Hacker News Reader

Comment by rowtheway | Hacker News Reader

Broadly speaking, the community-oriented left in places like the US support bureaucratic government welfare programs, while community-oriented conservatives support more organic, often religious, and non-government charitable organizations. My preference runs toward the latter, for reasons best explained by John Carmack:

https://archive.ph/0tHg4

View on HN

"more organic, often religious, and non-government charitable organizations"

Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.

Most people live in towns, cities, states and nations, not communities. State and national governments cannot rely on the good of the neighbour. Larger, more equitable systems need to be put in place.

> Or none at all. Or ones for people in a select group.

Bureaucrats do this too. See the history of communism in Europe, or present state of communism in China. Centralized welfare is a centralized system of control in the hands of politicians.

If you don’t see the issue with “often religious” then nothing I say can change your mind! Religion as a moral compass is horrible! Religious communities are often the most toxic ones!

I am an atheist ex-Catholic. The big atheist-leftist crowd in my college town are intensely more violent, toxic, and racist than local Catholics or Lutherans. Lack of religious belief is no guarantee of kindness or rationality, nor is the presence of faith a strong signal of evil.

Behavior is a strong signal and I see more Christian harlots and swindlers than people practicing Christ’s philosophy. The left at least don’t pretend to be wholesome and righteous.

> The left at least don’t pretend to be wholesome and righteous

Funny, I use this same line about the right (at least in reference to politicians) in the US.

> I see more Christian harlots and swindlers than people practicing Christ’s philosophy

Perhaps "more people who claim/pretend to be Christian"? You can hardly call someone Christian if they're not following Jesus; it makes as much as calling someone an atheist just because they call themselves an atheist right before talking about how God exists.

I am Italian… raised catholic… my high school was owned and managed by the church… and I am an atheist as well! An I can tell you that in my country the problem are the believers not the atheists! The presence of faith implies you are willing to outsource your moral compass to what a bunch of primitive men belived to be right

When it comes to value systems that have stood the test of time and have well-understood failure modes vs. whatever hot new theory was cooked up on Twitter or Tumblr last week (the main vectors for recent moral changes in my country), I generally prefer the former.

You mean the value system that got us the dark ages, people burned at the stakes for “heresy” (or hanged, or many other form of death), silenced people because what they were saying was against what is written in a non particularly good fantasy novel (aka the Bible), caused all kind of toxic behaviours in families and communities if someone was not following stupid rules in the aforementioned book. And the alternative is not embracing every stupid trend appearing on the internet… ethics is a topic philosophers have been engaging for more than 2 millennia!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com