Comment by bheadmaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bheadmaster | Hacker News Reader

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> Life is hard. Individuals consistently fail to act with everyone’s best interests in mind.

Yes, but Christianity gives people the excuse not to question their core beliefs - they just confess, repent, blame it all on Satan and carry on with business as usual.

> The offensive thing about Christians is that they’re a people that have acknowledged that they aren’t behaving appropriately in the first place and have come to the conclusion that they want to behave accordingly to the standard set in the Bible

The offensive thing about Christians is that they are constantly trying to impose rules from the Bible upon other people (e.g. abortion laws in southern US).

> When everyone is out there living their own truth, it can be offensive to learn about a group of people who reject the idea of their own truth and put their trust in the God of the Bible.

In other words, Christians consider themselves eternally right, and everyone else eternally wrong, no matter what evidence is provided.

You mentioned the concept of repentance. The biblical concept of repentance requires action to restructure the way you do things and is mutually exclusive with "business as usual". Anyone who is doing the BAU part skipped the repent part.

Regarding laws, we live in a representative republic where anyone can vote for any representative to act in their interests. If you would prefer that we remove the rights of Christians to vote because they tend to vote for policies that you don't support, well, that's a very different type of government. Historically, in the US, we have gone to great lengths to give marginalized groups the right to vote.

Finally, a Christian is simply a person who has decided that they will organize their life according to the standard defined in the Bible in preference to other options. Other people make decisions to organize their lives in other ways. It seems like you are willing to tolerate folks in the latter camp, but hold a special animosity towards folks in the former camp. Do we not each have our own autonomy?

> The biblical concept of repentance requires action to restructure the way you do things and is mutually exclusive with "business as usual".

That's your interpretation. The behavior I have observed is different.

> Historically, in the US, we have gone to great lengths to give marginalized groups the right to vote

Christians in the US are not marginalized.

> Finally, a Christian is simply a person who has decided that they will organize their life according to the standard defined in the Bible in preference to other options. Other people make decisions to organize their lives in other ways. It seems like you are willing to tolerate folks in the latter camp, but hold a special animosity towards folks in the former camp. Do we not each have our own autonomy?

Read about paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

In order for society to remain tolerant towards everyone, it must not tolerate intolerance. Christianity (as well as many other popular religions) is not tolerant, no matter how much that word appears in its holy books - just look at the history.

Ok, I wish you the best, but I don't think it's productive to continue this conversation. Sadly, you've decided to take the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed along with their rights to make decisions for themselves. That's a strongly authoritarian position for an American to take. I hope you'll reconsider.

> I don't think it's productive to continue this conversation. Sadly, you've decided to take the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed

If that's all you took away from this conversation, then I agree - it's for the best to end it now. But I'll try to elaborate anyway.

I am not taking the position that Christians should have their right to vote curtailed, I'm taking the position that nobody, not even Christians, should have the right to impose their own standards upon others, unless they made sense outside of the Christian worldview. Abortion laws only make sense in the Christian worldview (and maybe a few other, equally intolerant, worldviews). The fact that Christians are the majority in the US only makes it de-facto a Christian state, while still pretending to be a secular democracy.

Here's a thought experiment:

If Talibans somehow became a majority in the US, would you still consider it "their right" to vote away the democracy and establish Sharia Law?

I'll make an exception because you've asked a good question that I think will help illuminate our different viewpoints.

> If Talibans somehow became a majority in the US, would you still consider it "their right" to vote away the democracy and establish Sharia Law?

Yes. The current form of government in the United States is a representative republic that has a constitution that defines processes for dramatic change including a constitutional convention that allows for open-ended changes to the constitution itself.

I don't have a divine right to the land, water, or air here.

> Yes.

That's were we disagree. I believe there are some human freedoms that nobody has the right to deny. I suppose I'm just an idealist.

> The current form of government in the United States is a representative republic that has a constitution that defines processes for dramatic change including a constitutional convention that allows for open-ended changes to the constitution itself.

I'm sure the goal of such openness of constitution was to protect the liberty of people, not to open doors for authoritarianism.

How do we enumerate which human freedoms that nobody has the right to deny? What if there isn't consensus? If there isn't consensus and they are just imposed by fiat, then you've simply come around to authoritarianism from the other direction.

That's a hard question, like any other question concerning human freedom. I suppose a good rule of thumb is "if you're not forced to subject yourself to it, you don't get a say in it".

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