Category Archives: News

News

Women want to complain to Human Resources because man is reserved at work

15 Comments

I have spent over 23 years in information technology, and most of the companies were large IT companies. Large IT companies tend to emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion more than smaller companies, which have to perform in order to stay afloat. And that means making sure there is an equal balance of genders, ethnicities, etc. in every different area.

Here is a very interesting post on the relationship advice forum of Reddit:

Hi all I’m posting this on an alt because I know a few of my friends are following me on here and I don’t want this spilling out until I have some clear thoughts on what I want to do.

The author – who uses Commonwealth spelling – has a short summary of her post at the top:

A colleague (27M) joined our firm last year and since then he has had zero issues socialising with the guys we work with but always finds an excuse or says no to hanging out with the girls after work, even if we go out together as a whole he rarely talks to us and its making some of my friends uncomfortable.

And then here is the long version:

So early last year our firm hired Dan (27M). In the first few weeks he was really quiet and didn’t talk much and that’s just how we thought he was. Every conversation with him was short and to the point and never deviated from work, asides from pleasantries (Have a nice weekend etc). About 2 months in he started becoming a bit more friendly with the guys in our office and they would hang out every so often and have normal conversations. However, whenever any of the girls in the office tried to do so he would quickly change the conversation back to work or just not reply. Even now after a year of Dan working with us he straight up refuses to socialise with the girls in the office and it is making them feel uncomfortable. He avoids any discussion of himself outside of work related events and future plans and doesn’t ask any of the girls either. Where as he is, what I can only assume, pretty good friends with the guys in the office.

Even on work meals out to celebrate events he is only doing the bare minimum when it comes to conversation with the girls where again with the guys he talks to them like there is no problem whatsoever. I don’t know if I’m overreacting but one of the girls is considering go to HR about this because she is saying its creating a hostile work environment. Dan treats us like he treats clients we work with; cordial and strictly about business and its wearing thin now.

Any advice is appreciated.

Many young people today don’t see the workplace as being about work. They see it as a time of socializing. And they get angry when people don’t socialize with them. They want to be allowed into a man’s personal space, even though they are the kind of people who go straight to HR whenever anyone disagrees with them, or refuses to make them happy. Many of these women are single mothers who divorced the father of their kids.

I actually left my last job and took a lower salary job, because I was being harassed by a woman who had no college degree. Her official title was “Software Engineer”, but she didn’t write code. She just supervised deployments to production. She was very attractive, and had had cosmetic surgery done – her chest was super-sized. (I heard her explaining why she did it to one of the Indian workers one day). She was also about 6-8 years older than me. She started to get very angry with me for not giving her attention at work. She would come to my desk and talk about how politically conservative she was (she must have heard that I was conservative). But I didn’t want to have anything to do with her.

I blogged previously about a woman who accused a man of grooming her because he didn’t want to get more serious with her. Men are getting tired of this. If you know any young women who are wondering why men don’t talk to them, maybe it’s because many young women are not pleasant or safe to talk to. Even if a particular young unmarried woman is safe to talk to, men will judge her based on the majority of single, unmarried women. It’s just not safe for men to have non-business conversations in the workplace with young, unmarried women.

The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

News

Is the Big Bang cosmology a theistic or atheistic theory of cosmic origins?

5 Comments

Dr. Michael Strauss is a practicing particle physics employed as a professor at University of Oklahoma. He does research in particle physics at CERN, a large hadron collider. It’s safe to assume that he knows something about experimental physics.

Here’s what he writes about Christians and the Big Bang at his new blog:

When my children were young, I would often drive to the home of the person babysitting my kids, usually a young teenage girl, pick her up, then drive her back to my house.  In the car I would ask questions about her interests or her school.  In addition, I would sometimes ask a question that intrigued me since I am a scientist and a Christian, “Do you think the Big Bang is a theistic theory or an atheistic theory?”  Now that question is not on most people’s list of babysitter interview questions, but I was interested to know their answer even though it would not affect their monetary tip. Every time I asked this question I always got the same answer, that the Big Bang is an atheistic theory.  This is just one example of the fact that many kids growing up in an evangelical church environment have the perception that the Big Bang is an idea which removes God as the creator.  It seems that many Christians may disdain the Big Bang.

Subsequent conversations with people of all ages have shown me that many individuals (1) don’t really understand what the Big Bang is, (2) don’t know the scientific evidence for the Big Bang, and (3) don’t comprehend the theistic significance of the Big Bang.   So let’s explore these ideas a little bit.

Here is his overview of the scientific evidence for the Big Bang:

There are three primary observations that are best explained by the Big Bang.  First, the universe is expanding so that it must have had a beginning of expansion in the past.  Second, because the universe was once very hot, we can still see the remnants of that heat in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation.  The latest measurements of the CMB spectrum made by the Planck satellite (shown above) agrees almost perfectly with theoretical calculations using the standard Big Bang cosmological model (see the plot at the end of this post).  Third, the theory predicts the amount of primordial light elements that should have been created in the first few minutes of the Big Bang, like hydrogen and helium.  Again the observations and the theoretical calculations align almost exactly.   A few other observations are supported by Big Bang predictions, like the distribution of galaxies and primordial gas.  The agreement between what we measure and what is expected from a Big Bang is so remarkable that just about all scientists accept the Big Bang as the origin of our universe, despite its implication that the universe had a beginning.

Does this scientific evidence support theism, or atheism?

Because we don’t have any observations that tell us exactly what happened “in the beginning” of our universe, we can only speculate.  But let me point out the obvious.  All of the observations we do have, and all the theoretical calculations, and even some projective calculations like the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem… give credence to the conclusion that all of the space, time, matter, and energy of this universe had a beginning.  The Big Bang is a misnomer for it is not some kind of explosion since there was nothing that existed to explode.  It is the origin of the universe.  So if this universe had a beginning, then the cause of the universe can not be a part of the universe.  The cause must be transcendent, like the Christian idea of God.  Is the fact that all the evidence points to our universe having a transcendent cause proof for God?  No, but it is extremely powerful evidence.  If one hundred years ago you had predicted that scientists would obtain unambiguous evidence about the history of the universe for 13.8 billion years, all of its lifetime except the first fraction of a second, and that all of the evidence would point to an actual beginning consistent with a transcendent cause, I don’t think anyone would have taken you seriously.  But that is exactly what has happened.  Theists could not have outlined a better scenario to support theism.  The scientific facts are completely consistent with the statement, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

I know how I account for this scientific discovery in my worldview: a non-physical mind that existed eternally created the physical universe at time t=0. But how do atheists, who can only explain the world by appealing to matter, explain the origin of matter itself?

Here’s Oxford University professor of physical chemistry (and atheist) Peter Atkins explaining how he grounds the Big Bang cosmology:

Easy! Nothing actually exists, according to Peter Atkins.

What about a theoretical physicist, like Lawrence Krauss? Well, he just redefines the nothing that causally preceded the origin of the universe so that it is actually something. Pure speculation, and it goes against the experimental scientific evidence we have. Exactly what you’d expect from a man who wrote a book about “the physics of Star Trek”.

Each of us has to come to terms with this scientific evidence. What could have caused the beginning of the universe? It can’t be matter, because this was the beginning of all the matter in the universe. It has to be a mind.

Although most theists have no problem with this scientific evidence, atheists really hate it. When I tell them about this evidence, they tell me that in a few years or decades, all the evidence for a beginning we have now will have gone away. “How do you know that?” I ask. We have faith” they reply. I don’t think anyone should deny the objective reality we all share just because it’s what they want to believe.

News

Is the “He Gets Us” ad campaign an accurate portrayal of Jesus?

2 Comments

The following is a guest post from a friend of the blog.

The “He Gets Us” evangelism(?) campaign has gotten a lot of attention lately, particularly after its Super Bowl ads. Many conservative Christian pundits have criticized it as offering a watered-down Jesus, using the language and assumptions of the woke culture. Others have defended it as a form of pre-evangelism or attempt to translate the Gospel into the current cultural sensibilities. I understand the attempt to contextualize our evangelism. After all, the Apostle Paul did as much at Mars Hill. But in the attempt to relate to the modern culture this campaign uses the language of secular progressivism without doing much to correct the non-Christian ideology and assumptions behind it.  I’ve sampled a bit of the website’s content and find issues with most of what I’ve read.  I’d like to share several examples.

The whole site seems to portray Jesus more as a moral role model than anything else. This article admits that some involved in the project believe Jesus is the son of God, but that others simply have an admiration for the “man” that Jesus was.  That view is perfectly satisfactory to theological liberalism, which is the cul de sac at which many have arrived, and which already is at peace with modern culture. This movement does not seem to offer an exit from that comfortable and compromised version of Christianity.

This article doesn’t mention the most important and ultimate reason that the Jewish leadership condemned Jesus: that He claimed to be the Messiah, who will sit at the right-hand of God, and will come in the clouds at the end of the age (a la O.T. prophecy). It also suffers from poor exegesis regarding Jesus forgiving those who crucified Him. He was only explicitly offering forgiveness for those whose job it was to carry out the execution on a presumably guilty criminal, and not necessarily those who put Him there. In fact, earlier He had said that He must go to His death but woe to those by whose hands this was accomplished.

This article rightly depicts Jesus as hanging out with everyone, but it affirms “inclusivity” without mention that He did not hesitate to point out sin and caused (or expected) repentance and change in these people. As He said to an adulteress: I forgive you, but go and sin no more. And as He responded to His critics: it is the sick who need the physician. This campaign seems intent on avoiding such ideas as sin and spiritual “sickness.” As the saying goes, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

This article indicates that Jesus always forgave everyone, which is simply not true. It talks of Him “speaking truth to power,” and where this is true, in a sense, Jesus certainly did not express “unconditional love” to the unbelieving Jewish leadership whom He often accused of resisting Him because their father was Satan. Yes, “Jesus gets us.” He knows every inch of our rebellious hearts.

And in this article it emphasizes the way of love, which is undeniably true, but is already assumed by most people of good will. It is also not the whole story, nor is it adequate if we are all left to define “love” for ourselves. It’s as vague and circular as telling people to “follow your heart.” Further, the article says Jesus “always loved others despite their identity, beliefs, or values.” While He certainly received people of such diversity, He was keen to teach the truth about such things in ways that would correct mistaken views of identity, beliefs, and values, and asserted that there were not only particular objective truths, but that He Himself was THE ultimate Truth. The overall content of the campaign seems to imply that Jesus is ultimately fine with everyone on their own terms, and all we lack is to love one another. That message was offered by the post-Christian flower-children of the ’60s, but no matter how pleasant we might manage to be to one another, we can hardly live as a functional, harmonious society where everyone nurses their own distinct flavors of truth and value.

So, how’s the campaign working out?

I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Tweet speaks volumes:

“Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign”

Besides having no clue what “fascism” actually means, and a groundless presumption of what Jesus would actually do in any situation, she’s not having any of this. The irony is that AOC is a child and an icon of this modern cultural moment. If this is not who they mean to reach, then precisely who is it? One might say that it is those who are true seekers — those with “ears to hear.” But those seeking and listening for what: something that affirms their own “identity, beliefs, and values”? Or are they looking for the One who can offer us an eternal, unifying identity, who is the apex of the cosmic narrative in which we must believe, and who both grounds and defines the values against which we are to calibrate our thinking and behavior? This campaign appears to suffer from confusion over who its target audience is, what is being offered as Christianity, and how to effectively offer it.