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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

> The dire need for us to start calling out people for using “positive things only” to silence and enforce apathy has never been greater.

This encapsulates my objection to Christianity. If we are all saved by the love of Christ just for the asking, why strive? Why engage? How is the inner peace that is supposed to be the payoff for faith compatible with the inner turmoil needed to effect change?

I get called on by missionaries with some regularity. If they could actually deliver to me these benefits as they claim, I think it would lead me to exit the arena, to avoid conflict. It would diminish me. Like an opiate.

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The goal is to become like Christ. To heal the sick, fight for righteousness, proclaim mercy, and sacrifice oneself for others even to the point of death.

I recommend going and reading what Jesus actually said, not what pop culture equates to Christianity.

> what Jesus actually said

Really hard to find an objective source on this, isn't it?

When you perform miracles, they crucify you though.

Christ wouldn't be Christ-like without billions of followers effusively chanting his praise, and making up nice but fictitious stories about him which they falsely claim to be the word of God, and evangelizing and brainwashing innocent victims and defenseless children into believing in his magic tricks, against all the hard indisputable evidence they're physically and logically impossible, and telling you not to believe your own lying eyes and other senses when they transubstantiate Jesus-meat crackers and Jesus-blood wine for you to cannibalize (but don't make Jesus-poop, or that would be Stercoranistic), and promoting hatred, division, and violence by engraving psalms about him on assault rifles, and inquisitioning and pogromming and torturing and killing people who don't have the same beliefs or hate the same people they do, and praying for his second coming triggering Armageddon, and going to war in his name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stercoranism

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-16/gun-maker-markets-chr...

Where do I sign up to get a dedicated fan club and PR department and propaganda machine and ideology enforcement army like that? Then I'd be more Christ-like.

No longer a Christian, but I grew up quite passionate about my faith. Here are my two cents:

Your objection is spot on. It's a common critique and conundrum that Protestant Christians have been wrestling with and philosophizing about for quite some time.

The Christian bible is riddled with contradictions, absurd pronouncements, and obviously bad advice. However, my thinking is that those are where the meat of Christian practice lies. A bible, itself, is simply ink on lots of pages, while it is a spiritual practice to try deriving meaning and value from the jumble.

Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell's equations, Quantum Field Theories; all of these excellent descriptions of our world each contain absurd infities, false predictions, and sketchy philosophical foundations. However, the standard rhetoric is that these cracks are where all the interesting research happpens!

While I reject Christianity for personal reasons, in my experience, choosing some spiritual conundrum and working hard to resolve it goes a long way to generating personal spiritual growth, whatever that means. At the very least, many find such work deep and valuable and meaningful.

::fist bump::

Because faith without works is dead.

You are conflating Christianity with a particular flavor of protestant evangelicalism.

A sect that emphasizes damnation along with salvation is less posiopathic. But the cudgel of damnation exacerbates other pathologies. Fewer lotus eaters but more obedient crusaders.

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”

Ah, but life is a FAANG job interview. If you pass the test, a life of luxury and leisure await you. If you fail, eternity in the damnation of tiny paychecks and meaningless work. You must endure the whiteboard challenges and strive for perfection to show that you are worthy for the promised land.

Or... maybe I drank too much coffee this morning....

you ever read "The Varieties of Religious Experience" by William James? It's a good book despite its late-19th-century understanding of the brain and nervous system.

In talking about individuals who have had profound religious experiences, he distinguishes two types. One is the "healthy-minded" type, like the kind of relentless positivity you get in American evangelical religion, and perhaps could be extended to modern New Age thinking.

He also describes another type of religious experience, the "sick soul". These are the types of people who constantly agonize and worry and wonder, and are very in tune with human suffering and cannot accept the evil in the world. This can involve a fear of damnation but not necessarily.

He's able to come up with Christians of both types -- Tolstoy, for example, as a "sick soul".

This is a traditional objection to Christianity from powerful and successful people. If you became a Christian, it’s quite possible you would cease to be driven by the same motivations. There are many stories of people making drastic life changes after becoming Christians, forgoing advantages they had accrued.

However, there are also Christians who do your job well and embrace similar hobbies. They may not have changed much yet, or they have developed different motivations. For example, someone might have been working hard to spite someone and they learn to work hard to love their coworkers.

It’s hard to say whether you would change very little, change your motivations to do the same thing, or do something totally different.

That inner peace isn't a cause for one to put up their feet and not care for the sick or poor or widows. You could theoretically have incredible faith and walk around your whole Christian life not worrying what happens to you, but even then that peace only extends to yourself and you are commanded to love others, love justice, care for the sick, carry your cross, etc. I'd be curious to hear what kind of messages you're getting from missionaries, it seems really odd that this would be their message, but I know from the Joel Osteens of the world they are out there.

The way I was taught, as someone who grew up Lutheran, was that the act of accepting Christ changed the person for the better, as a sort of undeniable positive influence of the soul

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