
Living Out in Faith - exolymph
https://www.henryzoo.com/blog/2018/10/16/living-out-in-faith.html
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hzoo
Henry here, didn't expect this post to ever be on HN heh!

The podcast is a 10 episode series (pre-recorded it over the last 5 months)
with my friend Nadia (who isn't religious)

I'm writing up a post about making it from scratch (never made a podcast
before) and will post it soon as well!

~~~
indigochill
Hey Henry, cool concept for a podcast. I'm also a Christian who started with
commercial development and now is pushing more for open source (even got
permission to open-source some of my employer's backend tech as a "20%
project", which'll be exciting to release when it's ready).

Religiously, growing up in an evangelical setting, I didn't see that as a very
effective way of reaching people (as you say, you're not going to convince
people via argument), but I do believe in evangelism through actions. My close
coworkers know my faith because they've noticed things and asked questions and
I explained. And I find I take this stance with open-source as well. Talking
about open-source being great is one thing, but actually putting it into
practice is something else.

I'll definitely be listening to and sharing your podcast.

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Jedd
There's a lot of revelation from the author in this post, but I suspect not
all of it intentional.

Consider the claim:

> I started out in open source like a lot of us: wanting to get my name on a
> commit and counting on "getting" something out of it.

I can't find any good research on this area, but anecdata from a few decades
dabbling in various free software communities suggest a) this isn't the
primary motivation for most, and b) there's an inverse correlation between
free software contributions and religiosity. (With the second, most of my
experience has been in more secular societies - it may well be skewed
differently through Asia and USA.)

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indigochill
>there's an inverse correlation between free software contributions and
religiosity

I'm curious where this comes from. Seems like there could be a lot of
confounding factors. Anecdotally as well, I would speculate that religion
among developers as a pool is smaller than it is in the general population
(based on the sorts of personalities that tend to gravitate towards religion
and those towards software development). However, of that portion I would be
surprised if there was an actual inverse correlation.

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hota_mazi
The problem with faith is that there is nothing you can't believe based on it,
no matter how incredible, supernatural, or unproven it is.

Faith is not a reliable path to truth.

~~~
ekiminmo
The definition I’ve been given of faith is that is is a “belief which is acted
upon”. To “have faith” is then to believe something and act accordingly. Taken
out of a religious context it’s clear that in order accomplish anything in
life you must first believe in something and then act upon it.

Under this definition, faith can be a path (or perhaps the only path) to new
or prevoiusly undiscovered truth. For example to prove P = NP (or P != NP) one
must first believe that such a proof exists and then act on that belief in
search of a proof.

You are right though in that it’s a stretch to call faith a “reliable” source
of truth. For every truth that is believed and acted upon there are far more
falsehoods to believe and act upon, some of which are really popular.

~~~
hota_mazi
To me, faith is the reason people give when they don't have a good reason for
believing in something.

~~~
tkuichooseyou
Aren’t belief and non belief two sides of the same coin? One fan believes his
sports team will win, and another thinks they’ll lose. One person believes
there is a Creator, and another believes there is no creator.

~~~
KozmoNau7
That's an argument to false equivalency.

As a non-religious person, I simply have no belief in the concept of a
creator, nor any other supposed supernatural concept. I also don't have a
belief that there _isn 't_ a creator, nor in any sort of "atheist doctrine" or
"atheist gospel". I'm a non-believer, in other words.

Religion simply isn't a part of my life or world-view, other than as a mild
curiosity and fanciful concept for stories and legend.

What I _do_ do is put my trust in the scientific method and falsifiable proof,
which doesn't require belief to work. And I adjust my world-view according to
the findings and proof presented, so it's not set in stone. Obviously I don't
just do that blindly, it does require convincing proof. Bigger claims need
bigger proofs.

