Teaching python to non-programmers

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 22:42:14 -0700, Rustom Mody wrote:

> In middle-eastern society women are expected to dress heavier than in
> the West. A few years ago a girl went to school in France with a scarf
> and she was penalized.

Citation please. I think this is bogus, although given how obnoxious some 
schools can be I'm not quite prepared to rule it out altogether. I think 
it's far more likely that she was only penalized for wearing full head-
covering (not just a scarf) after being warned that it was not part of 
the school uniform and therefore not appropriate.


[...]
> People whose familiarity with religion is limited to the Judeo-Christian
> tradition are inclined to the view (usually implicit) that "being
> religious" == "belief in God"
> However there are religions where belief in God is irreligious --
> Jainism 

I think that it will come as rather a surprise to Jains to be told that 
they don't believe in god. In fact, they believe in a multitude of gods 
(not surprising, as Jainism is derived from Hinduism) and believe that 
every soul has the potential to become a god. 


> And others where it is is irrelevant -- Tao, Shinto. [There is
> the story of a westerner who wen to a shinto temple and said: All this
> (rites) is fine and beautiful but what's your *philosophy* To which he
> was told: "Philosophy? We have no philosophy! We dance!"]

A nice story, but the name "Shinto" even means "The Way Of The Gods", so 
claiming that Shinto is not about gods is rubbish.

It might be true that there is a particular Shinto temple where they have 
no religious beliefs and just dance for the love of it, but that's hardly 
the case for *all* Shinto. That would be a bit like claiming that 
Christians don't believe in god because some Unitarians are atheists. 
Shinto has no founder, no overarching doctrine, and no official religious 
texts, so you are more likely to find widely-varying religiosity than 
among Christian churches, but to generalise to all Shinto is misleading.

Similarly for Taoism (Daoism). The Tao itself is not a religious concept, 
it is more of a mystical/philosophical concept than a theistic one, but 
Taoism is a religion with many gods. It seems to me that your statement 
that belief in gods is irrelevant to Taoism is making the same category 
mistake as it would be to say that belief in Jesus is irrelevant to 
Christianity because Faith is not a religious concept[1].


>> That's equivalent to being told "Don't ever delete any of your code,
>> just comment it out". I don't care who's saying that, it's bad advice.
> 
> The correct analogy: "Dont ever delete content from the repository"

No -- the repository is the email archive. (Your inbox, perhaps.) You 
don't keep a copy of the entire repo in every source file.



[1] Or at least, not necessarily a religious concept.

-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/