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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you on "replace it with any religion" but I don't find it bigotry necessarily - I am averse to any and all religious influence on anything, and I'm happy to see it brought up to attention and awareness everywhere. As to the frequent Venn diagram overlap of locally predominant religion with corresponding country / nationality / ethnicity / etc, while that frequently the case, I agree we should focus on the underlying viral meme that's religion and not the confounding variable of nationality.

I mean, I've lived in Canada for 20 years before I've realized that friendly kids asking for donation for salvation army in super markets are in fact members of a massive church. Things some people find obvious aren't well known to others.

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> think twice before giving them money because you'd be supporting the late George Bush Sr's 2nd-favorite cult.

> They also own The Washington Times and United Press International (UPI).

> And True World Foods, which runs a major portion of the sushi trade in the US.

> Numerous other innocent-sounding organizations in many, many sports, interest groups, and industries.

Like if someone wrote any of that about Jews, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind that they were an anti-semite.

Fair.

One of the tricky things about that is that "jew" is both a religion (presumed to be a "by choice affiliation") as well as ethnicity (less "by choice" affiliation), as well as culture and sometimes nationality.

If I say "people who believe in loch Ness are gullible", that's viewed as ok in most places. Saying "Germans are gullible" is less likely to be true or acceptable. Saying "Christians are gullible" will depend on location - even most freedom of speech democracies will have blasphemy laws and cultures where they protect belief in Jesus in ways they do not protect belief in Yeti (I clearly have an opinion on that :).

Saying "Jews are gullible" will probably be viewed as anti semitic due to history, pattern, likelihood, as well as the confluence of what the word itself means. "Jew" is such a massive Venn diagram.

FWIW Ultimately I believe (and I'm sometimes lonely in that) that intent rather than keywords are important. I chose to gave benefit of doubt to poster (perhaps mistakenly).

I think one can be particularly legitimately concerned about religions that:

* directly accumulate controlling ownership interests in key businesses.

* use dubious fundraising and recruitment practices.

* form complex webs of not-obviously-related entities to use in influence operations.

* have acted as a pseudo-cult of personality of a figure in living memory.

* are possibly abusive to their members in various ways.

Doesn't that cover most organized religions?

Not really.

> > * directly accumulate controlling ownership interests in key businesses.

OK, there's things like Catholic healthcare and schools or the Adventists' various interests. They're mostly pretty clearly branded as being Catholic or Adventist affiliated. For the most part, this is not something religions do, though certainly there are areas of concern, like faith-affiliated substance abuse programs used to recruit the vulnerable.

> > * use dubious fundraising and recruitment practices.

OK, perhaps religious fundraising isn't perfect, but most religions do not engage in employing missionaries as quasi-slave-labor to panhandle funds from the public at scale. Of course, you can find an exception or two, like the Salvation Army.

> > * form complex webs of not-obviously-related entities to use in influence operations.

Doing this on anywhere near the scale of the Unification Church is basically unheard of.

> > * have acted as a pseudo-cult of personality of a figure in living memory.

Basically here you've mostly got the Unification Church, Scientology, and various kinds of "prosperity" churches.

> > * are possibly abusive to their members in various ways.

OK, you've got me here: a lot of religions dabble in abusing their members.

Obviously not. And conversely, it does cover some political cults.

Jews are not comparable to the Moonies. They are not a single organization but rather a loosely related set of varying ethnic groups and religious practices.

A better analogy would be to imagine people writing similar things about, say, the Satmar Hasidim. In which case it wouldn’t sound anti-Semitic at all (although I’m sure the Satmar might try to claim it was).

Most synagogues aren't cult-like. Quite the opposite, really. However, there definitely are some forms of Judaism which deserve the label. Even my Israeli friends think the Haredi are batshit crazy. You would not accuse the people who made this film of being anti-semites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_of_Us_(2017_film)

It's fair to call out the wackiest religious cults, and Christendom offers many to choose from.

I'm prepared to say it about any tightly centrally controlled cult that uses front groups. Including Jewish ones, should I find any. (Though, Judaism has enough diversity that even if such one existed, it would not reflect on other religious Jews, let alone people who are Jews only in the culture/ethnicity sense).

It's not only about religion either. There are also political cults that employ large number of front groups, like the Danish Tvind.

And if they wrote it about scientology it would be entirely uncontroversial

Of course. No one here is denying being an anti-Moonite.

Just like when people here are anti-Google or anti-Apple, they aren't bigots.

Moonies, Google, and Apple, and the Mormon Church and Catholic Church, and unlike Judaism, are specific business organizations with observable behaviors, not a personal belief and lifestyle.

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