Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

This is a fascinating paper with a lot of interesting context, the mid-1900s were a different time for medical ethics.

I grew up in the Adventist church and it's been wild seeing it drift so far from its original distinguishing stances.

When I was a kid, I primarily went to Adventist schools. However, one year after my family moved there wasn't an Adventist school available. I went to a local evangelical school instead. It was a real eye-opener.

The evangelical school had a program of outright child brain-washing about abortion that I'd never heard as an Adventist. As a fifth grader I was getting daily updates about the Supreme Court nomination battle over (disgaced Nixon lackey) Robert Bork, because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement. There was daily news about abortion protests they were running. When I went home and asked my parents about it, they told me as Adventists we had the bible's stance on abortion: the bible says nothing about abortion. Adventists hospitals even allowed abortions to be performed on prem since they had no doctrinal problem with it.

Fast forward to now, a lot of Adventist members are loudly anti-choice, anti-vaccine (the church leadership had to post a very delicately worded statement about vaccines because they operate respectable medical schools, and had to please both the many facebook-addled cranks in their pews as well as the sane professionals in their medical school staff), generally indistinguishable from generic right-wing evangelicals. The Adventist core membership of today I have no doubt would've been mostly pro-slavery and definitely would have no qualms about shooting people in war.

The paper talks about the church's effort to go from 'sect' (firm moral stances putting them at odds with the majority) to 'denomination' (compromising their morals to fit in), and the church of today I'd say has run as far away as they could from being a sect.

I recall an organization that was proud of Desmond Doss (one of only 3 conscientious objectors to get the medal of honor) and pre-political Ben Carson (I never was able to square the person I saw campaigning with the extremely well-regarded neurosurgeon). I wonder what happened.

> because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement.

Bork was a staunch capitalist and wanted to destroy anti monopoly laws. His position on abortion was that it should be a state legislature issue.

You spot the problem but I believe you misattribute the source in a way that actually only benefits Bork and those who would champion him.

Boy am I glad I went to a state school without this crap.

The ideological games being pushed on children in state schools is different, but it's not entirely absent.

That being said, I'll take historical revisionism over the history of the empire over, uh, the evangelical option.

> The ideological games being pushed on children in state schools is different, but it's not entirely absent.

People say this all the time and it's facile. Yes ideology is everywhere and you cannot be completely free from it. But the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.

Nah, you can't really. Before you question the textbook you have to wonder if it is worth it. Since the successfully indoctrinated believers won't let you get away with it it is not worth it. So much so that they never get to hear other versions of anything.

What textbook taught in the United States has anything with an ideological stance that isn't at the very least revisionist towards making the US look better?

Most history taught in the states already waters down the historical facts to make us look better.

Depends on how you characterize the War of Northern Aggression I suppose

Also depends on how you characterize the genocide of the natives.

> Nah, you can't really. Before you question the textbook you have to wonder if it is worth it.

This is some weird goalpost moving - I didn't say it's easy I said it's possible. Contrast with the fact that you fundamentally cannot question religious ideology - it's literally against the rules.

>Contrast with the fact that you fundamentally cannot question religious ideology

Martin Luther was pretty successful in his questioning.

But I guess he did get excommunicated for it, didn't he?

Well, I guess that could easily be described as "not easy".

You're again hitting the nail exactly on the head as to the difference: the Lutheran reformation gave way to Lutheranism, it did not actually reform the Catholic Church (cf the counter reformation). So again you see an instance where questioning foundational ideology from within is not possible.

I have a feeling that it's a lot more difficult to purchase indulgences nowadays than it was during Luther's time.

But luckily, I'm not Catholic, so I have no idea.

Arguably the entire hack created by protestantism was the infinite free indulgences "salvation by faith alone" glitch.

Okay, so you are admitting that Martin Luther had a measurable impact on the practices of the church, right?

You seem to be saying that religions are open to having their dogmas questioned and then growing from that, something that they are famously not open to (kind of the whole idea of a dogma).

Obviously 'Not all religions,' etc. However the Catholic church is notoriously dogmatic. Usually the more you press a dogmatic group to change, the more they dig their heels in about it. It's only when the organization is wounded by a schism or massive loss of membership do they suddenly start getting word from heaven that God has changed his mind.

I asked you a very simple yes or no question, actually.

Your lack of answer to that question speaks a lot.

> But I guess he did get excommunicated for it, didn't he?

This is wildly underselling the consequences of challenging the church: two centuries of unrest and war that would eventually result in millions dead, amounting to a significant fraction of Europe's population.

Right, so contesting the church isn't impossible, but it isn't easy.

If you are part of a community, be it a religion or [say] a sciencentific discipline, you have to do the ritual dance around the campfire. Not because it makes sense but because that is the way we do things around here. That one community will kill you and the other won't talk to you anymore doesn't matter for the result.

There are lots of different bible worshippers but there is only one academia. There might be small differences of opinion they all preach the same "proverbial" creation myth.

> the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.

This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the most repressive regimes in human history were or are secular. Maybe the "properly functioning" part is doing the heavy lifting, but if so, it makes the statement almost meaningless.

You cannot question modern gender ideology in any public school around me.

All children are indoctrinated with something. There is a competition for who gets to do it.

Main ideological information I learned in state schools: “there are these different ideologies” provided without judgement. There was even a devil’s advocate argument for the south and slavery.

In religious schools, even the best of them, I learned nothing about any ideology but the “true” one, everything else was people being deluded by the devil.

>Main ideological information I learned in state schools: “there are these different ideologies” provided without judgement. There was even a devil’s advocate argument for the south and slavery.

Did you hear a "devil's advocate" argument for the burning of Tulsa, Oklahoma by white supremacists?

Both-Sides-Ism isn't a real way to account for ideological coercion in education. It's just painting a picture that includes your enemies. What your enemies look like in the picture is LADEN with ideology.

Our state school played the pledge of allegiance every morning, had police with drug dogs doing sweep to great praise of the administration, and military recruiters begging us to come kill enemies of the state. The sanctioning of these activities for all to witness was part of the indoctrination -- praise for god was just replaced for worship of the government. Meanwhile basic civil stuff like how to invoke your rights a traffic stop was never even mentioned.

This is why even as a hardline atheist I have sent at times my kid to private religious education, and I hope I can continue to afford it. Neither system is great but worshipping someone who exists only as an ideal entity in your mind seems marginally better than worshipping the world's largest incarceration machine and military aggressor.

> Our state school played the pledge of allegiance every morning

I had the opposite experience, I never did the pledge in public school (or in the Adventist schools), at least not regularly enough for me to recall, but in the evangelical school it was the entire school doing it together in a big room every damn morning, first thing. I'd argue religious schools are more likely to drill it into you than public schools on account of the "under God" part that they've retconned in.

I also never saw military recruiters in public school, neither in military-dense Hawaii nor in deep red central Oregon.

If you didn't notice the military recruiters in your US public school, I have to imagine you weren't paying attention. They posted up during lunch with tables and stuff where I was. Maybe they were just capitalizing on the 2008 recession.

There was never an assembly dedicated to them; it was always just a kiosk-type thing students could walk up to.

Ok, but please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're invariably less interesting (because more repetitive, and more indignant) than the specific point they tangent off from.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder, what with science informing us that human life begins at conception and our consciences, and God's moral law recorded in good book that murder i wrong.

I notice you use the word choice and classify the pro-life position s "anti-choice" which makes it seem like a bad thing. However the "choice we are talking about here is directly and intentionlly causing death to an innocent human being. I think it is very important to understnd that.

To borrow an atheist trope, you and I agree that murder is evil and immoral in most cases. I just think it's wrong in one more case, when the victims are yet unborn too (I reckon murder is intrinsically evil and immoral)

> Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder

But murdering people in wars is quite ok, isn't it ? /s

> what with science informing us that human life begins at conception

No. Science can't say when life begins any more then it can say how much sand is needed to make a heap. Because it's a question of how we choose to define things, not a question of objective fact.

(And fyi... since what makes humans special is our rather absurd level of ability to think and learn things, human life begins with the ability to form long-term memories. Which is well past the end of infancy. This may seen counterintuitive, but there's a sound scientific basis for it.)

> Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder

Which christians are you referring to? Plenty of christians disagree with you and will tell you it's a complicated issue with no black and white answer. There isn't even a completely agreed-upon definition of what a christian is[1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6gzr6p/americans...

>Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder

So you are against the 2nd amendment?

> the mid-1900s were a different time for medical ethics.

But sadly, only nazis and japanese are bad, others (CIA) are good.

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