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Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to family deep rooted historical cultural traditions, I'm sensing that an advisory is not going to make much of a dent upon impact. Maybe better to advise how to have thanksgiving safely - pre isolate prior to meetup - whole scale of what you can do and outline the risk reductions each one has. Give people an educated choice in the risk as like crossing the road - we all make educated risk choices each day and they won't stop the holiday, but can manage it better with better advice/approach I feel.

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We didn't have an Easter celebration this year. In fact, for the entirety of Lent, the Catholic Church in my area said that mass was not necessary due to the pandemic.

Some things are more important than tradition. Easter is the most holy holiday of the Catholic Church (Christmas has more secular importance, but is still only 2nd most important).

If you were willing to sacrifice Easter back in April, then Thanksgiving / Christmas is no different, at least to those of us who are religious. Its important to take this situation seriously.

And yes, the Catholic Church definitely cares about tradition. In fact, people criticize it for caring too much about tradition at times.

Wonderful to hear that and was wondering if that would be down to the catholic church having a better structure of leadership that was on-board early? After all, we all know the Catholic church has The Pope as their leader, and probably about the only religion people know who the World voice of that religion is.

But kudos for the Catholic Church for what they have done throughout this pandemic. I am by no means saying other religions efforts during this pandemic are any better or worse and just wanted to clarify that so no subtext is inferred. Indeed I don't want to hear what others if they are be doing wrong, kinda want to hear the good examples so we all learn from them.

>And yes, the Catholic Church definitely cares about tradition. In fact, people criticize it for caring too much about tradition at times.

The Catholic Church also has a tradition of caring and people have a tradition of complaining (I'm British so maybe a cultural perspective slant there), but nobody complaining here upon that tradition of caring too much.

> Wonderful to hear that and was wondering if that would be down to the catholic church having a better structure of leadership that was on-board early?

I don't know the full mechanics of the decision. But a few things to note:

1. This was Archbishop Gregory's decision. I'm unsure how high up the "chain" goes for the Catholic Church. As such, Archbishop Gregory's history is important, but also the Archdiocese he's leading. So #2 goes into that background...

2. Archbishop Gregory was brought into my Archdiocese as a "turning over a new page" kind of bishop... as Theodore McCarrick (a previous leader) was caught up in the whole sex-abuse scandal that I'm sure you know about. Cardinal Wuerl, Gregory's immediate predecessor, was also seen as too connected to the sex-abuse scandals.

So after having the whole sex-abuse thing come into light over the past few years, and coming on as the new Bishop who will turn a new page after that whole awful affair... it is obvious what Archbishop Gregory should do for his first Easter of this area of Church.

So this is quite possibly a local-church politics (Archdiocese wide) thing that plays into the decision making process here.

> After all, we all know the Catholic church has The Pope as their leader, and probably about the only religion people know who the World voice of that religion is.

And yes, the Pope is the leader for sure. The new Pope is also quite reformist in attitude, and Archbishop Gregory would have been elevated to his position thanks to the blessings of the Pope.

But I didn't know the Archbishop had the power to negate the need of mass + eucharist (temporarily) during this pandemic. Such authority is rarely, if ever, used. But its those sorts of moves that really help get the Church unified during a long-term pandemic like this.

Not bad for Archbishop Gregory's first year.

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https://adw.org/coronavirus/

>> The dispensation issued by Archbishop Gregory from the obligation to attend Mass during this time remains in effect. All persons who are subjects of the Archbishop of Washington no matter where they may be, and all other persons who are actually present in the Archdiocese of Washington who are under the obligation, are dispensed from the obligation until further notice (cann. 87 §1, 91).

Not to be crude, but the whole sexual education debate is fairly analogous here.

We can teach people to abstain completely, or we can teach them how to do things safely.

It's pretty settled on which works better to prevent unwanted consequences.

One might argue there is no safe method in this case. There are enough stories of people who did as much as they thought they could and still ended up infected. Can't really be compared to condoms for example, which have a fraction of a fraction of a chance to break.

That's my initial thought as well. Abstaining from sex (or contact in the context of the pandemic) is a near impossibility for mental health, societal/economic benefit, and just human nature, so it's better to teach how to do so safely.

I fear that there's a large subset of the population who won't follow safe practices unless you scare them with text like "don't visit your friends/family".

Condoms are 95% effective.

Masks are only 60%. The only methodology that's anywhere close to 95% effective is a vaccine. Furthermore, you can't wear a mask while eating, and its too cold outside now to hold an outdoor dinner.

If you have a combination of methodologies that reaches 95% efficacy, feel free to tell the world. But mask-up, social distanced (6-feet apart) and all that is only partially effective at controlling the virus. And such conditions are unlikely to be kept during a Thanksgiving party (especially if alcohol is involved)

Certainly gives some perspective into peoples ability and limitations of controls/tools available. Best will in the World, stuff is goona happen and STD rates would give an insight. Be interesting in years to come to mine the COVID infection rate data and contrast against STD spread trends and see if any correlation geography. I'm looking at crime rates in area's and infection spreads and whilst nothing hard, it certainly does seem to have some correlation. The more likely an area is to have people prepared to break laws, the more chance people won't respect the laws/rules/advice for spread.

So certainly much to be learned, but like driving - you can follow all the rules and drive perfectly, it's always the other person who does not that crashes into you.

Just case of managing the flow like a production line and not seeing hospital capacity bottleneck, which seems to be the case in every country in the production line of normal life. So a mass risk increase all in short window of time is one heck of a sudden spike risk that could really jam up and backlog the bottleneck and have a knock-on effect that will not bode well.

This all happening in a country with leadership in a bumpy transition phase and potentially a perfect storm.

I'd hate to think though that the head of the CDC wasn't prepared to do an outright internal flight travel ban or harder notice statement for fear of upsetting the current president and getting twitter sacked and classed as a communist for not protecting American values. But for me and possibly others - I can see how that may well be plausible, so there is that in the back of my mind, can't deny that thought and do hope I'm wide of the mark even though it is a doubt I can't dismiss. But politics and health are never good bedfellows.

> too cold outside now to hold an outdoor dinner.

If it was good enough for the Peanuts, it's good enough for us with appropriate clothing. :D

Sex is a biological imperative entrenched in our DNA through countless generations of evolutionary selection all the way back to the dawn of sexual reproduction millions of years ago.

Thanksgiving is an American secular holiday about eating turkey.

Family and social relationships are not entrenched in our DNA?

Sure, they are. But Thanksgiving is only one minor manifestation of that.

Abstinence-only education is likely doomed to failure because you can't expect people to resist all possible sexual urges. But you could reasonably effectively get people to, say, abstain from having sex at Thanksgiving dinner.

Being social and connected with our family unit is also deeply embedded in our DNA.

This is one reason I tend to tell people traditions are stupid if there is no reasoning or thought behind them and the only reason is "because it's always been this way". Humans need to start using pragmatism and logic and forget about those traditions and cultural attributes that no longer serve a purpose in the now.

It's all very well to say that traditions that serve no purpose are stupid and should be forgotten, but it might be a Hard Problem to distinguish those kinds of traditions from other traditions that serve an excellent purpose that is complex or non-obvious enough that they appear purposeless.

Relevant Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...

Relevant HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037749

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