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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

I grew up around Christianity in the American south and this is very true. The genius of Christianity is that it's a mind virus: In order to be a good Christian you have to convert others to Christianity. It's the GPL of religions.

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I’m a “modern orthodox” Jew. We don’t proselytize (since there’s no downside to _not_ being Jewish in our view). Rather we focus on in-reach and retention. Anyway, this comment made me laugh and now I’m trying to figure out what license applies to us. It’s got to be some sort of walled garden, the lock-in is real.

I've never had a Jewish person try to convert me, regardless of their orthodoxy. And frankly I've always found the "we must argue with God" doctrine much more palatable than the blind faith of Christianity.

I was raised Catholic. Nobody ever talked about trying to convert anybody else. (I'm not saying no Catholics ever try to convert people, I know some do, but only a minority put an emphasis on it.)

One theological difference – the Catholic Church teaches that it is possible for non-Catholics, non-Christians, even atheists, to go to heaven. (See Vatican II, Lumen gentium, paragraph 16 [1].) This is different from many Protestants who believe that everyone who dies non-Christian (infants and children sometimes excepted) is damned to hell for all eternity.

[1] http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_counc...

While the virus analogy feels heavy-handed to me... the GPL one is actually incredibly on-point. I'll have to remember that one.

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