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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

I think this is just due to the slow death of organized religion. There was no way for a temple builder to survive in their primary business. Otherwise, they had an extraordinary run. Wish governments supported such companies as cultural legacies.

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> Wish governments supported such companies as cultural legacies.

I feel like the core of the company – led as a family business, earning real money – would be lost if it was suddenly state-supported, with the inevitable meddling to go with it.

The support doesn't have to be a financial subsidy; it can be the creation of a regulatory framework that advantages companies of this type. That is surely unexceptional, after all it's done in many countries all the time. It just happens that it is large corporations that are state supported rather than those with multi-century continuity or support for the local community in mind.

Thankfully religions have never meddled in affairs of business, state, war, or culture.

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Temple construction happens also to be concern of the world’s 10th oldest:

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

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

(Of course, since wiki page hasn’t been updated for the first, it might also have quietly passed into the ether)

It looks like it is still a going concern - the company website and phone line both seem to be active.

https://nakamurasyaji.co.jp/

A recent SMBC* explores "what if religion was freemium?", but the existence of temples and sacrifices suggest that, whatever model deities may have had in mind, their worshippers have always been eager to sign up for a premium plan.

* https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-3

I love SMBC so much that i once suggested a joke idea to Weinersmith. Sad day for me and my ideas lol. In particular, to discover that my heroes Rao and Weinersmith selfidentify as hypernormies T_T

[Cue yada yada the batman snowclone “live long enough”, eg you either die a batman or live long enough to become Batman)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(military)]

[another source of hypernormie pro weirdos, from my personal anecdata, are psychiatrists, im guessing the sibboleth is the high neuroticism to __ ratio, which comes off as wisdom (after discounting for age).. weird pronormies would then be econs profs? This is prob why both trigger the So[Ha]Ri(veign/vian) Taleb lol]

Also should have replied to alephnerd in a more timely fashion

Finally someone who pronounces sibboleth properly!

At one point I ran across a US book which noted that children of psychiatrists tend to wind up in treatment themselves, with the exception having been just after WWII (when the army's need for psychiatrists meant they retrained many people who had studied as regular GPs), and concluded that it may be a field many people pursue due to the attraction of self-diagnosis.

Sorry to disappoint if you didnt already guess i picked that up from you. However, its probably not a spelling i would practise elsewhere — too memorable.

Yes, I also appreciated the busniess manager mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442464 .

Had the Athenians been speaking to the Melians on the subject of signal/call-sign analysis, would they have said "the boring are anonymous in their masses for they can, while the novel leak identity as they must"?

(Novelty not referring to semantic goodness; I'm afraid just with the purely syntactic category of "number* of distinct code-points employed" my 'hand' would be extremal, both here and in Persia)

* I think I owe the notion to you that as long as one has been given summation, recovering multilinearity from linear elements is easy?

This doesn't really say anything about religions. Constructions company can build a lot of thing. Temples are just happen to be good business at that time.

But temples are almost uniquely good for construction companies.

- the more ornate, the better

- unlike palaces, every town needs at least one, and if you're polytheistic, so much the better

- extremely price-insensitive clients who are content to wait generations

- you can probably easily bulldoze both structures and local opinions that get in the way of construction because you're building for a cause everyone's supposed to worship

There aren’t any examples of state run businesses this old, right? It seems like at 1,500 years governments aren’t robust enough to survive. So any business run by a government would not survive the political upheavals.

The Church of Sinai has operated Saint Catherine's Monastery for nearly 1500 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery

St Catherine's Monastery is not a business

I mean, if you want to argue it's a Non Profit, not a business, go ahead, but I'm not particularly interested in fitting modern tax code and business rules to an entity that has existed for 1500 years.

The organization has existed and has had a need to find funding for it's activities. Since the question was about 'state' run entities, the goal of "making a profit" seemed not particular salient.

Honestly, I thought the more contentious part of this claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state.

> I thought the more contentious part of this claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state

That is not as contentious, because it's basically autocephalous/self governing.

It's always been a couple dozen loners in the Sinai peninsula maintaining self sufficiency, which is why I don't find it a good example - as there are plenty of similarly old and continuous organizations, but never truly scaled.

Oh well, guess there's nothing you can learn from it then

But they would; temples aren't destroyed unless there's a religious revolution, if the religion stops they become heritage sites and the work remains. Like modern day churches and cathedrals being repurposed as upmarket housing.

Aren’t a bunch of Japanese temples already heritage sites?

The big problem with these temples is not religion it’s deforestation. The spine is made of old growth timber. So some of these temples survived over a thousand years until the central pillars were deemed unsound and needed to be replaced. Problem is that the new pillars are estimated to need replacement again in 400 years. They are made of less sturdy stuff.

My impression is that Japan's temples are regularly destroyed. They're giant wooden structures with zero fire suppression and basically tinder boxes just waiting for a spark. Lo and behold, the Great ____ Earthquake/Fire or war occurs every few hundred years and there she goes.

In fact, many Japanese temples are designed to be torn down and rebuilt on a regular basis.

As they say: fires and fights are the flowers of Edo.

If you look up the history of the temples mentioned in the article, they were more often destroyed by non-religious conflicts, fires, and earthquakes.

Yes. I was surprised to see the castle of Hiroshima was still there. It was obviously rebuilt.

Also AFAIK most of these constructions are made of wood, which also mean they need to be rebuilt over time. I think I also remember it is even part of the Buddhist tradition (at least for temples), a way to emphasis the impermanence of things.

See for instance this long but fascinating video on one of the most famous temple of Kyoto: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAeN7TdGq4o

Found another reference, but for a shrine: [2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-shri...

Ise Jingu in Japan is perhaps the marquee exception, ritually torn down and rebuilt every 20 years in a tradition at least 1300 years old. I think it stands to reason that if ritual reconstruction and maintenance of temple facilities is part of the religious tradition, then temple builders will see regular work.

We shouldn't assume that all of the world's faiths follow the tradition of building temples as permanent monuments of stone and gold.

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