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Comment by iasay | Hacker News Reader

This scares me slightly. When I see a code of ethics bound to faith, I have to wonder what happens if the faith disappears. Experience says lots of people get hurt. I don't wish that on anyone.

Ethical stance must stand alone unconditionally.

As for the actual rules, picking one in particular, respecting someone purely for being senior is stupid. Respect is simply earned. I respect more people younger and in more junior positions than myself.

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>When I see a code of ethics bound to faith, I have to wonder what happens if the faith disappears.

Let's do the math:

Christianity has been around for around two orders of magnitude longer than any of the compilers or dev tools you're using on your project.

There are probably three orders of magnitude more people who use Christianity than are using any of the languages used in your project.

There are probably six orders of magnitude more priests and churches than there are maintainers on all but the top 1% of libraries (open source or closed source) you're using on your project.

I'm pretty sure the complete disappearance of Christianity from the face of the earth is not the highest probability risk to worry about for your project, and if it were to completely disappear there would probably be enough other stuff going along with that disappearance that we probably all have bigger things on our mind than the code of ethics published by a software team.

If the concern is just "what if the maintainers give up on Christianity," they're probably far more likely to get tired of programming (that happens far more often), but we can observe that their need to make a PR to edit their own code of conduct is not really going to be a particularly hard thing for them to pull off.

I think you entirely managed to miss the point there.

People don't tell you they lost their faith. They just stop following their code of ethics that was bound to it.

I trust a faceless corporation over this attitude.

any system of ethics ultimately must rest on axioms held on faith, there is nothing special about that faith being explicitly religious

You trust a faceless corporation more than someone who demonstrates the ability to learn, grow and adapt their thinking over time?

You and I see this differently.

The corporation is more likely to be accountable from experience.

It is power which cannot be held accountable, regardless of who holds it. Depending on character means you are depending on self accountability, the most wishful of all forms of accountability. Self accountability is for weight loss.

> Self accountability is for weight loss.

Medication works better.

Corporations and accountable? Those things all too often don't belong into the same sentence in Western societies. Individuals get into prison all the time for transgressions much more minor than what corporations can get away with just by paying often a ridiculous fine. I'd say that individuals are much more beholden to accountability.

Yes orders of magnitude more accountable than the religious contribution to ethics of an individual.

Sounds like a category error to me.

> don't belong into the same sentence in Western societies

don't belong in the same sentence in the United States.

There are other societies in the West.

Sadly I'm not that much of an optimist.

I shouldn't ask, but what happened to drive a negative view of faith?

> People don't tell you they lost their faith. They just stop following their code of ethics that was bound to it.

Not sure if this is true. Most Western values came from Christianity, even though the society today is not as religious as it was in the past.

> Most Western values came from Christianity, even though the society today is not as religious as it was in the past.

I think it's the other way around: Like with many holidays, Christianity usurped previosly existing ethics and claimed them as its own. It's not as if there were no ethics in the years we write "BC[E]" after.

By the numbers far more people have suffered under these dithering superstitions, that doesn't make them objectively better.

> far more people have suffered

Compared to what?

Than if they didn’t exist

Compared to modern sensibilities like equality for women, prohibition of slavery, trial by a jury of peers, medicine based on evidence, etc.

Christians and their faith lead the slavery prohibition movement.

I don't know the history of the other things you mentioned.

After only two thousand years of enabling slavery. Slow clap.

That's a human problem, not a Christian problem. Cultures around the world enabled slavery.

Christianity's own scriptures and holy men called for the return of slaves to their masters.

Just because other cultures also supported slavery doesn't mean Christianity didn't contribute to that horror.

The SQLite Code of Ethics has no relevance to you using the license. A code of ethics base on a whim rather than faith wouldn't be any more reliable.

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