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Comment by atestu | Hacker News Reader

A big difference I think is that religious truths by and large don't really change. For Christians, Jesus is Lord and always will be. It's been 2,000 years.

In those last 2,000 years virtually all "scientific truths" have changed. Scientists used to believe the Earth was flat, that it was the center of the universe. Doctors prescribed cocaine. And you can dispute those examples maybe but i hope you see what i mean.

It's not completely unreasonable to see how that might lead some people to not believe current scientific consensuses.

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Doctors still proscribe opioids and cocaine, the difference is mostly things like how shelf stable the compounds are not what they do or how addictive they are. Hellenistic astronomers got a roughly accurate calculation for the size of the earth in 3rd century BC, it’s spherical nature was deduced much earlier. Flat earth didn’t become popular due to scientific investigation but a complete lack of it, just as people on the internet still promote it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

Christianity has multiple times completely changed how they viewed Jesus let alone less foundational aspects of the faith. Read up on the First Council of Nicaea and similar such events, or ask the Vatican how old the earth is.

> let alone less foundational aspects of the faith.

God himself seems to have changed around the time of Jesus, with a really elaborate justification to make sense of it, based on very little that's actually in the Bible:

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

Cocaine is not an opioid. That's morphine, heroin, codeine, and fentanyl and others.

Yes, swapped ‘like’ for ‘and’ as I realized it wasn’t clear what I meant.

I meant Numbrino (Cocaine hydrochloride) which was approved in 2020 is used in place of Cocaine the same way Hydromorphone etc is used in pace of Morphine. Cocaine is a useful topical numbing agent, but tweaking it slightly is beneficial.

> A big difference I think is that religious truths by and large don't really change.

Current religious beliefs of religious groups change all the time; its a common conceit that the underlying truth is eternal, and sone groups also work hard to rationalize the changes as not really being changes if you squint just right because they have beliefs about the immutability of doctrine that are confounded by them changing their doctrines, but...

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