I feel like online applications and communities built around religion are pretty poor given how important religion is for lots of people. One hypothesis is that few hackers are religious. Maybe the YC community can confirm/offer a counter-explanation.
I hold Christian faith. In some ways, I hesitate to label myself as "religious," as it seems to me that a great deal of stuff that has been done and said in the name of Christianity is a bunch of rubbish -- while I believe Christianity itself is good, I also believe that a lot of cruft and misinformation has been tacked on over the years.<p>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... <i>sigh</i><p>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.<p>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.
No, there are plenty of religious hackers, it's that they don't talk about it because there is nothing much to say: every single religious argument has been argued over and over for thousands of years. What's the point in doing it again?
Why do you care? If you draw any generalizations from the replies on this forum, then you are committing every statistical fallacy in the book.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Maybe most good hackers are pragmatic? I'm spiritual, but not religious.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm mormon and I do practice all the "rules" of my religion and go to church every Sunday. I've been coding now for 11 years. I've been a contractor all that time. My religion is important to me but if you met me you wouldn't get the feeling that I'm all overly-religious. I don't try to pull any religious crap on people and I'm not trying to convert anyone unless they want to be.
I don't consider myself religious, but I have incorporated some buddhist practices into my life.<p>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.
Sort of, I believe that there is probably a higher being that created that initial micron of matter. But I don't believe that there is a "god" that watches our every move.<p>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.
<i>I feel like online applications and communities built around religion are pretty poor...</i><p>Your 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.<p>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...<p>I'm also pretty dubious about the facts of your statement -- not that online religious communities are poor, but that they're <i>especially</i> poor. A lot of online applications are poor, full stop. We're not going to run out of things to build anytime soon.
I do not believe in leprechauns. In fact, I actually <i>do believe</i> that there is NOT a leprechaun dancing around my feet at this very moment.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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?
No. I used to be a devout Catholic, but I lost my faith in the Church during high school. By the time my sophomore year in college rolled around, I decided I was agnostic. Now, a few years later, I have gone the extra step: I am atheist.<p>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.
Alternate theory: The Internet is a dangerous idea – cf Raganwald last post. Religions would probably prefer to keep followers away from the web and in a place of worship, where there is more direct idea control; therefore would be less interested in devoting resources to developing websites. Second, I’d suggest that the average hacker puts reason before faith, so is less likely to believe in a supernatural creator.
In discussing Windows vs. Linux (a different sort of religious issue), you can call upon a series of verifiable facts to support whichever side of the argument you are on.<p>For instance, I could point to Linux's superior X in comparison to the X provided by Windows.<p>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".<p>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'm not religious and religion makes me somewhat uncomfortable . This may be in part since religion is largely considered a private/personal matter in Canada (or at least Ontario :P).
Agnostic and atheist beliefs are likely more concentrated in the hacker world because this is a world of science and mathematics - worlds that have not traditionally reconciled well with the world of religion (no flaming please, historical observation - Copernicus: "The Earth is not the center of the Universe" Church: "Condemn the heretic!"). You need not search far to find examples of this (aside from the previous example) as most popular scientific periodicals and journals frequently discuss the lack of religious faith in the scientific community - Scientific American, Nature and Science all regularly discuss this very topic (very frequently in Scientific American).<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.
> Are you religous?<p>Nope. Religion implies <i>belief</i> in something/somebody. I for myself don't believe in anything at all. I can only <i>assume</i>. 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).<p>Such point of view is very much spread among technical/scientific guys. So, I don't think your hypothesis is right.
meh, I think religion in this context is merely morality side-taking.
morality is one of the great unsolved dilemma's of our kind, I can see the appeal of taking a shortcut. I myself have struggled with the balance between objective and subjective morals. I take an evolutionary psychology approach to why humans behave how they do, but that doesn't answer what we should do. I think this question is very relevant to hackers who work on AI. What happens when an artificial consciousness wakes up and it doesn't do anything because it doesn't have any idea of what it "should" do? there's axiometry, but in the absence of perfect information about the future you have to resort to Bayesian statistical models in order to choose between likely outcomes. I also think it's pretty clear that a 100% consistent interpretation of any axiomatic rule would have unintended consequences.
<a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/terminal-values.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/terminal-values.html</a>
I haven't given religion much thought (as a coding problem),<p>But have you looked at sites like,<p><a href="http://www.beliefnet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.beliefnet.com/</a>
You could just say "online applications and communities are pretty poor" and be mostly right, too.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm religious, but I'm seldom willing to discuss it in technical forums because of the responses it draws. Specifically those who feel it their mission to, first, tell me what it is I must believe, then, tell me why it's foolish to believe those things.<p>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.
I took a fair amount of religion courses in college, but I am not religious (believe there is no God, etc). However, I do find religion very interesting.<p>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.
The distribution here, if you believe this sample, is more biased to the heathens! than is the general population:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237517" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237517</a>
I have seen this post on here several .
The answer, its always the same.
I know Ruby coders who wont go near python.<p>We all have our own religions, some believe in trees others god, its all the same, experience.
I'd say that I am spiritual, in that I have an interest in the enrichment of the body and the mind, but I am not religious in any way, shape or form.<p>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.