I didn't claim to believe in God. Also, read what I wrote, which you quoted, again:

"The common underpinning of faith does not imply that other religions share the institutionalized, wholesale abuse and corruption committed by the Church of Scientology."

Now read it in the context of the post I was replying to. Do you really think I was trying to excuse or ignore the injustices of other religions? I was simply pointing out my problem with extrapolating the transgressions of the CoS to religion as a whole.

"Do it now or take your lying nonsense and stick it where the sun never shines."

Why did you choose to act like such an asshole and end your post with this?

What's with the need for skeptics to equate all religion with Scientology in every article about the CoS?

The common underpinning of faith does not imply that other religions share the institutionalized, wholesale abuse and corruption committed by the Church of Scientology. If an atheist cannot see the stark differences in nature and degree, then he is blinded by a dogmatic opposition towards faith.

Sounds like a horrible problem to have.

This is horse shit. I've worked with plenty of religious folks that are great at solving problems. Your line of thinking simply promotes the kind of discrimination and simple minded thinking that makes religious zealots so frustrating in the first place.

If you were black, then you would have used the n-word, instead of simply referring to it. So that tells me you're as white as I am.

This is wrong, in my opinion. Expanding education is a great idea, but do so by teaching yourself new languages or platforms, not by degrees.

Right now, Ruby on Rails is an extremely hot technology. Learn it, and there are tons of rails jobs out there for you to jump in to. I promise that your education level will not matter as long as you can show you are good.

I'm sure the same is true for django, node.js, iOS/Cocoa development, and anything else that is "hot" technology. If anything, focusing on C++ and Java will put you into more competition for job spots, since the market for C++/.NET/Java engineers may indeed be tight right now.

So basically hipsters can jump from 100,000+ feet safely?

I agree with every statement but the last. Ruby's internal implementation is very different from smalltalk. It's syntax from the ground up is very different from smalltalk. It's syntax isn't even convoluted -- can you qualify what you mean by that? About the only convoluted part of the syntax I've found is the lambda/proc/block syntaxes -- they should seriously cut down the number of ways to create anonymous methods.

Javascript does it right with function(){} syntax, but they don't have any way of creating blocks.

Where the hell does science "say" anything of the sort? Science is a process by which we can reliably improve our understanding of the world around us. Nothing more, nothing less. Some folks might embrace beliefs and views not backed by scientific evidence, but science ain't gonna jump out of the bushes and tell them anything.

Science can obviously refute beliefs it can prove are wrong, but you're conflating that with epistemology -- e.g. the study of defining what "knowledge" is.

This is wrong. Science doesn't claim that all beliefs must be justified by scientific evidence. The question of whether his views are justified or not is an epistemological question, not a scientific one.

I suppose if humans developed the ability to perceive reality beyond the Big Bang -- and we discovered evidence for which the most reasonable conclusion is that the universe simply sprang forth from nothing -- his professed beliefs would then stand in opposition to science.

Spat. Coffee. In public.

From one ex pizza delivery driver to another, well played, sir.

Do you wear a seat belt?

This.

Personally, I've been doing ruby on rails development for about four years now, and I haven't had to touch proprietary code in as many years. Development platform is linux or OSX, and 100% the software stack is open source.

This is just my personal anecdote, but I think you'll have success working on open source if you find an open source platform that's actually used by your company. (Duh, I know right?)

It's kind of hard for the OEM to get paid for the crapware like Norton they put on there when the computer sold doesn't even have an OS.

Take 15$ off the sticker price for removing Windows, but then add $30 for NOT being able to put the crapware on there.