On 10/22/2010 7:11 PM, Neeum Zawan wrote:
> Patrick Elliott<sel### [at] npgcablecom>  writes:
>
>>> 1. How many pharmacists refused to provide a drug (hard to call it
>>> medicine - it's not a disease being treated, if I think I know what
>>> you're talking about) on religious grounds? And of those, what
>>> percentage of the cases did not have another pharmacist at the same
>>> site, or within a reasonable driving distance? And of those, how many
>>> were not reprimanded or lose their job (at least in the US)?
>>>
>>> 2. What percentage of religious engineers claim their expertise backs
>>> their belief in religion, and of those, what percentage of those events
>>> have been demonstrated to be damaging due to their beliefs?
>>>
>>> 3. What percentage of religious engineers/scientists, when being asked
>>> to apply their expertise on a problem involving biology, have had their
>>> work on that project been subpar compared to, say, an atheist engineer?
>>>
>>> Until you present such data, what you keep stating is without merit.
>>>
>> Specific statistics no. Just news reports, done by people that may have
>> them. But, in case #1, this is irrelevant. It hardly matters if its only
>> one person effected, by one pharmacist, in one town, which by shear
>> chance happens to have only the one pharmacist they can go to, without
>> driving for 3 hours (which, maybe, they can't do). You shouldn't take a
>> job, if you can't, or worse, won't, do the job.
>
> Lots of bad things happen to bad people. If it happened only once, I
> don't see what the grave concern is for.
>
Umm. No. This isn't about "bad people". This is about someone who, 
maybe, needs a medicine to live, but the local pharmacist(s) doesn't 
want to give it to them, so they have to find some way to get themselves 
hundreds of miles away, to get it from someone else. Good or bad never 
even enters into it. For the most part, the most common one you here on 
this is "contraception", but some court cases, not just in the US, but 
Britain, have opened the door for **anyone** in one of these jobs to 
deny people, on what ever basis they want. Hell, its hardly an unknown, 
or completely unheard of, for there to be cases of dying people being 
sent, in the US, to a hospital 10-20 miles farther away (along with the 
additional delays, at the most critical time for injuries), because the 
closest one was Catholic, and objected to some known characteristic of 
the person that got delivered to their own emergency room. Its been 
frakking documented to happen, and its not specifically illegal, if the 
hospital doesn't receive funds the government, or is otherwise private, 
and the recent court cases has done nothing other than make it "easier" 
for this to happen.

I don't know about you, but I haven't had, and a lot of other people 
don't ever manage, to find themselves in a position where they can 
simply "go someplace else" where these sorts of problems won't be 
problems for them. If it was that damned simple to fix, for most people, 
it wouldn't be worth discussing. Yet, oddly enough, even the news 
stations seem to think its worthy of pointing out and arguing about...

>> 2. - I would say, among those that deny evolution at the same time,
>> pretty much 100%. I can't say for those that do not deny basic sciences.
>
> I asked for two percentages - which are you referring to?
>
The first one, you can see my answer below for why the second one is 
rather more problematic to pin down, or even form a coherent protocol to 
determine and address.

>> 3. Unknown. But, again, the issue isn't necessarily, despite your
>> ignoring that point, whether they are religious, but whether their
>> religion happens to specifically come into conflict with the subject
>> they are being asked about. That is why I say I find it
>> implausible. *Something* is bound to conflict, at some point, and when
>> it does, why wouldn't the result be sub-par?
>
> Did you even read the question I asked?
Yes, I did. And I answered it. I don't have statistics on that, they are 
bound to be problematic to collect, but it is almost impossible to hold 
irrational views and *never* run into conflicts with those views. Exact 
statistics would certainly be nice, but the first problem you have to 
address is how you determine what their output/results would be if they 
*hadn't* had a bias, before you can address whether or not any bias 
transpired. For *big* questions, like some bozo trying to run computer 
simulations of "flood geology", this is relatively simple. Any one 
claiming to be a geologist, never mind most anything else involve in the 
process, ***has*** failed to do it right.

Its *way* harder to pin down the effect of a bias from, say, giving one 
example I do know of, a neurosurgeon who believes that the brain is 
merely some sort of magic black box, which interfaces with a soul, and 
that any malfunctions are not the "intent" of the soul (presumably even 
cases such as someone suffering radical emotional changes, and killing 
someone, instead of caring for them), but in his words, "A result of a 
failure of the machine to correctly interpret what the soul wanted." 
This is absurd on its face, creates serious issues, at least as far as I 
can see, with his interpretation of "anything" discovered about the 
brain, never mind his practice. Its not even coherent from the stand 
point of religion and punishment for sins, which presumably would result 
from the soul choosing, not the brain machine malfunctioning, outside of 
the soul's control. How do you define *exactly* the parameters of when a 
person who holds that position is going to do something stupid, based on 
the, "brain as mechanical thing, the soul works through, not the mind 
itself", presumption. Hell, how do you even pin down where such a person 
delineates "choice" vs. "malfunction", so you can make any sort of 
distinction that it is only effecting "some" of his practice, not the 
whole thing, even if, in this case, possibly, by shear accident of the 
beliefs nature, benignly?

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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