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It's sad you have to qualify it—religion is part of all our past, whatever our opinions of it now, and it will only increase our wisdom to understand our ancest
by duaneb 13y ago
It's sad you have to qualify it—religion is part of all our past, whatever our opinions of it now, and it will only increase our wisdom to understand our ancestors.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- johansch 13y agoThere's also that 1000 years of lost progress in science due to their persecution of scientists...
- johansch 13y agoToo many christian apologists around?
- ivanca 13y agoSomething changed at some point in Hacker News; or maybe christians are getting together (twitter?) to downvote contrarian opinions.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoNo, HN has extremely good vote ring detectors. Blaming religion for the flaws of humanity got really old about 5 years ago. It reached its peak at Reddit but it's no longer popular. Turns out people realized that blaming an object (gun), a religion (islam, christianity), a movement (athiesm, feminism), or a philosophy (conservative, liberal) is dismissive of humanity's flaws. When you get rid of religion, extremists do not go away, people find something else to be extreme about.
- ivanca 13y agoWe are not blaming the flaws of humanity, just its own flaws, but that is enough to get downvoted. So maybe maybe the vote ring is incidental or not, is still one.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoI think you got downvoted because you implied the community is protecting something you don't agree with, therefore there must be something wrong with the community. (I didn't think it deserved downvotes at all, it was just a question) It was silly for OP to pick on the Catholic church when all throughout history, from World War 1 and 2, to the African Genocides, and the inter European wars, and the Mongolian & Muslim invasions, and the European colonizations, and the Japanese massacres, and the Chinese wars and communist caused famines.... Hundreds of millions have died needlessly. We should look past it and be glad we as humans have evolved past those points. Human beings take advantage of large groups, infiltrate them and use them as their personal armies. Sometimes to do good, sometimes to do bad. The OP got downvoted into unreadable "grey hell" for a broad comment that brought nothing thought provoking.
- lotharbot 13y agoChrisNorstrom is on the right track. There's a small cluster of people who seem to think that, every time religion is mentioned, it's important to jump in and make negative comments no matter what the original topic is (and, on some sites, a small cluster of people who seem to think it's a good time to try to convert people.) The thing is, those comments (on both sides) are generally boring and unenlightening, two things we don't like to see on Hacker News. The idea that a group is digitizing a whole bunch of ancient documents is interesting and has potentially deep intellectual consequences for people interested in researching the topics covered in the ancient documents as well as for those interested in other ancient documents that might be digitized using the knowledge gained from this project. Kvetching about how harmful religion X is or was in the past is boring. Nobody in this thread has said anything genuinely new or insightful; you can hear these exact sentiments just by making a religious comment in a semi-public way (with a large group of friends, on FaceBook, etc.) On other sites they might provoke a flamewar, but here on HN we prefer comments to be thought-provoking. We downvote flamebait. Consider it a signal from the HN community: make more thoughtful and worthwhile contributions.
- wglb 13y agoIn my view, this and the later comment of yours offers nothing positive to the discussion.
- nsxwolf 13y agoRidiculous. I could list dozens of important Catholic scientists over the centuries but I'm sure I'd be wasting my breath. Can you even name a persecuted scientist besides Gallileo? (The new secular darling Bruno was not a scientist)
- duaneb 13y agoBruno was also executed for, among other things, denying the divinity of Jesus and the virginity of Mary, not any of his pseudo-science. (This a bad blemish on the current run of Cosmos; he should be remembered as a whacko philosopher rather than one who contributed to our current scientific corpus.)
- ivanca 13y agoThat's the exact reason I can't name them; they got killed by the church before they could get famous.
- Natsu 13y agoThere's a list with all of the names inside Russel's Teapot.
- ivanca 13y agoNo sir, is closer than that: http://listverse.com/2011/06/08/top-10-shameful-moments-in-catholic-history/ http://listverse.com/2011/06/08/top-10-shameful-moments-in-c... And this are the know ones, if you don't think there is a single one outside those, you sir, are delusional (or just biased).
- Cthulhu_ 13y agoMaybe in the western / Catholic world; while they were busy burning witches, they kept going on mathematics and mechanics and whatnot in the islamic world.
- simonh 13y agoI suspect most modern Catholics would agree with you. I don't think its vet productive going round blaming each other for what our predecessors did hundreds of years ago.
- UbuntuJon 13y agoMost modern Catholics are ignorant to all the suffering their religion has caused. As are most people of all religions, otherwise they would abandon it.
- bionsuba 13y agoI doubt that very much. Just because the church has caused suffering in the past does not cause people to lose their faith.
- nitrogen 13y agoIf an organization claims its legitimacy based on an unbroken line of continuity, and also claims certain fundamental values, then violations of those values at some point in the past should be seen as a break in continuity and a loss of the organization's legitimacy.
- ivanca 13y agoThanks for this comment, the lack of rationality in this comment thread is astounding.
- AutoCorrect 13y agothat would then mean that no government in the world is legitimate. Maybe we should invalidate all laws/regs passed during Obama's presidency, since he has fundamentally reneged on the promises he made in his campaign?
- jval 13y agoYour point rests on the premise that institutions carry some kind of permanent guilt with them that delegitimises what they stand for. There's a number of issues with that, not least of which is the fact that institutions are not neat abstractions that behave uniformly without contradiction or change. This creates two issues for an institution as old and decentralised as the Catholic Church. Firstly, the church is not a corporation where processes and orders dictate the behaviour of employees and people are fired for insubordination. In practice it is highly decentralised, and the idea that it is centrally run by a single old man at the end of his life in Rome without access to a computer is farcical. Secondly, the church is the oldest institution in the world. Even the United States, a 'modern' institution by historical standards, has to contend with the slaughter of native peoples, the enslavement of thousands of innocent human beings, countless wars (many of which have little to no serious justification), the destruction of the environment etc etc etc. And the US is by far the most just superpower by historical standards. In spite of all those things most people will agree that it has been an unprecedented force for human progress in its (relatively) short history. Your comment was probably just a throwaway insult that didn't warrant such a detailed response but comments like it really irk me for some reason.
- nsxwolf 13y agoIt's also very much a part of our present, perhaps Silicon Valley not withstanding.
- ekianjo 13y agoOh, don't worry, Silicon Valley still has some forms of religion. Like the idea of Singularity, with Kurzweil as a prophet. You also have Saint-like figures such as Steve Jobs, whose achievements are God-like for all his believers, no matter how he mistreated employees, competitors and humans in general. It's a strange thing, actually, to see people reject older nonsensical beliefs while creating their owns devoid of all rationality.