on determines how you behave, what policies you support, if you will deny scientific facts, what you want your kids taught in schools, etc.
If that weren't enough some of these people find it irresistible temptation to "share" their delusions to the point they want their brand of belief instituted in laws and constitution of the country, and things like commandments displayed in schools and courtrooms almost like graven images.
This is why they must be engaged in debate, discussion and idiocy of their beliefs pointed out. There is no polite way to tell someone that what they hold as most precious and dearest thing is false, and debunked. But it has to be done, esp. now that we live in times when we do know, are free to say so.
And the only reason we are having this discussion is precisely because these people feel the need to discuss and share their beliefs, because they can't be happy until you believe it too, and until every knee bows. The stipulation to proselytize is in the holy books.
I would like to kindly request that you look at the guidelines on commenting (linked at the bottom of the page). In particular, complaining about being downmodded and opening with "What an incredibly stupid thing to say" are both explicitly against community norms.
The rest of your comments may or may not be true, but they feel off-topic.
This is a most interesting philosophical question. How do you know that "evidence based reasoning" gives you access to the whole of reality, instead of an (admittedly large and very useful) subset of it?
You do not have to answer that question to me, but until you have produced a satisfactory answer, you will be like the drunkard who lost his keys in a dark alley, but keeps looking for them on main street because "there's light there".
You basically accuse people of dogmatism but in my experience, the dogmatics are those that get pissed off upon hearing some taboo word mentioned, ignore what other people are actually saying, and instead of respond resort to cheap rhetoric tricks such as name calling and repetition of litanies.
Christians are at least (painfully) aware that theirs is one amongst many competing faiths. Scienticists on the other hand just believe that the World is exactly like they think it is, and that everyone that thinks different is plainly wrong. This makes them dangerous because there is always a subset in every group that would burn every "other" man, woman and child at the stake if they thought they could get away with it. The more you affirm the "otherness" in people you dislike, the closer you make this scenario to play out in your reality.
> This is a most interesting philosophical question. How do you know that "evidence based reasoning" gives you access to the whole of reality, instead of an (admittedly large and very useful) subset of it?
"Evidence-based reasoning", as goes the misnomer, is not actually based on some ontologically basic thing called evidence; it's based on causal interaction. If I can't use evidence-based reasoning on some phenomenon X, it's because X and I don't have any interactions via causality.
Now, this could mean that X is, for instance, an ultra-distance galactic supercluster completely outside our light-cone, so far away that the last time it interacted with us was when we were all inside the singularity pre-Big-Bang.
But it effectively means, "X doesn't exist [in the same universe as us]".
Agreed. If X does not have any observable evidence in my world, it might as well not exist to me (though it might exist Elsewhere(TM)).
But people who brandish the "evidence based" argument do not mean that. What they mean is that if X does not behave in a particular way for which it is feasible to design an experiment, then X ought not to exist.
In practice, what happens is that if I claim to have had direct experience of X, they will dismiss it out of hand and go trying to shoehorn some explanation which does not offends their world view. And if I go further and point out that there are millions of people who have had similar experiences during history, they will blast that we are all a bunch of brain-washed idiot sheep.
Personally speaking, and to make it clear, I have had a couple of experiences that make much more sense if you consider that there's more to reality than what scientific materialism would be willing to accept. Maybe there's is perfectly materialistic explanation that is yet unknown to us, but maybe there's not. I simply point out that accepting the limits of our own ignorance is a more philosophically sound position than to dismiss evidence before considering it.
>But people who brandish the "evidence based" argument do not mean that. What they mean is that if X does not behave in a particular way for which it is feasible to design an experiment, then X ought not to exist.
No. It means that if X does not behave in such a way that it is physically possible to design an experiment, X most probably is not a sensible concept for anything other than "the idea of X".
The problem here is that subjective experiences are highly malleable and have never particularly corresponded directly to objective reality without further interpretation. So your subjective experiences are explainable in three possible ways:
* You subjectively experienced something we don't have a theory for yet, but which is part of physical reality. We will eventually figure out how to test it and construct a theory of it. This is very unlikely.
* You subjectively experienced something whose underlying causal basis is so highly complex that the interaction may not be repeatable (ie: whatever you interacted with could be capable of choosing with whom to interact or not, and when). This is extremely unlikely.
* You had a subjective experience that does not correspond to any external reality. This is quite common, actually, and the most probable option.
Again you fail to reason correctly. It's not that if you can't devise an experiment for X that X does not exist. It is more that you speak of X, X does things for you in this material world, etc. yet you have never seen X but you trust other human mammals who told you there is X, and you never even asked for ordinary evidence for X, let alone the extraordinary evidence it would require to prove the claims.
Nice attempt at distraction. But you see I don't need to know the answer to that question (nor do I need to know everything) to know the correct answer isn't bronze ramblings of goat herders who got everything about the natural world wrong and who invented the concept of god to explain the world they misunderstood and feared in the first place. The only question worth asking is if Christianity and religion in general is true. And all evidence points out that it is decidedly not true.
There are two kinds of beliefs. One is based on evidence, logic, reason, testable repeatable experiments. Rational mind has no option but to accept their truthfulness (sometimes after laborious examination of evidence or step by step verification of logical deduction). You could go on and deny obvious truth, but that leads to cognitive dissonance and is rather mentally taxing. The other belief is opposite, it is not based on any evidence at all and it is called faith. You are believing things without having sufficient or any evidence for it. Note also that all religions are faith based. If they were based on evidence, religion would be a branch of science, it would be a scientific theory (which is the highest pedestal a scientific hypothesis can be placed upon, only mathematics has theorems).
There is now strong evidence that theistic gods i.e. gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, god who stops the motion of the sun around earth so certain people in the Bible can finish their work, god who takes "our" side in a war, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity are man made invention.
Religion comes to us from other human mammals who not only know there is a god, but they also know his mind what he wants us to do. And how do they know? Revelation of course, god told them something often times contradictory what he told others. And the religious never even seek evidence for their extraordinary claims. But revelation is useless and unreliable as a way to discover truth
Revelation can only ever be relevant to the person to whom something is revealed. As soon as that person shares and relates the revelation to someone else, it becomes a testimony at that point. And then it becomes a matter of trusting that person for the claim they are making. Also, the person to whom something is revealed should be apprehensive and wonder which is more likely that laws of nature have been bent in their favor no less, or if perhaps they are under apprehension.
Revelations are dime a dozen. Numerous people have claimed that something has been revealed to them. Even worse different people have claimed same god has revealed things that are contradictory to the things god has revealed to other people. In Christianity god reveals himself as a human, he dies on the cross, and resurrects. In Islam, Jesus is not only not the son of god, he never died on the cross and never resurrected. Believing otherwise will have you condemned to hell. In Christianity god says love your enemies, in Islam he says kill your enemies and apostates. Yet it's the same god, and both sides claim divine revelation for the "wisdom" they preach.
Content of revelation paints a picture of a god who is quite frankly incompetent, stupid and has morals lesser than average decent human being today. And most importantly he leaves it to chance what you will believe about him and if you will be damned to eternity.
What religion you get indoctrinated into has very little to do with its truthfulness, but everything to do with where you were born. If you were born in Saudi Arabia for example you would be a Muslim defending Islam right now. Yet both Islam and Christianity and Judaism (the three desert dogmas) all claim to posses the true and perfect words of the creator of the universe.
And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence? God would presumably know that people would invent scientific method as the only sure way to discover truth. Yet he leaves such important things as if you will be damned for eternity to belief without evidence leading to three desert dogmas that teach completely opposite things about him. Yahweh himself besides being stupid is rather evil god. Look how he behaves exactly as you would expect the people of that age that invented him to behave (he orders genocide of neighboring tribes that worship other gods, enslavement of women and children etc, just read random book of old testament). By the way he was never meant to be god of all, he was meant to be a god of a single tribe (otherwise a lot of stuff god says and orders makes no sense). Evolution of competing religions and the fact we have multiple religions like this is exactly what you would expect to see if religion were man made.
All metaphysical claims and especially all physical claims made by religion were proved to be wrong. And would you expect it any other way really? Religion was our first approximation of cosmology, medicine etc. But like all first approximations it proved to be completely wrong. Jesus casts out demons to heal people, he heals lepers instead of healing leprosy, no germs ever mentioned in the Bible (naturally no germ theory of disease either).
But now we know better. We know how solar systems are formed, we know how planets are formed, we know how life evolves, we even know how a universe can plausibly come from nothing. We really don't need god to kick off any of these things any more. Besides positing an intelligent god capable of creating universes, god that always existed, or that spontaneously came into being is assuming a lot more than assuming the same about the universe itself i.e. dumb matter. Occam's razor cuts him out of existence as superfluous assumption that does not explain anything.
This is a extremely long rant that seems to mix together tautologies, unexamined beliefs, either logical impossibilities or downright falsehoods with lots a lots of anger.
I will rather be polite and say that I am not interested in keep going further with this discussion. But if you ever find yourself in need to examine your world view please consider the following:
> And isn't it incredibly stupid of a supreme, intelligent, omnipotent, omnipresent being to demand belief in him without evidence?
Ok, granted... you have a point here. What of the many assertions you make can be logically derived from this one hypothesis? What other hypotheses could explain the same facts?
You didn't really address anything he said; instead you resorted to name-calling and disengaging from the conversation. I always see this from religious people when their beliefs are challenged in a coherent, logical manner. You can't logically reconcile the truth about the nature of this universe with your irrational belief system, so you typically just say the other party is wrong and either attack them or completely disengage. I guess you really cannot prove to an irrational person that they are being irrational and deluded.
Thread-shitting for Christ is not as awesome as you think it is. Doing this as a systematic project is bringing down the value of HN a tiny little bit with every one of your posts.
One of the things people do when discussing HN topics is share other resources that they feel have some bearing on the topic at hand; it also seems to be a common practice to offer alternative perspectives, complementary ideas and criticisms related to the OP or comments on it.
I do my best to make sure that all my comments, whatever their nature, follow that pattern. So, no, I'm not trolling, or "thread shitting", or anything along those lines. If I didn't think my comments were relevant in some way, I wouldn't make them -- that's just basic HN etiquette. If you don't like what I have to say or think I am in fact trolling, by all means downvote my comments. Also, if my comments really bother you, feel free to implement a little script that filters them from view. You could even make it general purpose, put it up on GitHub and submit it to HN.
> One of the things people do when discussing HN topics is share other resources that they feel have some bearing on the topic at hand; it also seems to be a common practice to offer alternative perspectives, complementary ideas and criticisms related to the OP or comments on it.
However, one of the things most people here don't do is use HN as a convenient platform to push their beliefs at every possible occasion.
> feel free to implement a little script that filters them from view.
No. You are the one with the annoying, spamming behaviour. Don't tell me to put up a spam filter. Stop spamming instead.
> However, one of the things most people here don't do is use HN as a convenient platform to push their beliefs at every possible occasion.
I find that claim implausible... I see a lot of beliefs being pushed, like "Startup culture is great" or "Startup culture is awful" or "Those people should have a better security response story" or "Don't use tables for layout" or "MAC-then-encrypt is a mistake". I would expect that most people have pushed a belief one time or another.
What I don't see a lot of is arguments about what is or isn't on-topic. That's what the downvote button is for, and it has a built-in mechanism to see if anyone else agrees with you.
Perhaps I wasn't 100% clear. 'Pushing beliefs' is, I'm quite sure, commonly understood to be about religious beliefs, which are of a different class than 'belief' in CSS being superior to HTML tables.
Proselytism on HN should not be okay. This is not something you'd want to leave to up and down votes, in my opinion.
We all "push" beliefs, don't we? what else can humans do? After all michaelsbradley didn't ask you to be a christian or something like that; he just pointed out another resource, those who wish to read it may do so, there is no need to pick on him for this. Now you might say I'm "pushing" my belief, maybe rightly. In a sense all comments are at some deeper level are 'beliefs'. Personally I've found links to "different" views on HN threads pretty interesting, I may not buy the argument, but it's good to know.
Don't get the impression you are providing a wonderful service here; it's very annoying to see Christianity dragged into otherwise pleasant subjects.