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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

A professor at a Christian college claimed to be in religious solidarity with Muslims. That’s pretty much like saying that you’re attempting to further Facebook’s goals as a Google employee. Of course you get fired.

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She was fired for saying that Muslims and Christians worship the same god, which is literally heresy according to many Christians: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/20/460480698/do-christians-and-m.... Jews and Muslims reject the trinity, which is an essential part of the confession of faith in most branches of Christianity. So it’s quite loaded to say that the Jewish and Muslim god is “the same” as the Christian god.

Right. That’s my point. It’s simply not an example of cancel culture.

Yes I’m agreeing, just elaborating. It’s like Planned Parenthood firing an executive for being a pro-life activist. That’s not cancel culture. The NYT doing the same would be.

I guess. The Jesuits taught me they were all pretty much the same dude.

It's exactly the same God. Islam is basically Judaism fanfic, and Muslims accept Jesus as a prophet of God (though denying his divinity). Christians are upset about the Mohammed thing, and about the two other faiths downgrading Jesus, but there's no question that the dude doing the smiting in the Old Testament is the same God in all three Abrahamic traditions.

Different religions are going to have angry doctrinal differences by definition, but you can't let that obscure the obvious. We're not talking about tengrism or Brahma here.

> A professor at a Christian college claimed to be in religious solidarity with Muslims.

I'm not sure if the greater theological offense was the solidarity with Muslims or quoting the Pope in support of it (Wheaton had only a few years before fired a professor for converting to Catholicism; “Christian” isn't a label of a monolithic group in practice.)

It doesn’t matter. Either way you are not dealing with cancel culture. You are dealing with somebody who has gone on the record s as opposing the fundamental goals of the organization she works for. As I said before, of course you get fired.

Virtually every instance of firing or other institutional disaffiliation attributed to “cancel culture” follows the same pattern: someone—inside or outside an institution—complains to an institution (of those within it empowered to make decisions on this kind of issue) with an allegation that the institutions relationship with someone violates what they perceive to be the fundamental values of the institution, the institution reviews and reaches a similar conclusion, and the relationship is terminated.

That’s like equating a cruise missile with a cap gun because “they both just make explosions.”

This comment is a fine answer to your ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26311621

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