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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm not religious. But 20% of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. Is it really so crazy for one venture capitalist to believe that the Antichrist is real?

Part of the freedom of religion is accepting that other Americans really do have religious beliefs that differ from your own sometimes, and that's okay. It doesn't mean you need to support the policies that he supports. But we do need to share this country peacefully with people who don't have the same religious beliefs that we do.

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It's kind of hilarious when he gets asked about the whole "mark of the beast" thing and the fact that his entire fortune is based on implementing massive surveillance, and has absolutely no rebuttal. A man with this much power is incapable of anticipating a simple question like that.

I mean he named it Palantir.

It’s just shy of calling it the SuckingVoidOfEvil Inc.

sauce?

It’s the end paragraph of the interview quoted in the article.

> Part of the freedom of religion is accepting that other Americans really do have religious beliefs that differ from your own sometimes, and that's okay

That's incorrect. The government can't make laws respecting religion, but people can think that some beliefs are not ok, shun and mock people for believing crazy shit, and oppose their attempts to impose their nutty beliefs on others.

> Part of the freedom of religion is accepting that other Americans really do have religious beliefs that differ from your own sometimes, and that's okay.

Absolutely.

However, another part of freedom of religion is that people shouldn't impose their religious beliefs on others, which is precisely what the politically energetic Christians are trying to do. Thiel is doing it as well, but in a slightly more indirect way.

Thiel is bankrolling Yarvin’s ideological push among others.

A man who’s written essays claiming that “the obvious statistical differences in the average talents of human races” justified eliminating the system of representative government.

Does that sound like someone who would share his country peacefully with you?

You’re asking sheep to be tolerant of the approaching wolf.

"But we do need to share this country peacefully with people who don't have the same religious beliefs that we do."

That is something the hardcore Bible believers don't want to do. They want to "take back the country"

It's alright for people to believe crazy things. But it's much less alright for extremely powerful people to believe crazy things.

If Peter Thiel was a guy who lived three doors down and occasionally told me about the latest wacko stuff he saw online, that would be one thing. But he's not some random nut, he's trying to remake the country, and succeeding to an alarming degree.

What does it mean to share the country peacefully with someone who does not want to share the country peacefully in return?

This is why I'm opposed to billionaires. Inequality, shared prosperity, all those are nice things, but the most important thing is that money is power and having people with extremely large amounts of money means having people with extremely large amounts of power, people who were never elected to any office.

Broadly speaking I agree with you.

That said, when it comes to peacefully sharing the country with people with different beliefs I'd probably be more worried about the President-bankrolling military-industrial complex billionaire looking for a literal antichrist to be the Girardian scapegoat to renew the social order than the tech journalist wondering if that's a bit weird...

When the person adopts religious terminology to attain additional leverage in their particular form of murder capitalism, yes, you should think "this is so crazy."

Well the Anti-Christ as a character and literal demon, mirror image of Jesus, etc is a misinterpretation of the anti-Christ attitudes/behaviour the bible is discussing. Which alludes that the end times are when people are no longer pro-Christ. So yes it is so crazy.

Why is a misinterpretation of the Bible any crazier than a non-misinterpretation?

Because it demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the source material. If you’re trying to reach Christians who believe in anti-Christ behavior, then you probably lose them when focusing on the personified cartoon version of the Anti-Christ.

Also considering there are 7+ definitions of the word crazy, which one are you protesting Thiel represents?

Because the other people care about what you will do, not what you believe. Most recently the rapture folks stopped paying their bills, sold their belongings, and generally opted out of society in a mass hysteria event - and that's a small ripple in the overall system from mostly people not in power of the military industrial complex.

Oh, some ideas can be crazier than others—I just didn’t get why a misinterpretation is necessarily evidence that a belief based on the Bible is crazier than one that’s not a misinterpretation. I can easily imagine misreadings or misinterpretations being a lot less crazy than a more-correct interpretation of something like that.

>Is it really so crazy for one venture capitalist to believe that the Antichrist is real?

I think it's pretty crazy to take a man at face value who claims to believe in the real presence of the anti-Christ and literalist reading of scripture but is also married to another man and has boyfriends who mysteriously fall out of windows.

Religious crazies exist everywhere, but only in America would someone continue to listen to a person with all those things going on at the same time and think they aren't bullshitting. If I genuinely believed in eternal hell I probably wouldn't live like Peter Thiel and in all likelihood neither would he. "Venture capitalist afraid of the antichrist" is in itself pretty funny given what scripture has to say on God and Mammon

Those same religious nutjobs want to erase the identity of other equally nutty groups like trans people etc - basically everyone in America is crazy in some form or another, we should judge people not on their particular flavor of it but on how tolerant they are of the other crazies, which doesnt seem to be the case for Thiel.

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