The point that those who are making the point on behalf of religion are making is that numerous Christians who are also scientists have been motivated by their Christianity to learn what were then the secrets of the universe and have been able to do so without compromising their scientific validity.

That seems reasonable enough to me. In some cases, publishing in conference proceedings prevents one from publishing the same in scholarly journals. The line on this is kind of fuzzy.

Your personal attacks and irrational speculation have no place here.

Ayn Rand showed exactly how the morality of "ought" depends on what "is" by showing the facts that give rise to it.

The reigns of terror of totalitarian dictators were not the result of reason. That vicious attack on reason is disgusting.

There is no role for religious faith in science. The science stands on its own without any extraneous commentary, especially religious dogma, which when it occurs at all is dropped from subsequent re-confirmations, explanations and presentations. Pruning out the warts does not make Newton's science impossible to understand. Newton's science is understood by millions of people without regard to his extraneous religion. The same is true for Maxwell, who kept his religion and science even more separate. There are no "outright religious implications" from science, except that religious dogma is constantly rolled back before the discoveries of science.

Dave Harriman is not wrong that great scientists had radically new ideas and conclusions. The time it takes for others to catch on or drop competing inferior ideas does not imply that what happened in the mind of the individual creator did not happen.

Validated scientific theories change as they are expanded with additional knowledge, not reverted, unless an outright mistake is discovered, which is relatively rare.

There are no "sycophants" or "cowards" "incapable of rational discussion" opposing you. You are systematically evading the content of posts rejecting religious fallacies. Don't be surprised when people who know better disapprove of your posts. Your resorting to name calling is no answer to that.

I agree with you on that. Here he has become nasty and personally insulting pushing religious irrationalism while evading the many thoughtful posts explaining what is wrong with the philosophical arguments he tried to rationalize it with. I hadn't "voted down" any of his posts until he launched this latest snarling attack as he complained about others rejecting him.

They say that because it is what the religious agitators are doing. They are projecting.

You miss the point that pursuing wishful thinking on faith contrary to reality is not in one's self interest.

Name calling, dishonest personal attacks like that deserve to be voted down for their content.

You are evading again. Your posts have been non responsive to the subject matter. "Points" are not relevant to that.

He said that "faith in God... is essential to the moral fiber of the Nation".

Personal philosophy is not based on natural rights. It's the other way around. Every political philosophy presupposes a moral philosophy.

Much of the "moral principles" held by today's Christians in modern society are not due to the otherworldly mysticism of early Christianity at all. They embrace out of common sense a highly secularized version that does not depend on religion at all.

You and your resorting to name-calling as evasion of honest discussion were "done" a long time ago. Honesty does not mean submitting to demands to take mystic sophistry seriously.

I do not submit to mystic dogma. "Getting it" requires ignoring reason by going into a trance. I'm not missing anything.

Yes, it is.

The entire tradition of the Christian era defines faith in opposition to reason, and is illustrated in the Catholic orthodoxy that dominated for centuries, from Tertullian's "I believe it because it is absurd" to the regarding of reason as the handmaiden of faith by Abelard and many others. Their famous "proofs" of God intended to rationalize a prior belief on faith, which always came first and is required in the dogma, have been held out as examples of logical fallacies ever since logic began to be respected again as not the "handmaiden" of anything. "Historical evidence" in the form of legends of religious testimonials to "miracles" have no rational credibility and do not even begin to justify the rationalistic superstructure of doctrine they have spun out and demanded be accepted as dogma ever since.

As for the survival of the Jews despite the long history of persecution, it is remarkable that humanity has survived at all, let alone advanced so much, in the face of the routine barbarism.

He describes it as both "presented and published in the proceedings", and it is listed in the "2010 Southeastern INFORMS Conference Proceedings Papers Listed by Track and Chronological Presentation Session" under a different title, "Testing Ayn Rand's Moral Foundations of Capitalism: 20 Testable Hypotheses on the Nature of Capitalism".

"Southeast Informs", turns out to have been an annual multi-disciplinary meeting of a chapter of InfORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences.

The paper he delivered is apparently not available in written form, but a 4 page printed summary was released prior to the presentation under the alternate title. The summary describes it not as a philosophical analysis or evaluation of a philosophy of moral foundations, but as an attempt to statistically "test" political goals using "freedom indices" compiled by the World Bank for different countries today.

"We plan to explore the moral foundations of Randian capitalism as Ayn Rand defined them and compare these ideas to several prominent western philosophical thinkers. We then plan to line these ideas up with real world economic variables and to test what it is possible to test. Is economic freedom good? Is it correlated with many of the goods we desire?"

And

"There are obviously arguments for and against capitalism and there are both societal advantages and disadvantages to such a system. I plan to examine these advantages and disadvantages; examining whether in fact the advantages of competition and the free market system that Rand so strongly advocates in both her pieces of fiction and nonfiction outweigh disadvantages of capitalism. For Rand, this is almost easy by definition, but social science must [d]o better. The debate must be put forward in falsifiable and testable terms."

I'd say that holding out hope in an afterlife is a very selfish decision even if you personally do not value or mock that possibility. A person, today especially, does not have to have a faith or religion. So someone taking a belief structure is very selfish.

This is the rational perspective I've tried repeatedly for you to see and you irrationally toss aside as mysticism and/or folklore.

A religion could start up tomorrow and promise eternal life and anyone subscribing to it would be doing so for selfish reasons.

Not everyone can agree on everything. I can admit somethings I say could be considered dumb within this context even though I seldom post without thinking or reason for doing so.