The Conclusion

During the last few weeks I read your posts about general topics and I liked most of your opinions. I noticed that you have strong conviction in your beliefs and ideas, you take no rubbish from anybody and you take no prisoners. Yesterday I made the assumption that you confronted the guy in Las Vegas because you didn't like his ideas. Now I know that the religious guy was in the wrong harassing you, it was good of you to teach him a lesson.
This could be another example for wrong assumption made by me.

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He wasn't really harassing me but I found his views to be way off from what the good book he was quoting really says.

It's not our job to judge others. Especially by outward appearance and where or who we hang out with. That's God's job and God's alone. I just had a bit of fun getting him to point that out to himself in front of the very people he was chastising.

Really it just irritates me when people like that use their good intentions the wrong way and drive people away from the very thing they are trying to bring them to. I used to be an atheists just because of that type of people at church. Turned out the real representatives of God do not act anything like that.

moty22 said:

My rule is that if you are not the physicist or the scientist that carried out the experiments and reached those conclusions yourself, then you are a believer only. ...

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Harsh rule...

Let's take the invention of the transistor as an example. It was, of course, loosely based on the galena crystal detector which had conduction properties which, in the 1920's, 30's and 40's, no one really understood. Yet its use was wide spread and the belief in its rectifying properties were accepted and believed to be true despite a total lack of any scientifically derived explanations for why it did what it did.

With the invention of the germanium based transistor (Bell Labs), the properties exhibited by the device were finally investigated and defined, obviously after the belief in the efficacy of the device was established.

Seems to me that if I can review and understand the steps and methods that the physicists (or scientists) took to arrive at their ultimately successful creation of the transistor , then I have, in effect, reproduced the experiment(s) and have an equally valid right to believe in the resultant device(s), without ant further qualification.

I might even go so far as to postulate that even if I didn't investigate their work or, for that matter didn't even understand it, that my belief in the reality of its capabilities is any less significant.

Same goes for God...

cowboybob said:

Harsh rule...

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I used to discuss scientific theories like they are facts, now I rarely do it so it is easy for me to make such rule.

When you design and build a circuit using transistors and you get it to work as you intended then you are qualified to discuss the transistors you used as facts. You are not only a believer how transistor function, you are the scientist that experimented with a circuit containing transistors. This applies to most of us in this forum, we are experienced engineers that experimented with transistor as a component. We have the right to debate transistors with each other.

At the same time all of us are believers only when it comes to the theory of electrons holes minority carrier etc. This theory is an invention of some scientist, like all other theories it is true only until proven otherwise. For me those theories are not facts at all. If some of us will have a debate about that theory they will look like two people arguing about their religion.

On this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor they believe that the transistor was invented before 1947.
Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a field-effect transistor (FET) in Canada in 1925,

tcmtech said:

Really it just irritates me when people like that use their good intentions the wrong way and drive people away from the very thing they are trying to bring them to. I used to be an atheists just because of that type of people at church. Turned out the real representatives of God do not act anything like that.

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You probably experienced this kind of behavior, telling other people what to to, in your place of work. They are almost everywhere including your home. It is one of the characteristics of people generally and not only religious people. As you learnt yourself; it isn't the religion fault.
Most of us receive the education during childhood to be afraid of God and about punishment for sins. It is possible that when a religious man preach to us this hidden fear make us react very strongly to that man. For that you can blame our parents.

moty22 said:

... On this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor they believe that the transistor was invented before 1947.
Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a field-effect transistor (FET) in Canada in 1925,

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The patent was for the concept of the later named "transistor". The actual physical device was not pursued until the Bell Labs effort(s). It was a classic example of the theoretical preceding the actual, like much of physics. Lilienfeld, in this case and so far as we know, came to no conclusion whatsoever...