20 ms·

We are desensitized to Christianity’s influence on Western thought

70 points by _Microft 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nottorp 6y ago
> But at the same time, they believe in human rights, which can be justified only by the very God they don’t believe in. Why?
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  I don't believe in God, but this is historically correct. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights as conceived by the United Nations traces its roots to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that was a product of the French revolution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of... The preamble of this document directly references God: > In consequence, the National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and citizen https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/ilp-pji/rev5/index.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/ilp-pji/rev5/ind...
  - nottorp 6y ago
    That's a declaration. Which apart from mentioning a supreme being (not the Christian god) has its roots in other concepts. However, the article is typical Christian propaganda insinuating that atheists are amoral and you need the benevolent guidance of a supernatural being (and its church) to behave like a decent human being.
    - throwaway210222 6y ago
      > you need the benevolent guidance of a supernatural being… to behave like a decent human being. which is precisely why an atheist's morals are superior: they thought it through and convinced themselves that human rights is the better path. Religious people by definition only do it [their words] because their deity says so. Which is precisely why its so simple for the same benevolent guidance of a supernatural being to equally justify - inter alia - crusades, jihads, fatwas and honour killings.
      - alphachloride 6y ago
        In the context of the human rights record of several atheist societies like the USSR, where religious expression was forcibly curtailed, I find it hard to believe that an atheist's morals are inherently superior.
        nickkell 6y ago
        Five years hard labour in Siberia should cure you of your disbelief comrade
    - Anointmous 6y ago
      Atheists are immoral, because it's an illogical premise, proving a negative, and in the face of lots of evidence at that. That's why athiests always turn to insults, they have no argument - much like the message this is in response to. Agnostics, deists, and free thinkers are another matter. But from the outset, an atheist proclaims himself as someone irrational with nothing to say.
    - Amezarak 6y ago
      The stronger form of this argument is made by Nietzsche, not by Christian propagandists. Without God, there is no objective moral foundation. Obviously, people remain 'moral' regardless of their religious orientation, because morality is a social phenomenon, it's the 'herd instinct in the individual'. But this morality shifts and changes with times and cultures. You have no perch from which to stand and declare yourself objectively morally correct relative to some other time or culture, aside from "well, I said so." You think human sacrifice, torture of children, throwing gay people off buildings is wrong - great, sure, but here's Society X that doesn't think that, that has a whole different moral framework, and in that context those actions may be entirely moral. Phrases like "decent human being" simply mean "conforms to societal expectations." That's why Nietzsche's famous death of God speech is directed to the atheists, not to believers. > The meaning of our cheerfulness.— The greatest recent event—that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes, the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some suns seem to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt: to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, “older.” But in the main one may say: the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet; much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it: for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending: who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth? On a historical note, viewing the outcomes and events of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Soviet-era, and the like, I think it may be worth considering even for a non-believer that the "objective" moral foundation provided by Christianity serves as a useful brake on the worse excesses that arise during societal upheavals.
      - krapp 6y ago
        Except Christian morality also shifts and changes with time and culture, because religious practice is a social phenomenon. There has never been a universal, objective Christian morality. The Bible says slaves should obey their masters, that women are as far beneath men as men are beneath God, and that homosexuality is an abomination worthy of death. Christian morality used to allow killing pagans, Jews and Protestants as heretics. Christians from a century ago would see modern Christians as weak-willed apostates (you don't even read the Bible in Latin, but gutteral English you swine!) and Christians from a thousand years ago might not even recognize the religion as theirs. Atheists reject the premise that morality presupposes God not because they reject morality but because they recognize that all moral systems are relative, and yet still have value. And yes, being a "decent human being" does simply mean "conforming to societal expectations," even when that society's expectations are based on the current generation's fashion in interpreting Biblical teaching. But it's enough for me to believe in the value of human life because I believe it, not because my society tells me a man in the sky will send me to hell if I don't. And from an atheist point of view it's obviously possible to accept a moral framework in a morally relative universe because that is what everyone, including religious people, are actually doing. Accepting the truth of the matter isn't going to cause society to collapse into barbarism and hedonism.
    - dang 6y ago
      Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. I realize other commenters are doing it too but this was a noticeable plummet in discussion quality. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - litoorachure 6y ago
    The "Supreme Being" in the French Revolution was not necessarily the Abrahamic God. One major cause of the revolution was the Church's corruption and overreach during the ancien regime, and they got pretty radical with religious experimentation during that time. They even tried to set up a state-sponsored "cult of reason" to replace religions like Christianity. That was followed by the "cult of the supreme being", because not many people felt comfortable worshipping an abstract reification of "rationality". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being
  - thisCtx 6y ago
    Historically correct but do we need to tell that part of the story going forward? Can we not set the idea of “human rights” on its own pedestal and decide what those are and carry them forward in tradition and song? Why do we have a literal obligation to the asinine part of a dead philosophers opinions on their origin, along with an actual useful concept? Let’s dispense with the all-father bits and see it as we claim to; within the legislative and judicial process we in practice are all afforded the same privileges and obligations. Let’s discuss how in practice that’s not true and stop giving a shit what dead guy first conjured the idea. Caretaking the literal lineage is nothing more than banal taxonomy fetishism.
    - torstenvl 6y ago
      > Historically correct but do we need to tell that part of the story going forward? Yes. Hiding the truth is almost always wrong.
      - Nevermark 6y ago
        I don't think the point is to suppress history. But that ideas about human rights can have a firmer foundation than a particular religion. I.e. moral principles such as equality and some basic rights result in a safer and more productive society for the vast majority of people, vs. alternate principles. They are less arbitrary principles than saying this group of people is better than another group, and results in a society with greater productivity and resiliancy than one where the strong continually put down the weak. The history is still meaningful, but is not the rationale.
        torstenvl 6y ago
        Sorry, that's absurd. The rationale for why something exists cannot be divorced from the history for why it exists. And there is no source for a principle of equality in nature.
        Nevermark 5y ago
        The history of something, and its current rationale, are two different things. They are related, but certainly the latter can be talked of coherently separately - if one chooses. Equality can be argued for in terms of economics, game theory, the objective recognition of commonality between humans, and from many other avenues, without reference to religion.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    > The preamble of this document directly references God: No it certainly does not reference "God". The "Supreme Being" they were talking about was definitely not the God of Catholic Church that came under direct attack in the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries did not hide their Masonic root. It's right on the tin. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen_in_1789.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Declarat... The "Supreme Being" is the Masonic "Great Architect", a metaphysical notion entirely distinct from the experiential spiritual God of religions with visionary prophets and scripture. You can have a 'born again Christian' who experiences a divine encounter, but you don't have epiphanies with "the Supreme Being". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_d...
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  It’s a very common belief in some Christian circles that universality of morality is impossible without resort to a personal deity, it's at least a source of cosmic punishment of morality is violated. This is, of course, completely bogus; universality works just as well as a standalone a priori moral axiom as it does as a consequence of the Cosmic Punisher.
throwawaw 6y ago
> The same people who tout the virtues of being well-read skip right past the Bible, the most popular book in human history. Who's doing that? You wouldn't be able to understand half of what you read. Did the author just make up someone to score points on?
- 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
  At least in my (I think typical?) big city tech worker circle the bible as literature has been received with disdain the couple times I've seen it come up. I also had a (atheist) friend once tell me he bought copies of the bhagavad gita and quran to put next to his bible so he would look well read instead of christian if anyone looked at his book shelf.
  - mgh2 5y ago
    This is so prevalent that it has become a joke in Silicon Valley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWoRVaGlFRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWoRVaGlFRc
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Did the author just make up someone to score points on? That pretty much describes the entire content of the article, which is filled with mythology with no basis in fact (and I’m not referring to actual Christian doctrine, but all the post-Biblical “history” in the piece), including completely fictional contents attributed to the Constitution.
markemer 6y ago
Yeah, this is a load of nonsense. The worst part is this essays ahistorical line of thinking. Like highlighting the Romans bad behavior without examining things like the crusades and chattel slavery which used Christianity as a defense. And it’s Christian supremacist since he leaves out the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and any other religion that believes in human rights.
- nobodyCloak 6y ago
  I think you may be missing the point of the essay. I don’t think it meant to say that Christianity is perfect nor that Christianity is the supreme religion. Of course Christianity has been used to justify hateful conduct (just like most other religions at some point) but regardless it more than anything else is responsible for how “Western Civilization” developed, and by extension our understanding of human rights. Yes Christianity was used to defend slavery, but it was also used to condemn it. Regardless, the point was that Christianity is a driving force behind Western thought/morality and ignoring that is dangerous. Are there other religions that teach the same values of human rights? Of course! But how many of them directly influenced Western life and the Western definition of those same rights, specifically in the founding of the US (which became the blueprint for so many other countries after it)? Also, I feel like Judaism is implicitly included to some degree in this because Jesus was a Jew and the author specifically mentions he (the author) was Jewish.
  - jwhitlark 6y ago
    Greece and Rome's civic and philosophical development was the source of how Western Civilization developed. Christianity was then transplanted on top of Western Civilization; it wasn't the source. The author is either mistaken or arguing in bad faith, and makes numerous factually incorrect statements. He argues the Locke "assumed" God given rights, and states that there are no other legitimate sources, despite there being a large body of work in the 3rd century BCE that made logical arguments for treating all of humanity equally. Similarly, in his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius argues that gods or atoms, your first responsibility is to the human race. The author would have us forget that much of the Enlightenment came from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman knowledge. The whole article reads as an attempt to convince atheists that they're not really atheist, that all their ideas came from religion and are worthless without religion, completely ignoring the role philosophy had in creating those ideas, long before Christianity was on the scene.
mrkeen 6y ago
> Appealing to human rights just because we say so is as baseless as appealing to astrology or the will of Zeus. You are this close to a realisation.
- Anointmous 6y ago
  Well, maybe first they will appeal to "the we", "the collective", "the identity", or the will of the emperor. Then it will descend into the superstition after the dictatorship. I much prefer the Christian religion to that, even if I weren't a believer. Mob rule and government rule - dictator rule is just an extension of "we" rule - and who is we and who gets to say? And that is, after all, what this article is about.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't be snarky, or sneer, or do shallow dismissals, in HN comments. All that is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Udik 6y ago
I was reading this essay nodding, until the revelation: the author isn't Christian at all. He's raised in Judaism. My knowledge of religion (despite being born and raised in a Catholic country) is entirely intuitive, but Judaism and Christianity seem pretty different religions, and the Old and New Testament contain different teachings and a different worldview. At the very least it could be lexical sloppiness (Christianity as a catch-all term for the three Abrahamic religions, since he mentions mosques too at some point). Curious. I guess this confusion between Christianity and Judaism is pretty typical of American culture. For example, this is an interesting article from the Jerusalem Post about the progressive Judaization of US's Pentecostals: https://m.jpost.com/magazine/the-new-judaizers-540415 https://m.jpost.com/magazine/the-new-judaizers-540415
- _r0fz 6y ago
  Yeah there's a thing for a while now in the US where we like to talk about "judeo-christian" values or roots or whatever. I've never really understood it except as a way to exclude islam which I really believe is all it is. Parts of the white evangelicals going hard into it is weird but not completely out of nowhere I guess. BUT! Anyway the "judeo-christian" thing is just a rhetorical move. I think overall Americans are very ignorant of judaism and think it's a lot more similar to christianity than it is but no one thinks they're the same religion. Uninformed but not likely to mix the two up like this.
netfortius 6y ago
Delusion is delusion, however one wants to call it in religious terms, e.g. christianity, islamism, etc. Attempt to apply some rationality to such, regardless of the topic, is simply ridiculous. But - hey! - let's just have another blog, just in case...
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post flamewar comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something (hopefully quite a bit, but we'll take any) better than this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
permo-w 6y ago
> “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified. This … isn’t true? Maybe a few hundred years ago that was the case, but since World War 2, The West means west of the Iron Curtain
- Udik 6y ago
  The Middle East (where Jesus was born and crucified) doesn't have anything to do with the Iron Curtain and is, quite obviously, not the center either.
  - permo-w 6y ago
    I didn’t say anything about the East. I commented on what is regarded as The West
- Anointmous 6y ago
  east and west were fighting and differentiated since at least before Alexander the great.
hitekker 6y ago
This passage from the "Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan Watts sheds more light on the concept of "surrendering knowledge" as a way to realize truth: > The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism covers a similar topic.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights. No, it doesn’t. The author confuses apropaganda document (the Declaration of Independence, which still doesn’t make this specific claim—it does reference rights being endowed by a Creator, but does not specifically attribute omnipotence to that Creator) with a governing document (which comes nowhere close, making only a vague reference to the “blessings of liberty” in its preamble.) > To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible as on the writings of Enlightenment thinkers. Even aside from the content supporting this not being in the document in question at all, “As much as” is trivially false; the authors of the Constitution were Enlightenment thinkers themselves, so if it had any Biblical influence at all, it could only be subordinate to and by way of Enlightenment thinkers. > When it comes to space, “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified. No, while it was a Christian geographic reference before being replaced with a Cold War one, the reference was to the geography where the dominant religion after the East-West Schism was Roman Catholic.
- Anointmous 6y ago
  "An Appeal to the "Supreme Judge of the World" Like I said, most of the commentators aren't even from America. But they sure are commenting like they were.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > An Appeal to the "Supreme Judge of the World" That’s also in the Declaration, not the Constitution, and also does not include the author’s description of omnipotence. > Like I said, most of the commentators aren't even from America. That’s...both unsupported and a particularly bizarre ad hominem, but I am an American (and, probably more relevant, have a degree in political science with a course of study focussed on the American system), but its not like the main problem claims about the US system here require particular expertise beyond, you know, reading the readily-available text of foundational documents. > But they sure are commenting like they were. I’m not sure what “commenting like they were [Americans]” means in this context.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Anointmous 6y ago
Another article I see where a bunch of non-Americans are going to comment on an article which was obviously written for an American perspective (and afterwards a western one), all the while pretending to be Americans. I don't mind disagreement. However, I have come to loath the anonymous nature of most of the internet, while the in thing is to comment on someone elses life anonymously while claiming to be in it. Most of the people commenting aren't you neighbors, or even your countrymen. It's 100 fake responses, with zero trust or authentication.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post flamewar comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Note this guideline also: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
thinkingemote 6y ago
Has the title been changed?
- dang 6y ago
  Yes, we changed it in a feeble attempt not to have a tedious religious flamewar. (From the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Btw, when we do these edits we nearly always use some representative phrase from the article itself. I'm pretty sure that was the case here.)
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    I hope the attempt worked. I was trying to find how the new title related to the original one and was skimming the article in the process. It didn't seem that, well...peaceful?
    - dang 5y ago
      It didn't work. I originally wrote "feeble and doomed" but then felt embarrassed for using 4 adjectives in 1 sentence.
mgh2 6y ago
Referenced author in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDA7YMKVJZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDA7YMKVJZo
scotty79 6y ago
We are desensitized to all the simplistic silly intuitions that are reinforced by Christianity. Like the idea that good and evil are one dimensional opposite things that you can sort of add up to decide if your life is ok. Or the idea that there's a point where you can stop looking for evidence and faith without sufficient evidence is a virtue. Or that there's some ideal of bodily health since we are made in Gods image and deviations from that ideal are evil. Or the idea that you can do evil without doing harm, or you can do good by doing plenty of harm. Or a huge number of other false reasoning patterns that we are almost slaved to because we allow millenia old myths to pollute our thinking.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar, nor generic tangents. Neither of those things makes for good HN threads. Especially not religious flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - scotty79 6y ago
    Sorry. I thought this was either religious post, so mentioning religion in the comment is ok or that religion in this post was irrelevant and we are talking about culture and humanity so it's fine talking about them in similar way in the comment. And since it's a discussion forum I thought taking contrarian position was fine. I stand corrected that religion is a special topic on HN as nearly everywhere else that can be freely promoted and praised but any critique is in bad taste.
    - dang 5y ago
      It's not about the topic—it's about the quality of the responses. If your post had been thoughtful and curious, rather than religious flamewar, that would of course have been fine. I realize that when it's a topic you have strong pre-existing feelings and opinions about, the tendency to rush into the forum and vent them is very strong. It's not just you—we all have it. In order for HN to be the kind of forum we all want—something with the potential to remain interesting over time—we all need to find other ways to process those reactions in ourselves. Then the forum can be free for new exchanges, not just ranty repetition. One thing to watch out for is whether you're responding to something specific and interesting in the article, or whether you're just taking its appearance as an opportunity to post generically what you think or feel about a large adjacent thing. As I've tried to explain many times here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), discussion tends to get much less interesting—and also angrier—as it gets more generic, especially on divisive topics.
dadjoker 6y ago
So nice to see someone explain what is obvious to anyone who has studied the history of the West, especially science and economics.
Daishiman 6y ago
Why is this piece of trivially debunkable Christian propaganda here? First of all, any moderately educated person in Western history makes the connections between contemporary thinking and Christianity inasmuch as it was the dominant religion in the West. That is neither novel nor particularly contentious. The extrapolation to the idea of human rights is... iffy. First of all because there are _quite a few_ systems of philosophy and religion that encode it as much if not more. I can think of Jainism and many Buddhist schools that were much close to modern human rights thinking 2000 years ago than mainstream Christianity was 150 years ago. The rest, just... it sounds like the author hasn't grasped enough of the fundamentals in exactly how Enlightenment thought makes a very clean, deliberate break from Christian thought of its time. Religious systems of thinking are so broad, so inconsistent, so encompassing and so ambiguous that you can make up whatever connection you wish to nudge it towards modern Human Rights. But then again there are equally compelling narratives from practically any religion. You could link it to slavery, the Holocaust, the Industrial Revolution or anything just by linking ideas together. You're going to need a much stronger, direct, causal relation and a comparative study that shows better than this rambling.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't go straight into religious flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here, and jumping immediately into it doesn't really sit with that. An article being somehow provocative isn't license to flame. If you can't respond in a spirit of curious conversation, there are other threads where that may be easier. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Daishiman 6y ago
    A curious conversation would come if the author made an argument with more substance. This doesn't have the merit to any response besides the ones that point out how incredibly flawed the original argument is. It's hard to assume an intention of honest debate.
    - dang 6y ago

70 points by _Microft 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

> But at the same time, they believe in human rights, which can be justified only by the very God they don’t believe in. Why?

HenryKissinger 6y ago
I don't believe in God, but this is historically correct. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights as conceived by the United Nations traces its roots to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that was a product of the French revolution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of... The preamble of this document directly references God: > In consequence, the National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and citizen https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/ilp-pji/rev5/index.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/ilp-pji/rev5/ind...
- nottorp 6y ago
  That's a declaration. Which apart from mentioning a supreme being (not the Christian god) has its roots in other concepts. However, the article is typical Christian propaganda insinuating that atheists are amoral and you need the benevolent guidance of a supernatural being (and its church) to behave like a decent human being.
  - throwaway210222 6y ago
    > you need the benevolent guidance of a supernatural being… to behave like a decent human being. which is precisely why an atheist's morals are superior: they thought it through and convinced themselves that human rights is the better path. Religious people by definition only do it [their words] because their deity says so. Which is precisely why its so simple for the same benevolent guidance of a supernatural being to equally justify - inter alia - crusades, jihads, fatwas and honour killings.
    - alphachloride 6y ago
      In the context of the human rights record of several atheist societies like the USSR, where religious expression was forcibly curtailed, I find it hard to believe that an atheist's morals are inherently superior.
      - nickkell 6y ago
        Five years hard labour in Siberia should cure you of your disbelief comrade
  - Anointmous 6y ago
    Atheists are immoral, because it's an illogical premise, proving a negative, and in the face of lots of evidence at that. That's why athiests always turn to insults, they have no argument - much like the message this is in response to. Agnostics, deists, and free thinkers are another matter. But from the outset, an atheist proclaims himself as someone irrational with nothing to say.
  - Amezarak 6y ago
    The stronger form of this argument is made by Nietzsche, not by Christian propagandists. Without God, there is no objective moral foundation. Obviously, people remain 'moral' regardless of their religious orientation, because morality is a social phenomenon, it's the 'herd instinct in the individual'. But this morality shifts and changes with times and cultures. You have no perch from which to stand and declare yourself objectively morally correct relative to some other time or culture, aside from "well, I said so." You think human sacrifice, torture of children, throwing gay people off buildings is wrong - great, sure, but here's Society X that doesn't think that, that has a whole different moral framework, and in that context those actions may be entirely moral. Phrases like "decent human being" simply mean "conforms to societal expectations." That's why Nietzsche's famous death of God speech is directed to the atheists, not to believers. > The meaning of our cheerfulness.— The greatest recent event—that “God is dead,” that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes, the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some suns seem to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt: to them our old world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, “older.” But in the main one may say: the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet; much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it: for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending: who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth? On a historical note, viewing the outcomes and events of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Soviet-era, and the like, I think it may be worth considering even for a non-believer that the "objective" moral foundation provided by Christianity serves as a useful brake on the worse excesses that arise during societal upheavals.
    - krapp 6y ago
      Except Christian morality also shifts and changes with time and culture, because religious practice is a social phenomenon. There has never been a universal, objective Christian morality. The Bible says slaves should obey their masters, that women are as far beneath men as men are beneath God, and that homosexuality is an abomination worthy of death. Christian morality used to allow killing pagans, Jews and Protestants as heretics. Christians from a century ago would see modern Christians as weak-willed apostates (you don't even read the Bible in Latin, but gutteral English you swine!) and Christians from a thousand years ago might not even recognize the religion as theirs. Atheists reject the premise that morality presupposes God not because they reject morality but because they recognize that all moral systems are relative, and yet still have value. And yes, being a "decent human being" does simply mean "conforming to societal expectations," even when that society's expectations are based on the current generation's fashion in interpreting Biblical teaching. But it's enough for me to believe in the value of human life because I believe it, not because my society tells me a man in the sky will send me to hell if I don't. And from an atheist point of view it's obviously possible to accept a moral framework in a morally relative universe because that is what everyone, including religious people, are actually doing. Accepting the truth of the matter isn't going to cause society to collapse into barbarism and hedonism.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. I realize other commenters are doing it too but this was a noticeable plummet in discussion quality. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- litoorachure 6y ago
  The "Supreme Being" in the French Revolution was not necessarily the Abrahamic God. One major cause of the revolution was the Church's corruption and overreach during the ancien regime, and they got pretty radical with religious experimentation during that time. They even tried to set up a state-sponsored "cult of reason" to replace religions like Christianity. That was followed by the "cult of the supreme being", because not many people felt comfortable worshipping an abstract reification of "rationality". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Reason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being
- thisCtx 6y ago
  Historically correct but do we need to tell that part of the story going forward? Can we not set the idea of “human rights” on its own pedestal and decide what those are and carry them forward in tradition and song? Why do we have a literal obligation to the asinine part of a dead philosophers opinions on their origin, along with an actual useful concept? Let’s dispense with the all-father bits and see it as we claim to; within the legislative and judicial process we in practice are all afforded the same privileges and obligations. Let’s discuss how in practice that’s not true and stop giving a shit what dead guy first conjured the idea. Caretaking the literal lineage is nothing more than banal taxonomy fetishism.
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    > Historically correct but do we need to tell that part of the story going forward? Yes. Hiding the truth is almost always wrong.
    - Nevermark 6y ago
      I don't think the point is to suppress history. But that ideas about human rights can have a firmer foundation than a particular religion. I.e. moral principles such as equality and some basic rights result in a safer and more productive society for the vast majority of people, vs. alternate principles. They are less arbitrary principles than saying this group of people is better than another group, and results in a society with greater productivity and resiliancy than one where the strong continually put down the weak. The history is still meaningful, but is not the rationale.
      - torstenvl 6y ago
        Sorry, that's absurd. The rationale for why something exists cannot be divorced from the history for why it exists. And there is no source for a principle of equality in nature.
        Nevermark 5y ago
        The history of something, and its current rationale, are two different things. They are related, but certainly the latter can be talked of coherently separately - if one chooses. Equality can be argued for in terms of economics, game theory, the objective recognition of commonality between humans, and from many other avenues, without reference to religion.
- eternalban 6y ago
  > The preamble of this document directly references God: No it certainly does not reference "God". The "Supreme Being" they were talking about was definitely not the God of Catholic Church that came under direct attack in the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries did not hide their Masonic root. It's right on the tin. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen_in_1789.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Declarat... The "Supreme Being" is the Masonic "Great Architect", a metaphysical notion entirely distinct from the experiential spiritual God of religions with visionary prophets and scripture. You can have a 'born again Christian' who experiences a divine encounter, but you don't have epiphanies with "the Supreme Being". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_d...
dragonwriter 6y ago
It’s a very common belief in some Christian circles that universality of morality is impossible without resort to a personal deity, it's at least a source of cosmic punishment of morality is violated. This is, of course, completely bogus; universality works just as well as a standalone a priori moral axiom as it does as a consequence of the Cosmic Punisher.

throwawaw 6y ago

> The same people who tout the virtues of being well-read skip right past the Bible, the most popular book in human history. Who's doing that? You wouldn't be able to understand half of what you read. Did the author just make up someone to score points on?

8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
At least in my (I think typical?) big city tech worker circle the bible as literature has been received with disdain the couple times I've seen it come up. I also had a (atheist) friend once tell me he bought copies of the bhagavad gita and quran to put next to his bible so he would look well read instead of christian if anyone looked at his book shelf.
- mgh2 5y ago
  This is so prevalent that it has become a joke in Silicon Valley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWoRVaGlFRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWoRVaGlFRc
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Did the author just make up someone to score points on? That pretty much describes the entire content of the article, which is filled with mythology with no basis in fact (and I’m not referring to actual Christian doctrine, but all the post-Biblical “history” in the piece), including completely fictional contents attributed to the Constitution.

markemer 6y ago

Yeah, this is a load of nonsense. The worst part is this essays ahistorical line of thinking. Like highlighting the Romans bad behavior without examining things like the crusades and chattel slavery which used Christianity as a defense. And it’s Christian supremacist since he leaves out the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and any other religion that believes in human rights.

nobodyCloak 6y ago
I think you may be missing the point of the essay. I don’t think it meant to say that Christianity is perfect nor that Christianity is the supreme religion. Of course Christianity has been used to justify hateful conduct (just like most other religions at some point) but regardless it more than anything else is responsible for how “Western Civilization” developed, and by extension our understanding of human rights. Yes Christianity was used to defend slavery, but it was also used to condemn it. Regardless, the point was that Christianity is a driving force behind Western thought/morality and ignoring that is dangerous. Are there other religions that teach the same values of human rights? Of course! But how many of them directly influenced Western life and the Western definition of those same rights, specifically in the founding of the US (which became the blueprint for so many other countries after it)? Also, I feel like Judaism is implicitly included to some degree in this because Jesus was a Jew and the author specifically mentions he (the author) was Jewish.
- jwhitlark 6y ago
  Greece and Rome's civic and philosophical development was the source of how Western Civilization developed. Christianity was then transplanted on top of Western Civilization; it wasn't the source. The author is either mistaken or arguing in bad faith, and makes numerous factually incorrect statements. He argues the Locke "assumed" God given rights, and states that there are no other legitimate sources, despite there being a large body of work in the 3rd century BCE that made logical arguments for treating all of humanity equally. Similarly, in his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius argues that gods or atoms, your first responsibility is to the human race. The author would have us forget that much of the Enlightenment came from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman knowledge. The whole article reads as an attempt to convince atheists that they're not really atheist, that all their ideas came from religion and are worthless without religion, completely ignoring the role philosophy had in creating those ideas, long before Christianity was on the scene.

mrkeen 6y ago

> Appealing to human rights just because we say so is as baseless as appealing to astrology or the will of Zeus. You are this close to a realisation.

Anointmous 6y ago
Well, maybe first they will appeal to "the we", "the collective", "the identity", or the will of the emperor. Then it will descend into the superstition after the dictatorship. I much prefer the Christian religion to that, even if I weren't a believer. Mob rule and government rule - dictator rule is just an extension of "we" rule - and who is we and who gets to say? And that is, after all, what this article is about.
dang 6y ago
Please don't be snarky, or sneer, or do shallow dismissals, in HN comments. All that is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Udik 6y ago

I was reading this essay nodding, until the revelation: the author isn't Christian at all. He's raised in Judaism. My knowledge of religion (despite being born and raised in a Catholic country) is entirely intuitive, but Judaism and Christianity seem pretty different religions, and the Old and New Testament contain different teachings and a different worldview. At the very least it could be lexical sloppiness (Christianity as a catch-all term for the three Abrahamic religions, since he mentions mosques too at some point). Curious. I guess this confusion between Christianity and Judaism is pretty typical of American culture. For example, this is an interesting article from the Jerusalem Post about the progressive Judaization of US's Pentecostals: https://m.jpost.com/magazine/the-new-judaizers-540415 https://m.jpost.com/magazine/the-new-judaizers-540415

_r0fz 6y ago
Yeah there's a thing for a while now in the US where we like to talk about "judeo-christian" values or roots or whatever. I've never really understood it except as a way to exclude islam which I really believe is all it is. Parts of the white evangelicals going hard into it is weird but not completely out of nowhere I guess. BUT! Anyway the "judeo-christian" thing is just a rhetorical move. I think overall Americans are very ignorant of judaism and think it's a lot more similar to christianity than it is but no one thinks they're the same religion. Uninformed but not likely to mix the two up like this.

netfortius 6y ago

Delusion is delusion, however one wants to call it in religious terms, e.g. christianity, islamism, etc. Attempt to apply some rationality to such, regardless of the topic, is simply ridiculous. But - hey! - let's just have another blog, just in case...

dang 6y ago
Please don't post flamewar comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something (hopefully quite a bit, but we'll take any) better than this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

permo-w 6y ago

> “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified. This … isn’t true? Maybe a few hundred years ago that was the case, but since World War 2, The West means west of the Iron Curtain

Udik 6y ago
The Middle East (where Jesus was born and crucified) doesn't have anything to do with the Iron Curtain and is, quite obviously, not the center either.
- permo-w 6y ago
  I didn’t say anything about the East. I commented on what is regarded as The West
Anointmous 6y ago
east and west were fighting and differentiated since at least before Alexander the great.

hitekker 6y ago

This passage from the "Wisdom of Insecurity" by Alan Watts sheds more light on the concept of "surrendering knowledge" as a way to realize truth: > The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism covers a similar topic.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights. No, it doesn’t. The author confuses apropaganda document (the Declaration of Independence, which still doesn’t make this specific claim—it does reference rights being endowed by a Creator, but does not specifically attribute omnipotence to that Creator) with a governing document (which comes nowhere close, making only a vague reference to the “blessings of liberty” in its preamble.) > To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible as on the writings of Enlightenment thinkers. Even aside from the content supporting this not being in the document in question at all, “As much as” is trivially false; the authors of the Constitution were Enlightenment thinkers themselves, so if it had any Biblical influence at all, it could only be subordinate to and by way of Enlightenment thinkers. > When it comes to space, “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified. No, while it was a Christian geographic reference before being replaced with a Cold War one, the reference was to the geography where the dominant religion after the East-West Schism was Roman Catholic.

Anointmous 6y ago
"An Appeal to the "Supreme Judge of the World" Like I said, most of the commentators aren't even from America. But they sure are commenting like they were.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > An Appeal to the "Supreme Judge of the World" That’s also in the Declaration, not the Constitution, and also does not include the author’s description of omnipotence. > Like I said, most of the commentators aren't even from America. That’s...both unsupported and a particularly bizarre ad hominem, but I am an American (and, probably more relevant, have a degree in political science with a course of study focussed on the American system), but its not like the main problem claims about the US system here require particular expertise beyond, you know, reading the readily-available text of foundational documents. > But they sure are commenting like they were. I’m not sure what “commenting like they were [Americans]” means in this context.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Anointmous 6y ago

Another article I see where a bunch of non-Americans are going to comment on an article which was obviously written for an American perspective (and afterwards a western one), all the while pretending to be Americans. I don't mind disagreement. However, I have come to loath the anonymous nature of most of the internet, while the in thing is to comment on someone elses life anonymously while claiming to be in it. Most of the people commenting aren't you neighbors, or even your countrymen. It's 100 fake responses, with zero trust or authentication.

dang 6y ago
Please don't post flamewar comments to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Note this guideline also: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

thinkingemote 6y ago

Has the title been changed?

dang 6y ago
Yes, we changed it in a feeble attempt not to have a tedious religious flamewar. (From the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Btw, when we do these edits we nearly always use some representative phrase from the article itself. I'm pretty sure that was the case here.)
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  I hope the attempt worked. I was trying to find how the new title related to the original one and was skimming the article in the process. It didn't seem that, well...peaceful?
  - dang 5y ago
    It didn't work. I originally wrote "feeble and doomed" but then felt embarrassed for using 4 adjectives in 1 sentence.

mgh2 6y ago

Referenced author in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDA7YMKVJZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDA7YMKVJZo

scotty79 6y ago

We are desensitized to all the simplistic silly intuitions that are reinforced by Christianity. Like the idea that good and evil are one dimensional opposite things that you can sort of add up to decide if your life is ok. Or the idea that there's a point where you can stop looking for evidence and faith without sufficient evidence is a virtue. Or that there's some ideal of bodily health since we are made in Gods image and deviations from that ideal are evil. Or the idea that you can do evil without doing harm, or you can do good by doing plenty of harm. Or a huge number of other false reasoning patterns that we are almost slaved to because we allow millenia old myths to pollute our thinking.

dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar, nor generic tangents. Neither of those things makes for good HN threads. Especially not religious flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- scotty79 6y ago
  Sorry. I thought this was either religious post, so mentioning religion in the comment is ok or that religion in this post was irrelevant and we are talking about culture and humanity so it's fine talking about them in similar way in the comment. And since it's a discussion forum I thought taking contrarian position was fine. I stand corrected that religion is a special topic on HN as nearly everywhere else that can be freely promoted and praised but any critique is in bad taste.
  - dang 5y ago
    It's not about the topic—it's about the quality of the responses. If your post had been thoughtful and curious, rather than religious flamewar, that would of course have been fine. I realize that when it's a topic you have strong pre-existing feelings and opinions about, the tendency to rush into the forum and vent them is very strong. It's not just you—we all have it. In order for HN to be the kind of forum we all want—something with the potential to remain interesting over time—we all need to find other ways to process those reactions in ourselves. Then the forum can be free for new exchanges, not just ranty repetition. One thing to watch out for is whether you're responding to something specific and interesting in the article, or whether you're just taking its appearance as an opportunity to post generically what you think or feel about a large adjacent thing. As I've tried to explain many times here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), discussion tends to get much less interesting—and also angrier—as it gets more generic, especially on divisive topics.

dadjoker 6y ago

So nice to see someone explain what is obvious to anyone who has studied the history of the West, especially science and economics.

Daishiman 6y ago

Why is this piece of trivially debunkable Christian propaganda here? First of all, any moderately educated person in Western history makes the connections between contemporary thinking and Christianity inasmuch as it was the dominant religion in the West. That is neither novel nor particularly contentious. The extrapolation to the idea of human rights is... iffy. First of all because there are _quite a few_ systems of philosophy and religion that encode it as much if not more. I can think of Jainism and many Buddhist schools that were much close to modern human rights thinking 2000 years ago than mainstream Christianity was 150 years ago. The rest, just... it sounds like the author hasn't grasped enough of the fundamentals in exactly how Enlightenment thought makes a very clean, deliberate break from Christian thought of its time. Religious systems of thinking are so broad, so inconsistent, so encompassing and so ambiguous that you can make up whatever connection you wish to nudge it towards modern Human Rights. But then again there are equally compelling narratives from practically any religion. You could link it to slavery, the Holocaust, the Industrial Revolution or anything just by linking ideas together. You're going to need a much stronger, direct, causal relation and a comparative study that shows better than this rambling.

dang 6y ago
Please don't go straight into religious flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here, and jumping immediately into it doesn't really sit with that. An article being somehow provocative isn't license to flame. If you can't respond in a spirit of curious conversation, there are other threads where that may be easier. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Daishiman 6y ago
  A curious conversation would come if the author made an argument with more substance. This doesn't have the merit to any response besides the ones that point out how incredibly flawed the original argument is. It's hard to assume an intention of honest debate.
  - dang 6y ago