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Comment by sbhn | Hacker News Reader

Did they ban church spires and church bells ringing on Sunday. They are advertising also.

If they put really gaudy church spires on a lot of buildings that aren't churches or play the bells at deafening volumes all day every day, I would sure hope they'd get banned, too.

They are advertising, but the point isn't that all advertising is inherently bad. The point is that we've normalized a really unhealthy amount of daily exposure to it and it turns out we are way more susceptible to it than we like to admit.

A church spire can be seen for many miles, and from almost any location in every city, it’s ringing bells can be heard for many miles and in every city. They’ve been doing this for hundreds of years and it’s normalised to the point where your conscious doesn’t notice it, but if Mac Donald’s or coke did this, then you’d notice and lobby to have it banned.

If a church were to put something in my eyes, they'd put a sculpture, a nice building, a gargoyle on a wall, whatever.

(That's what they actually do).

If your examples did it - it'd be flashy, colourful, gauche, impolite, nonsense. Scammer grade low class bullshit.

No-one likes having evangelists knock at their door, because they're annoying and interruptive.

Normal businesses don't have similar weekly events, but no, people don't really mind the sound of bells once a week. Business owners are free to build spires if they want: it's rarely considered a good idea. Similarly, every city and town with a church has had the option to ban spires and bells. When you find me the town that has done that, I will believe that more persons than yourself find these things to be detrimental.

> A church spire can be seen for many miles...

I mean, maybe in Ulm? [0] But I can rarely see a church tower over trees and other buildings within a fraction of a mile away.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulm_Minster

For many old German towns their church(es) will be one of their most prominent features, often visible from afar, located at their highest point on a hill, and towering over the entire neighborhood.

Generally it's a pretty sight though, not like billboards at all...

Here where I live, I don't have to see a single church spire, nor can I.

No...instead, I can walk down almost any street, and find a sign out by the road imploring me to come find Jesus, or some other pap - and I can usually pass by 3-4 within less than a mile of each one (we have more than one street here where there seems to be a church of one form or another every few hundred feet for a couple of miles - not even joking).

Welcome to America, I guess, where churches are big business (that's putting it kindly).

Church spires are an artifact of history, when they performed functions beyond advertising mass times. Still, they're mostly unobtrusive, and in the noise of modern cities, one barely even notices them. If society was a body, then church spires would be freckles. Funny, but not dangerous and you stop noticing them quickly. Ads would be cancerous growths.

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