Kakure Kirishitan | Hacker News Reader

Kakure Kirishitan

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32 pointsbenbreen5 comments

One day at church, I learned about the 26 Martyrs of Japan, crucified on a hill in Nagasaki in 1597. I said "Hmm, that city is notable for another reason today" and I thought about the frequent Jesuit contact there, the building of a famous basilica in the 1850s, and thinking it was probably not a coincidence or accident that this was the city in the list of secondary targets for the Bockscar mission. Of course, its major military operations and manufacturing surely factored into the choice as well.

I don't understand the obsession Cathalocism have with converting Asian/African cultures to Christianity and then make them donation slaves of Roman Catholic Church. Can't they just mind their own business rather than funding ridiculous missions.

I'm not saying that it's right, but I can explain why they feel this.

If you strongly and sincerely believe that you have some key knowledge on skin disease, say you were the first person to discover a working sunblock to prevent cancer, would you not go and try to get people to use it? If you realised the value of seatbelts before anyone else, would you not start a world-wide campaign to improve road safety?

Christians are like this. They don't view missionary work as "trying to embiggen the Church", they view it as going out to save people lives, in this realm and the next, since they sincerely believe the way to do this is with a relationship with God.

Those are useful analogies; I guess you might also say "if you found out that handwashing helped prevent disease, wouldn't you want to tell other people?".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

The other people might not believe you, and you might end up being wrong about some or all aspects of what you thought you had discovered, but it makes sense that you would feel an urgency in letting people know about it.

Of course the difference is that both of your analogies have and would involve some degree of peer review, product testing, regulatory approval, clinical and safety trials, engineering specifications, and the full weight of scientific rigour so that people can feel reasonably confident that what is being promoted to them is safe and beneficial and evidence-based.

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