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Comment by tliltocatl | Hacker News Reader

Every single ethics movement in history ended up spawning utter and complete nope (as well as a lot of useful concepts). See christianity, the enlightment liberalism, marxism and so on. It is almost as if the idea of universal, objective and cognizable good is inherently evil.

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this is the pattern:

- humans find useful concept X - they describe it with label Y - it's genuinely useful, it spreads - It gets too big, Y is misunderstood and corrupted - New group of humans rediscovers concept X, gives it label Z

This is the story of humanity. The good news is we're kind of (mostly) stumbling through a upwards spiral. Current religion would be unrecognizable to the people in ancient times. It was never meant to be something frozen in stone. Folklore and things changing as they're retold was a feature, not a bug.

There's a great write up on this [1], but TL;DR, religion is cultural technology. It succeeded in doing exactly what it tried to do at the time (get people to stop killing each other in tiny tribes and allow mass decentralized human coordination to build civilization & empires where humans could be safe from the elements of nature)

[1] https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/a-beginners-guide-...

Great analogy with the upwards spiral

I think that utopias implemented in reality became dystopias because, unlike bold ideas, reality is pretty nuanced.

I think it's an apples and oranges comparison to lump in Christianity (a religion that outright predicts that people will abuse it and protects itself against that) with liberalism/marxism (a philosophy that has no such protection and can be mangled into whatever you want). If anything, liberalism/marxism are more like secularized offspring of Christianity, given that they would probably never developed if it wasn't for their founding figures living in a western moral context completely drenched in Christian ideas.

I think I would’ve used Objectivism as a contrasting example. It’s designed around the idea that whatever a “strong” person does to fulfill their goals is inherently good. Objectivists wouldn’t phrase it that way, surely, but that seems the inevitable end result.

I'm not comparing them. What I'm saying is despite all the differences, the end result (dogmatic and self-righteous ideology with zero ability to align beliefs with reality) is eerily similar.

Curious how Christianity protects itself from abuse? From my perspective, Christianity is used to justify incredibly un-Christian activities pretty much constantly.

1. Christianity (like other religions) has built-in protections against false teaching within their own theology, which isn't really the same for secular philosophical frameworks.

2. There's a level of outlier visibility going on with a lot of people who abuse Christianity. The Christian who sincerely follows Jesus and walks in obedience don't seek out visibility or to exalt themselves. Even ones that evangelize do it on a local scale most often. Meanwhile people who abuse Christianity (Prosperity gospel, Christian nationalists, etc.) try to seek out large followings to bolster their power or wealth, making them seem like the "face" of Christianity whe

> has built-in protections against false teaching within their own theology

You are just saying the Bible has a bunch of text that lays out what being Christian is and isn't?

Sort of.

To elaborate, the idea is that a Christian (someone who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior) will show an outward transformation into someone who is Christ-like and obedient to God. When this doesn't happen at all, and that they remain completely un-Christian, you know it isn't genuine (See Matthew 7:15-20). The idea of how a Christian is shown by their outward renewal also touched on in Romans 12:9-21, Galatians 5:16-24, etc. It's not a perfect process, and it's the renewal is not a pre-requisite to salvation but rather an end result of salvation (Ephesians 2:8-12).

Therefore, Christians have a framework that can be used to identify and rebuke people who distort the teachings of Christianity into something that is in rebellion to God. This doesn't really exist with secular philosophy, which lays out the "ideal" but has no way to prevent itself from being warped.

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