5 ms·
At the same time we have an utterly boring/dogmatic salad of tales, such as the Bible and Quran, which remain important in the modern world - due to the still p
by eruci 8y ago
At the same time we have an utterly boring/dogmatic salad of tales, such as the Bible and Quran, which remain important in the modern world - due to the still prevalent ignorant multitude. They would not mind if you desecrate the Iliad though. It belongs to a different audience.
- netcan 8y agoThat's a little harsh, perhaps. The legacy of be blical stories is far deeper tham dogma. The other day, i watched a (very sacreligious) cartoon (castlelvania e1). In it, Dracula's wife is burned at the stake for witchraft, by the church. On her way out, she calls out to dracula. "Forgive them! Don't take vengence. They don't know what you're doing." This is exactly what the author is talking about. The dogma isn't there. If the scene was boring or banal it wouldn't have been recreated in the cartoon. Still, its a reference everone gets, and the metaphor is extremely deep.
- Latteland 8y agoWell, in our modern world, we still face passionate denunciation of women and people hating on gays Etc because someone wrote something thousand of years ago. So it's okay though point out problems with these originalist documents.
- eruci 8y agoWe've become more civilized about biblical tales, but try making fun of the Quran and you'll get all these savages foaming at the mouth.
- ctrl-j 8y agoReplace bible with quran, and savages with "savages from the US south" and you have an equally repugnant statement (with the same level of whatever accuracy exists there.) Extremist fanaticism exists in all religions - and your garbage xenophobic bigotry doesn't belong on HN.
- sebastos 8y agoOk, why don’t you go ahead and put two YouTube videos up: one of you burning a Bible, one of you burning a Quran. We’ll see which one gets you into more trouble :) (Note: please don’t actually do this, you would be putting yourself into mortal peril for the rest of your life)
- ctrl-j 8y agoI don't need to put up any videos, there's plenty of LGBTQ videos on Youtube that get death threats from Christians daily. You want to believe that there is no christian extremism, go right ahead. You're just wrong.
- eruci 8y agoYour claim about savages, just like mine is true. Hence they both belong on HN.
- sebastos 8y agoSeems like you just wanted to excuse to talk about how stupid people and barbarism are the only reason we still have religion. There’s a less obnoxious version of that argument I tend to agree with, but I don’t see how it’s relevant here. Can’t we have a nice thread talking about the importance of stories and how they transcend time without turning it into a political shit-flinging contest? (That said, the equivalence the other poster is suggesting is stupid.)
- eruci 8y agoYou are right, we went off on a tangent here after an equivalence was made between the Iliad and other ancient tales which tend to belong more to the "dogmatic" category and have a different modern audience. The Iliad is a marvelous tale that I have enjoyed reading since childhood. Western Civilization owes a lot to such stories as they tend to inspire people at an individual level.
- sebastos 8y ago:thumbs-up: Thanks for being civil :)
- dang 8y agoReligious flamewar is not welcome on Hacker News, and we ban accounts that do it here, so please don't do it again. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18228931 and marked it off-topic.