Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

In context, your reply sounds like a negative take, but I find it rather positive.

I've always found good fiction enlightening. There is no need to be so serious about it.

My biggest criticism of religion is the very boundary drawn between fiction and scripture: that adherents to a religion must treat fiction as if it is reality.

All too often, that means obsessing over obedience to a structure of rules/dogma, instead of confronting the reality right in front of us; like voting to restrict gay marriage so God will bless our country, instead of learning to empathize with people around us to become a better community.

View on HN

> My biggest criticism of religion is the very boundary drawn between fiction and scripture: that adherents to a religion must treat fiction as if it is reality.

Agreed. This is the part that really gets under my skin… its been my understanding for most of my life that the bible specifically is full of allegory, not history. Yet, so many many of the “believers” I encounter don’t know what “allegory” means. The bible is their literal truth!

Tbh, knowing this isn’t helpful. It somehow makes me more paralyzed in dealing with literal believers. It always feels like they know they’re full of shit, but won’t admit it. There’s a disingenuousness to it that very deeply bothers me.

Often it's because while they may "know they're full of shit", they won't admit it to themselves.

Being able to think critically of religion means being agnostic or atheist.

My assertion is that it's not you who is paralyzed, but anyone who cannot criticize their own position.

This is a good take, thanks! It feels like their paralysis is contagious, which is endlessly frustrating.

like voting to restrict gay marriage so God will bless our country

Do we know how this is going to play out, though? Has matrimony between same sex couples ever been widely available in any civilization? Rome, Greece, China and Egypt all had various different approaches to open homosexual relationships overtime, but it's hard to find any significant civilization that broadly equated same sex unions and heterosexual marriage. I'll allow that my research on this is incomplete.

I think anyone who thinks they know for certain how this kind of social change will play out on the scale of decades or centuries is mistaken. It's possible that everything turns out great and we enter a golden era of tolerance and flourishing human relationships, but at the same time there's usually something worth fearing in the unknown, which is why we tend to.

If no one has tried it yet, it might be worth being the first one.

From what I can tell, the only group claiming to know what will happen in the future are religious conservatives who want gay marriage outlawed. It's their claim that homosexual unions will lead to a bad societal outcome, and that claim is based purely on religious dogma.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com