• Question: Is your work sometimes rescricted by religous beliefs?

    Asked by oliviabu007 to Damien, Rachael, Simon, Suzi, Tim on 19 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by aparker.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi @oliviabu007
      Thanks for the question!
      I am agnostic, which means I have thought about it a lot and I really don’t know whether God exists. I don’t believe the world is as young as some people say the Bible tells us, and I don’t believe the world was created in 7 days.
      I believe that living your life by the morals presented in the Bible (most of them anyway) is a good way to live your life. I wonder whether the Bible was created as a set of stories to help people live a moral life, and over the years it has become more ‘real’ to people following it, and has been taken more literally?

      Because of this, religion does not affect or restrict my science. I think it would be possible to be religious and be a scientist (there are lots of religious scientists), although if you believe in Creationism you may struggle to investigate the history of space 🙂

      What are your views on this?

    • Photo: Damien Hall

      Damien Hall answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      My work isn’t really restricted by religious beliefs – neither my own beliefs nor other people’s – but I do interviews to get the speech data that I need to analyse, so, theoretically, I might well have to be careful what I say depending on the religious beliefs of the person I’m interviewing. It just so happens that personally I’ve done most of my interviewing with Christian, atheist or agnostic people, which isn’t by choice, but just because the communities I am most interested in studying the language of tend to have those beliefs. I’m not aware that I have ever interviewed a Muslim, for example, but I know people who do, and they have to be careful about what they say, and what they choose to talk to that person about. So, what you do in linguistics isn’t restricted by religion in itself, but you have to bear other people’s religion in mind when you’re doing it.

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