

Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999) - daxelrod
http://www.techgnosis.com/wall1.html

======
daxelrod
I first saw this on Reddit:
<http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fje57> and thought it deserved
HN's quality of discussion.

The original link is actually <http://www.feedbag.com/re/re172_master.html>
but is much harder to read and shoves the interview itself off onto a second,
hard-to-find page.

------
istjohn
lol:

 _FEED: The hacker community is full of very cantankerous and opinionated
individuals. Have you gotten much grief for being so open about your Christian
beliefs?

WALL: I've had no difficulty with it....I see God looking down on all these
weird, cantankerous people, and kinda liking them, in an artistic
fashion....There are certainly a bunch of what I would clearly label sinners
out there...._

~~~
xiongchiamiov
_...But they are real people, and they have real problems, and they just need
real help..._

------
mckoss
It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful
people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little
less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.

~~~
dasil003
What do you think God is? Evangelical atheists want him to be a straw man
poking his head of the clouds Monty-Python-style; but what if God is just a
metaphor for everything greater than the reality we are capable of
understanding in our tiny carbon-based brains? Do you really want to believe
that the only things that matter in life are those that can be hypothesized,
measured, and analyzed with physical instruments?

If the answer is yes, that's fine, but remember that you are taking that
assertion _on faith_. There is simply no evidence one way or the other about
what lies outside the bounds of human knowledge.

~~~
stopmi
"that which can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof"

and why give weight to the ramblings of the religious but not to all
schizophrenics?

shouldn't we give both views equal respect without calling to reason?

edit: referring to the "difficult to tell the difference between real and
unreal experiences/delusions/hallucinations" symptoms when i said
schizophrenics

~~~
dasil003
> _"that which can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof"_

Exactly! And vice versa!

Who said anything about "giving weight" to "ramblings"? You are fixated on
everything being about truth and facts and who's right, but that's not what
I'm talking about.

Maybe you don't want anything bigger than observable facts and theories based
thereupon in your life, but I hope when your parents say they love you you
don't tell yourself that it's simply endorphins firing in their brains.

~~~
stopmi
"You are fixated on everything being about truth and facts and who's right"

would you rather i countered an argument with untruths and lies?

what i'm trying to say is, if you are willing to give credibility to any
assertion which is without proof, then you have to give an equal amount to
credibility to _all_ assertions without proof

i.e, all religions equally, fairies, leprechauns, elfs, russel's teapot, a
furry-god, Elvis still alive, alien-invasions and abductions, etc..

and problems arise then, if you give credibility to _all_ religions, there
will be contradictions

\- they have different creation stories and timelines

\- multiple 'unique' prophets

\- multiple 'chosen' tribe/people

etc..

------
doorhammer
I'm just glad we can all have a decent holy war over something other than text
editors.

~~~
mckoss
Amen, brother!

