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Comment by LouisSayers | Hacker News Reader

My mum some years back got involved in a church (as a non religious person).

She somehow ended up giving talks at church events and got invited to speak out of town (she would talk about subjects such as helping refugees etc).

Eventually though she felt like she was being excluded in subtle ways and being asked to give too much of her time.

I also went to a couplebbible reading events some years back (free food lol) as my gf used to be religious and wanted me to go along.

Everyone was nice, food was good, but I couldn't get over how everyone in the group would listen to a story (which would literally make zero sense) and swallow it down as if it was a bed time story.

Religion is weird.

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> Religion is weird.

I think it's fair to say that there are people who:

{believe | disbelieve} x {true things | false things} x {for good reasons | for bad reasons}.

Deciding what's true can be a challenge.

> Deciding what's true can be a challenge.

It's not too hard when you hear ridiculous stories and treat them as if they were to happen today.

The one I remember from the church event was about a big guy that couldn't be subdued and then ended up breaking through chains.

So many questions from a single statement. Everyone else literally sat there and didn't blink an eye.

> It's not too hard when you hear ridiculous stories and treat them as if they were to happen today.

Maybe it hinges on which parts of the stories you imagining happening today.

E.g., if Jesus rose from the dead next week, I'd find it pretty thought-provoking. If he were merely crucified but stayed dead, I'd cross Christianity of my list of plausible world views.

I.e., a lot really depends on whether or not those miraculous events actually happened.

> if Jesus rose from the dead next week, I'd find it pretty thought-provoking. If he were merely crucified but stayed dead, I'd cross Christianity of my list of plausible world views.

In today’s environment, how would you evaluate the truth value of a claim like that? It seems like the only way to 100% convinced of the truth would be as a first-hand witness, unless there was some kind of detailed and airtight evaluation.

Maybe the foundation document for the next world religion will be a 100-page paper that definitely establishes causality.

Yeah, good point. We're definitely in an age of super-powered disinformation.

As a believer - thanks for the insight! Normative acceptance of bizarre claims must feel odd. I guess there is a passing familiarity with some of these stories in some of these communities that means they are either unexceptional or at least, not the “main game” as supernatural beliefs go — but that must have felt strange!

Most faith communities I’ve been part of have had some form of space for questions and encouraged discussion about stories they have heard. I’ve found probably 1 in 10 people would start a discussion about this and maybe half would engage with it, suggesting community is a big part of the draw but also that for a significant minority, community is centred on some of these “big if they were to happen today” events.

I do think wrestling with our reality to understand the nature of the world is a pretty powerful force for creating meaningful relationships! But this depth can also be uncomfortable or abstract at times.

Religion is a special kind of thing that's quite different. It isn't like a philosophy or believing vaccines don't work. It's a structure of your reality.

Once you learn that parables may exist and are never literal, but can still impart wisdom, it makes more sense.

Religion wouldn't be a problem if people understood the difference between descriptive and prescriptive text. Churches don't teach this.

The fundamentalists don't teach it, many do.

I was involved in multiple churches for over 20 years, none of them taught it, none were fundamentalists.

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