Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty new!

Pretty much everything except farming and church is new.

Farming has been around for over five times longer than the church.

Uhh...I don't have sources but I'd imagine humans prayed to _something_ before they went mammoth hunting or picking berries long before farming.

Organized religion, writing, and agriculture were a self-supporting set. The people today that didn't develop that set don't pray.

Agriculture == 4chan/internet

Religon == memes

Writing == telling memes to others

The Church requires that you've decided this needs to be organized, all you need to start praying before you go hunt for food is superstition.

The Princes Alice experiments show why superstition might be valuable (and so get preserved in a culture) if you don't have much technology to provide oversight. Children were told to perform a task and that an (invisible) Princess, Alice is watching to check they don't cheat while the adults are away. Superstitious children didn't cheat because they believed in Alice watching them. The non-superstitious children cheated, after first verifying that in fact Alice does not seem to exist (e.g. passing their hand through space supposedly occupied by the invisible princess)

"The church" is a metonym for Christianity.

In this case I think it refers to organized religion in general, which is older, roughly dating to the beginning of agriculture and city formation.

That interpretation only works if you desperately want the comment containing the phrase "the church" to be wrong. If you insist on this unusual interpretation, then yes, farming isn't at least five times older than the church. But if you go with the usual interpretation of "the church" as a metonym for Christianity, as was very clearly intended by the implications of the statement, it is correct.

Why not go talk to some Muslims about the Islamic church? Or some Hindus about the church of Shiva? I'm sure you'll find the discussion edifying!

Oops, yeah, you are correct about the relative ages, I wrote a bit too fast there.

There was an HN discussion in 2020 about the oldest business or commercial establishment in various countries and/or continents. Many of those are involved with, variously, food service, alcohol, teaching, construction, or banking. In part because those are activities which have been with humans (or at least civilised, that is, inhabiting-cities humans) since the beginning, and have not been supplanted by some newer activity.

<https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in-almost...>

HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22426289>

You do know what "the oldest profession in the world" refers to, though?

The symbol has existed for some good 2/3 of the time international standards existed as a concept.

As the articles says on the end, we don't know how old non-standardized versions of it are.

If you think about it, though, the symbol has been around longer than most people today have been alive, and for a substantial amount of the time people have been driving. Compared to other symbols, it may be fairly "new" (for example, the Christian cross or Islamic crescent), but in the realm of widely standardized symbols, it's pretty old.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com