Amerika

There’s always the risk of religious persecution, but the only truly dangerous people are the religious nuts who don’t realize they are religious nuts.

But software development is, and has always been, a religion. We band together into groups of people who believe the same things, with very little basis for proving any of those beliefs. Java versus .NET. Microsoft versus Google. Static languages versus Dynamic languages. We may kid ourselves into believing we’re “computer scientists”, but when was the last time you used a hypothesis and a control to prove anything? We’re too busy solving customer problems in the chosen tool, unbeliever!

There’s nothing wrong with a religion that preaches solid engineering. If you’re a true believer in the church of Google methodology, you’ll become a better developer.

Coding Horror

I unspun this article so we could have a scientific look at religion.

Religion is any belief in that which is not directly provable. It tries to tie together abstractions so distance from tangible manifestations that we must keep them as abstractions in order to draw any conclusions about them.

To a scientist, a religion or philosophy or dogma gets analyzed the same way: as a structured argument for describing the world and how we ought to act in it.

Secularists can be religious too. They can be religious about their secular beliefs, meaning that they cannot prove them and that makes them even more inclined to defend them when attacked, to the point where they deny blatant scientific data to the contrary of their assumptions.

Even more, many secularists ape religions — notice how liberal/Progressive morality is identical to Biblical Christian morality or even Communism — but will refuse to see the similarity.

In our wise society, which can do nothing but deconstruct so that the individual feels empowered over the context and order around them, we like to think that calling something a “religion” makes it sound dumb and for uneducated, pickup-truck driving, redneck scum from the rural areas.

But yet:

Faith is blossoming, not just in Third World countries with poor levels of education and in Islamic theocracies, but also in industrialized nations. The US magazine American Spectator, writing about the “myth of the secular West,” calls it a “complete mystery” that so many scholars and journalists believe the people of the West are, for the most part, adherents to Darwin’s theory. Opinion polls have painted an unchanging picture for years — that religions have managed to fend off all assaults by natural science. Even now.

According to a survey completed by the European Commission in early 2005, 52 percent of the citizens in the European Union believe in God. About one in four Europeans stated that while not believing in a personal God, they did believe in “a sort of spirit or life force,” and only 18 percent outed themselves as non-believers. Germany ranked in the middle of countries surveyed, with 47 percent of respondents declaring a belief in God. According to the 2005 study, 25 percent of Germans said they believed in a higher power other than God, while another 25 percent believed in neither.

In an international comparison, these numbers still place Germany and the EU among the world’s most secular regions. In the United States, the Gallup Organization regularly polls people on questions of God and science. According to the most recent result only 14 percent believe Homo sapiens arrived in the world as a sole result of evolution. Thirty-six percent believe evolution did take place, but under the guidance of God. The largest group, comprising 44 percent, believes the Almighty himself created man in his current form — and that this occurred no more than 10,000 years ago.

Der Spiegel

“Science” has become corrupted by the word of the Crowd, and so can’t explain enough.

People like the idea of a society united by a number of factors that are not political, like: Values. Religion. Culture. Language. Heritage.

That’s how you get a stable community. And most of us aren’t fascinated with the ideal of some revolutionary conflict that never ends. We want stability so we can do what interests us, which is constructive things… not political agitation.