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Comment by oaktowner | Hacker News Reader

It's weird, though, right? I mean, flip the logic.

What if someone had a code of conduct that was clearly about people treating each other well...but started it with "First, you must acknowledge that there is no God." Or "First you must acknowledge that Mohammad is God's messenger." Or "First you must accept the mitzvot as binding." Or "Brahman is Truth and Reality."

None of these is promoting inclusion.

That said: I'm an observer here. I haven't chosen to participate or not participate in the SQLite community because of this. I simply think it's a strange place to promote one's religion, and it doesn't surprise me that non-Christians might find it unwelcoming.

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I reject this premise that every CoC must "promote inclusion" i.e. be approved in full by some social marxist Politburo notionally intended to protect everyone's "feelings" by expunging and banning everything that might be considered "offensive". If you want that for your own project, fine, but you have no right to force it onto others.

In any case, western civ has deep roots in the christian tradition and I don't know any atheists that are so extremely fragile or sensitive that they are "offended" by simply seeing people repeating 1500+ year old fragments of it. Especially when they use the disclaimers that were used here.

I'm not trying to force anyone to do anything, and I'm not sure where you came up with the idea that I am. If someone wants their OSS project to be appealing to the 1/6th of the people in the world who consider themselves to be Christians, that's fine.

If they want to try to be appealing to, say, 7/7ths of the developers out there, they might want to do something different.

> appealing to the 1/6th of the people in the world who consider themselves to be Christians

I don’t consider myself Christians but I like CoC a lot. It even made me think why I only used sqlite when I had to.

To me the CoC doesn’t say I’m excluded. It says a couple of other things however, that author’s not ashamed of who he is, he’s sincere, and he knows about 1st amendment. I think all of these things are good.

Well i love Sqlite and also don't consider myself Christian and i am quite baffled by this. I mean this is some strange place to promote Christianity. It is suprising considering how tech tries to always paint itself as apolitical.

Seriously i can't imagine the uproar and hate if he was a Muslim. Imagine how many tech leads would immediately start figuring out how to completely change their stack and replace sqlite with leveldb.

If he were a muslim and added some Sufi-inspired rules I don't think there would have been more complaints than the Rule of St. Benedict gave rise to. If he cited those parts of islamic scripture which call for conquest by the sword there would - hopefully - have been uproar as those espouse an exclusive and oppressive ideology, just like there would have been more of an uproar if the sqlite project cited the more vile parts of, say, Deuteronomium.

I see this 'code of conduct' as a literary form of pro-biotics [1], there to protect against invasion by harmful non-transcendental religions like intersectionality which have the capacity to sow discord and tear communities apart into warring factions. Even though I do not believe in transcendental gods I have no problems accepting the Rule as I see it for what it is, an abstraction of monastic life written to the benefit of medieval monks. I am under no vow of obedience or poverty and I am rarely in a situation where I have to bury the dead so I know I can skip those parts which are not applicable. In truth, I realise I can skip just about everything except the bit which tells me to treat others as I'd like to be treated myself.

[1] a mixture of safe bacteria which is supposed to colonise the gut to keep the bad ones out

Um, that isn't flipping the logic at all.

It says 'love God'. It doesn't say 'acknowlege God exists'. The latter may be a prerequisite of the former, but the explicit rules are distinct, and have different flavors.

Ok then, imagine if rule 1 were “hate God with every fiber of your being.”

Your logic is at fault, at least regarding atheists: atheists are expected to be tolerant of religious beliefs, but no religious person is expected to be tolerant of atheist (non-) beliefs.

Expected by whom? There were and are "warlike" atheists, who actively fight, mock and even eradicate religious objects and people, and there are, thankfully, a lot of religious people, who tolerate atheists' non-beliefs.

Aside from the fact that the SQLite CoC does not use the language "you must", none of those statements bother me.

I think the SQLite's author is just trying to make a statement of "hey, there's us Christians out here, and this is actually what we believe in[1]".

1. Let's just avoid the reality that there are many people who call themselves Christians who don't follow those rules, and do many horrible things. Those people exist in virtually every demographic.

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