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Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

> If you must do religion, why not Christianity or Islam? At least these two make a point of encouraging charity and kindness towards others.

You are comparing the historical reality of one religion to the ideals of other religions. In such a comparison the ideals will always look better. If you compare the ideals of Buddhism with the historical reality of Christianity and Islam (war, slavery, genocide etc.) I'm sure Buddhism will look better.

You will typically see people compare the ideals of their own religion with the realities of other religions and come to the conclusion that their own religion is best. The imperfect reality is explained by flawed people misunderstanding or misusing the religion, while the real-world problems of other religions is attributed to faults in the religion itself.

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Spot on.

Or you can go one step further and conclude that all religions (and indeed anything that is based on non-scientific dogmatic infallibility like communism or Austrian economics) are all a bit wanting.

>and indeed anything that is based on non-scientific dogmatic infallibility

There's no such thing as a scientific ethical system. Science tells us how and why the universe behaves as it does, it cannot make a judgement about what the world should be. This has been known since antiquity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument.

So what is the realistic alternative - all I'm stating is that I get deeply suspicious when a political system is based on beliefs that you are not even allowed to question.

There's no alternative: all belief systems must have some axioms that people agree on "just because", as if the axioms required justification, then the system used for justifying them would also need to be justified, ad infinitum. It's a bit like Gödel's second incompleteness theorem: a moral system cannot prove itself to be moral.

What we can do is try to understand and compare the axiomatic systems upon which belief systems rest. Marxists believe in the labour theory of value (very roughly, "value" comes from time spent working). Austrians believe "value" is a form of ordinal utility with which intrapersonal utility comparisons cannot be made. Mainstream economics believes "value" is a form of cardinal utility with which intrapersonal comparisons can be made.

Within the context of one of those systems, if somebody argues for something that doesn't maximise what the system values, we could say it's unscientific. If somebody makes an inconsistent statement, we could argue it's illogical. But if somebody makes a statement that is consistent with maximising value as defined by that system, we cannot argue it's unscientific just because it doesn't maximise value as defined by our own system, because science cannot say whether our own system is morally superior.

I think you're a bit confused. The "not allowed to question this ideology" problem is independent of whether the ideology has a supernatural component or not. You weren't allowed to question Mao when he ruled China or Pol Pot when he ruled Cambodia; in many circles you aren't really allowed to question transgenderism or other ideas as well.

On the other hand, there are long histories of philosophical and theological inquiry in the Christian tradition; from what I understand the same is true of Islam. There are certainly times and places in both camps where small deviations were perceived as heresy, and perceived "heretics" were persecuted or killed; but as a Christian, I am as opposed to that as much as any atheist can be opposed to the persecutions of Mao.

Unless you are trolling, I think you are mixing up different senses of "not allowed to criticize". In totalitarian states it is literally not allowed to criticize the state ideology. That is not the case for "questioning transgenderism" anywhere I know, unless you are taking about things like literally calling for the murder of transgender persons, which indeed would be illegal in many jurisdictions.

Of course everybody have the same right to question your ideas, as you have to question their ideas. Some people seem to think that their freedom of speech is curtailed because other people are allowed to criticize them back or even ignore them.

'The "not allowed to question this ideology" problem is independent of whether the ideology has a supernatural component or not.'

Isn't that pretty much what I wrote?

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