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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

I have this notion that Abrahamic religions are the worst single thing that happened to Homo Sapiens to date.

And that they're also trying to appropriate human progress for themself, but now we know the real achivements of Greeks and Romans, surpassed only by early XX century. They managed without.

My wife says: "But you personally have no other culture to belong to". That doesn't make me happier.

> in 324, he extended similarly pro-Christian policies to the eastern empire, where he not only favoured Christians, but actively discriminated against non-Christians, restricting their ability to worship or fund their temples.

And it mostly went downhill from that.

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Nah, religion is just repackaged tribalism. Not like we wouldn't replace it with something equally stupid, like rioting and fighting each other over politics... At least religion includes a sort of morality as part of the deal.

When you're fighting over politics, you can usually convert most of the losing side before resorting to slaugter.

When you're righting over religion, people are very reluctant to convert (which is usually a sin), and to accept the converted, so it ends with cleansings and genocide. Same thing with ethnic conflicts, but they're religion-driven more often than not.

FWIW, the christian answer to this is jesus' command to 'love your enemy', which is the foundation of what, in our culture, we usually call 'tolerance'. I think it's more accurate to judge a belief system by its founder than by those who abuse it later, eg europe's historical religious wars.

> I think it's more accurate to judge a belief system by its founder than by those who abuse it later, eg europe's historical religious wars.

If those two things aren't identical, then you have two or more different substantove belief systems that happen tobshare a common label; it's inaccurate to judge everything going under the label by either the founding philosophy or any of the later incarnations; they are separate things that must be judged separately.

It was the first personality cult that outlived the persona.

We assume that we should stick with that Jesus considered right. But we can't ask him, so we have to interpret whatever sacred texts available. We assume that only one interpretation is correct and all other are sinfully wrong.

This is a fertile ground for conflict. Everyone has their own interpretation but pretends that they all share it. Ultimately it's the Highlander, when just one Christian is to stay alive over dogma.

This is actually stricter than Islam where conflicts over interpretation are explicitly discouraged, and indeed there's less of those. However Islam is even less tolerant to "live and let live".

The solution, IMO, is stop considering one person "the one", and get rid of sacred texts.

Christianity (and Islam after it) has the unique characteristic of being the first to claim that it was both universal (applied to all of humanity, not just one's tribe/city/language/culture) and that it was exclusively true -- no other belief systems were considered real. Even Judaism allowed for difference between Gentiles and Jews. Christianity admits no other belief systems beside itself. For all of humanity.

The 'pagan' Romans were astounded at the intolerance and dogma of the Christians. They were used to absorbing other ethnicities pantheons into their own. While they had all sorts of chauvinistic and tribalistic beliefs, they never believed -- until Christianity -- that they had the answers for all human kind.

Christianity is the origin of 'religion' as we think of it now. It has altered the lens of how we perceive all belief systems, so we accept as normal the concept of an all-encompassing totalizing system of transcendent explanation.

Whether you think its explanations are right or not, this is a unique property historically. And Islam inherited this philosophy.

Even more profound is the extreme intolerance that Christianity fostered _within itself_. Many thousands lost their _lives_ for interpreting the some aspect the Trinity, or the relationship of the Father to the Son differently from what became accepted as official dogma. Very technical language and very specific interpretations of this language controlled the fate of nations and the lives of millions.

We can free our children from the shackles of religion or other forms of tribalism by teaching them to be free thinkers from an early age. Teach them to think philosophically, educate them in the writings of Spinoza and Thomas Paine, etc. Make that their Sunday school and you'd end up with a remarkable generation.

No, then you'll just end up with the church of Thomas Paine. Plenty of Greek philosophers in antiquity wound up spawning cults...

Heck, getting back to the topic, even in Jesus' time there were various messianic and mystery cults within Judaism. Christianity just won... But even then there were all sorts of crazy beliefs, like that of reincarnation, which was surprisingly popular in the ancient Christian (pre-Nicene) world...

Do philosophy students worship the philosophers they study? If you succeed in teaching them to be freethinkers they will reject the religious worship of anyone.

> Nah, religion is just repackaged tribalism.

No, it's not. Religious identity may be a focus of tribalism, but religion is more than identity.

> Not like we wouldn't replace it with something equally stupid, like rioting and fighting each other over politics... At least religion includes a sort of morality as part of the deal.

So does politics; every political ideology, like every religious ideology, is exactly a "sort of morality". Actually, there's often a content overlap between political and religious ideologies (and often a political ideology subsumes an expressly religious one, or vice versa.)

Religion is more "good intentions" than "a sort of morality".

Disregarding facts is and should considered to be immoral.

But you can very well have "good intentions" while doing so.

Leaving aside for the moment whether your implicit generalization about what religion is accurate, the fact that a system of morality is one that you disagree with does not stop it from being a system of morality.

Of course, followers of different sorts of morality often view it as immoral; that's inherent in conflict between moral systems.

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