RE: Religious Discrimination
July 6, 2012 at 3:33 pm
(This post was last modified: July 6, 2012 at 3:38 pm by CliveStaples.)
Quote:Anyways, let's analyze this. If the hiring manager knew a candidate believed magical flying ponies lived in his or her basement, all of your analogies would still apply. You could bring up a story about loyalty to a bank vs loyalty to one's wife. You could easily and successfully argue that an atheist can be irrational in one context and not another; again, I do not deny that and I even patently rejected that all atheists are rational in other contexts. At the end of the day, if I know nothing else about the career candidates, I sure as hell (pun intended?) think an applicant who believes in magical flying ponies is more likely to fail at critical thinking in other contexts. You can contest the idea that a magical flying pony believer is more likely to be irrational in another context, but it seems (as an axiom) to be silly.
Yeah, because mathematical and scientific geniuses are never whacked out or anything. According to your metric, you'd refuse to hire Grigori Perlmen.
Quote:I already stated that plenty of religious people are smart. My position is that in the context of religion, Christians are irrational. Yes, I am being condescending about the subject of religion. I will not lie out of fear I will be seen as pompous. You, and every other Christian, are less logical than me in the context of religion. Yes, Francis Collins, the DNA genius, is an inferior thinker in the context of religion. That does not mean I think you or Francis Collins are dumber than me. (You are obviously a good writer.) If you earned a PhD from MIT and became a billionaire because of your financial genius, and I scrubbed floors while wishing I could multiply and divide, it would have no bearing on the insane stupidity of Christianity. I do not think people I disagree with are dumb. I think Abrahamic religion adherents are irrational in the context of religion.
Don't forget Immanuel Kant, Karl Barth, Alvin Plantinga, Gottfried Liebniz, not to mention the majority of modern philosophers of religion.
It's one thing to say they're mistaken. It's another thing to say that you're more rational. I don't know, maybe I'm quibbling.
Quote:At the end of the day, if I know nothing else about the career candidates, I sure as hell (pun intended?) think an applicant who believes in magical flying ponies is more likely to fail at critical thinking in other contexts. You can contest the idea that a magical flying pony believer is more likely to be irrational in another context, but it seems (as an axiom) to be silly.
But you do know something else. You have their CVs. You have their references. They, to your knowledge, are equally likely to provide the services you need. According to the hypothetical, anyway.
Sure, if a guy thought magic ponies lived in his basements, odds are he's crazy. If he's high functioning crazy, that might shift the odds closer to genius. If he's otherwise reliable with good references and a strong performance record, what do you care that he's got some weird belief? If you knew that one of them liked really really rough BDSM porn, would you reduce your probability of hiring him on the notion that he'd have a higher probability of committing rape on the premises?
“The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
