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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens with religion: it impedes progress, and makes people behave completely irrationally.

These observatories aren't causing environmental problems (AFAIK); they're great tools for humanity to understand our universe. There aren't many locations on Earth that have the advantages this location has, yet these people want to stop this for what? Irrational superstitions? If this were some corporation trying to do mountaintop removal mining (like they do in West Virginia), it would be perfectly rational to oppose that: that's an environmental catastrophe. But this is not, this is one of the most benign things humans can do.

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Religious flamewar isn't welcome on HN. Please don't take threads further in that direction, regardless of how provocative a topic is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I urge you to do some research into why they're protesting and not jump to wild conclusions. Try to think of the protestors as sane, rational humans who have values that's derived from a unique history and culture.

I'm not saying they're "right" or they're "wrong", but just that they have a perspective that's valid and reasonable.

Casting others as zealots only serves to confirm our own biases and doesn't lead to more understanding, which is what we need.

I imagine it has something to do with annexing their land and attempting to erase their culture. This isn't an isolated incident, but yet another example of America's disregard for indigenous people and their right to some degree of self-determination. What respect do they owe us for our desire for progress when we haven't respected their desires? And how much has that disregard contributed to a sense of zero-tolerance of encroachment, even in cases where it would objectively benefit humanity and society? Let's be honest, this isn't coming out of a completely misplaced sense of spite.

> religion: it impedes progress

Please don't make generalizations.

You should look up who came up with the Big Bang Theory.

make widening our understanding of the universe into religion, problem solved. (i thought about making the scientific method into a religion, but it doesn't make any sense :))

Everyone takes things on faith. For instance most could quite trivially prove PV=nRT, but most just take someone else’s word on faith.

In a universe where you can never really know something unless you’ve proven it yourself, you take nearly everything on faith from someone else who claims to have proven it.

I don't think 'faith' covers both things. Yes, a lot of people accept lots of things as being true on the authority of others, but there's lots of other evidence that those authorities are trustworthy. The details, i.e. the specific differences, of religious claims aren't correlated with any other evidence, or even possible evidence, which is why it's so much easier for so many different creeds to exist even given that they make different, and often contradictory claims.

As an example, most people haven't directly carried out all of the relevant experiments needed to discover the laws and theories of electromagnetism, but the evidence of TV, radio, telegraphs are easy enough to perceive and thereof trust. There doesn't seem to be nearly anything similar for religious beliefs, that would make any specific religion more likely than any other. Most of the evidence that does exist for religions seems to be common to any or all of them, e.g. the benefits of group cohesion, common morality, etc..

>For instance most could quite trivially prove PV=nRT, but most just take someone else’s word on faith.

No, that's not faith, not in a religious sense. People accept stuff like that because they believe that other people have followed all the proper procedures to prove this is true (within tolerance of error, etc.), and that they aren't making it up or lying for some reason, and most importantly, that it is independently reproducible and verifiable.

Religious faith has no such element of verifiability. So this isn't "faith" at all.

This is actually similar to the rationale behind the Vatican Observatory, which does some serious science: http://www.vaticanobservatory.va/content/specolavaticana/en/...

Isaac Asimov explored that idea in the Foundation series. At one point science became a religion and even had priests. One notable aspect of the religion of science is that it actually works (prayers are answered, etc), which made for some interesting story telling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Science

Sounds interesting, but I can see that the problem with a society like that is that by restricting the practice of science to a select group of elites, you're holding back progress because people who aren't in that group, who have a great talent (or determination) for scientific work, are presumably being prevented from entering the field.

Imagine if we went back in time to 1980, and made it so that the only people who could write computer programs had to attend special schools and go through an expensive licensing process, and no one was allowed to do it on their own, schools weren't allowed to establish their own programs, and people couldn't even write a simple shell script without going to jail. We wouldn't have the technology we have today.

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