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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

>I was hoping 30 years ago that the tyrany of christianity is being eradicated in my lifetime

It's funny you refer to the tyranny of Christianity when by far the most tyrannical regimes were all officially atheist (Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, North Korea), and the west has been getting steadily more and more authoritarian as it's gotten less and less Christian. Fundamentally most non-religious people are utilitarians, who see no inherent value in a life and hence are open to the idea of sacrificing a few lives for the "good of the many".

The first step to dictatorship is convincing people there's no such thing as "absolute" rights, so that they won't object to the regime making up more and more excuses to violate people's rights. And without a belief in some kind of higher power the majority of people also won't have any reason to believe that some rights are inherently inviolable.

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>Fundamentally most non-religious people are utilitarians, who see no inherent value in a life and hence are open to the idea of sacrificing a few lives for the "good of the many".

Non-religious people are no different than religious people in the way they view life and its inherent value. They simply don't feel that value necessitates a supernatural framework. I know this will likely be incomprehensible to you, but one does not need to believe in God at all to value human life.

Non religious people live in a culture that has been created by people including religious people.

In other cultures and times in the past, for example, all human life was not valued and slavery was considered a normal part of life.

We don't really understand what culture is and think that the values are fundamental constant variables baked into biology.

> In other cultures and times in the past, for example, all human life was not valued and slavery was considered a normal part of life.

That's funny, because in a large amount the justification for slavery was religious.

The perks of religion are great if you're on the right side. The downside is that you might also find yourself on the side of the "other", and then any concerns you might have stop mattering, and how much that might suck for you doesn't matter because deontology doesn't concern itself with consequences.

What's wrong with slavery? We're no further away from outright slavery than we were in the 1800's.

The idea of mechanical equality, where all are masters, is absurdism.

> What's wrong with slavery?

Gee, I wonder. Maybe read a history book?

> The idea of mechanical equality, where all are masters, is absurdism.

Because you put it in an absurd way. Dispense with the idea of "masters" and what you have is peers, which makes perfect sense.

Modern culture is more the product of secularism than religion. We understand a great deal about what culture is. We have entire fields of scientific and academic study devoted to it, and centuries of research on it. And believing that cultural values are baked into biology is often the basis for racist ideology.

Regardless, the claim that only religious people value human life and everyone else is an amoral sociopath is as pernicious as it is false.

Like a famous tweet expressed, if one needs the threat of eternal damnation to do good in life, they're not really good persons.

Thats my observation. If someone needs that threat, they are likely not fun to be around.

I have agnostic/atheist friends who are “better Christians” than many of the professed Christians I grew up with in Central Texas, and the country I live in, Germany, is currently more of a “Christian” country than my home region, despite (or because of?) a much lower level of personal faith, if you use “what did Jesus tell us to do” as your main metric (feeding, clothing, housing poor), but less-religious Finland is even more Christian by that measure.

And I say that as someone who still considers herself to be a Christian.

The Western world is a lot less authoritarian than it was 60 years ago for people like me - women, that is. In the early 60s, I could not get a bank account, a job or a driver’s license without my husband’s permission in Bavaria.

And that was nothing to very Catholic Francoist Spain, where I couldn’t leave the country or study at university without my father’s (if unmarried) or husband’s permission.

Did you go to a catholic school? I did. It took a while to get the cold heartedness of these people out of my system again.

Besides, since you are talking about valuing life, whenever I think about the catholic church, their inability to deal with their own cases of child molestation comes to mind first. So swinging the moral sword from the position of a church which still molests children without consequendces is probably a bit, hm, brave to say the least.

I don't see the difference tbh: tyrannical Christianity and tyrannical ideological governments are on opposite sides of the same coin. It is a time honored ploy to use one as the reason to favor the other.

What they share in common is that they both reject the value of a lived human life in favor of some totalizing ideology like a "god", church or the "state". Both can be credited with millions of lives lost. Lets not forget centuries of religious wars, or what role Christianity played in Western colonization. Both excuse those deaths because of proposed ideas like "god's will" or "the after-life", or the "good of the many" etc.

So if theocracy is so much better, do you have an explanation for Iran?

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