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Comment by drtz | Hacker News Reader

Do you truly see no difference between a lie that leads to someone getting harmed and a truth that leads to the same outcome? Your argument seems disingenuous.

> Following the logic you're laying out, I don't think it's the defense of truth you're advocating for; it's social harmony and stability. Basically the ideals favored in the Chinese model -- which censors true things and false things equally, depending on their social impact.

This is a straw man. The original comment made no such argument. From the comment you're responding to:

> ... I desperately do not want further injury or violence to occur spurned by incorrect speech on the facts of reality.

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> Do you truly see no difference between a lie that leads to someone getting harmed and a truth that leads to the same outcome?

Only if the action is justifiable in the first place. Let’s say someone wants to kill gay people (or people who are against vaccines, or people who want to raise taxes); does it really matter whether he kills an actual gay person or whether he kills a straight person who he mistakenly thinks is gay?

Some religious people say if there's no god, they will go kill all people. Is such truth worth the price?

If they are sincere, it's very useful to allow them to identify themselves by publicly announcing this in advance. Much easier to stop them before they get going if you know who they are.

Yes? Civil society cannot allow itself to be held hostage by the threats of an unhinged fringe.

If they have to believe in a mythical deity that dispenses "justice" post-death in order to quell their urges to commit murder, they probably should be treated for mental illness or otherwise removed from society, as they are a ticking time bomb.

There needs to be some evidence for this. You can’t just claim some religious people want to kill everybody. Link please or this is a blatant lie.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was not a bad idea. It was scorned and mocked in the 20th century because it had become so unwieldy and impractical, based on the widespread use of the printing press and other media such as film, television, and music.

Now, "truth" is an interesting thing. Ricky Gervais decided that the founders of Christianity were the lying liars, perhaps because their stories were not concretely, verifiably true in every historical detail, and therefore Ricky concluded that Christianity is a fabric of lies made up to make people feel better or control us or something.

Unfortunately it's Ricky who's got the short end of the Truth. Because Truth is more than just facts that are printed in a newspaper about the daily police blotter. Once you accept that there are higher, more important Truths than what you'll find in Wikipedia, we'll all be a lot better off. And we can better evaluate those lower-order facts and figures for what they really are.

Ok you’re espousing a view that’s fringe on HN and of course you were downvoted (not by me), but I’d just like to raise a technical point:

The truth of Wikipedia is epistemic, as is the truth of theology, and as such it’s possible to evaluate them in different epistemic systems and draw different conclusions.

But capital-t Truth is capitalized to indicate that it is an ontological rather epistemological signifier, i.e. a name referring to a personal entity.

So technically speaking God is not a higher or lower truth, in the sense of the verity of a proposition, as you can’t compare a person with a fact.

If we start conflating epistemology with ontology, then... God help us! We’ll end up calling night day, and figuratively literally :)

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