I am not in any way affiliated with the author, it's just one of the few books with real content that I've read in a long time.
Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse, and then turning around and claiming its to "save them", so the abuse isnt reallllly abuse.
Most of these camps cited are christian. And the people running them? Dogmatic christian fundamentalists. And these are the same types that run "pray the gay away" camps too.
And my inflammatory, albeit true comment also goes right back to the heart of the article:
"Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls."
Extremist Roman Catholic "values", demonization and imprisonment of 'unruly women', anti-LGBTQ. Same damned thing, again and again.
When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
> religion itself is the problem
Religious flamewar isn't allowed here, so please don't post like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Edit:
It also looks like your account has been using HN primarily for ideological/political/religious battle. That's not allowed here (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), and we ban accounts that do it.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
I read the article, and discussing the article. And as hackers, im curious as how to fix the problems.
It's not hard to understand where the line is if you've reviewed https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and genuinely want to use HN as intended.
And even if it did, they didn't say it here. This is not the place for religious ideology. I passionately hate my neighbours who listen to music really loudly in their garden all the time, but I don't call for their eradication on public fora unless there's a really, really specific relevance (like here, for example) and I also don't campaign against them on GitHub, my local supermarket, local government meetings, or other places where people are trying to do other things.
There are places for me to rant about my neighbours. There are entire discussions about noisy neighbours, my vicinity, local customs and manners etc. If I wanted to rant about them, those would be the place to do it. But I don't, because I wouldn't actually gain anything from it. I'm not going to single handedly change the law on nuisance, and all a hate campaign could achieve would be, well, more hate. I want solutions, or quiet, and I won't achieve either of those by telling random strangers how terrible my neighbours are.
I'm sure you can think of the easiest solution to the hypothetical neighbour problem. It's not ideological and doesn't involve changing the hearts and minds of hundreds of people, none of whom are currently concerned about my neighbours.
It might look like I'm trivialising your point, but I promise, I'm not. Noisy neighbours, or an itchy foot, or even a literal broken fingernail, are a more immediate problem than 'we must rid the world of Christians', unless they are currently holding you hostage.
And the reason I'm bothering to write such a long-ass reply at all is because there is currently far too much intolerance and ethno-religious hatred being propogated and spread around the world. We know where this leads. It always leads the same way, there is no possibility of a happy ending. We have tried 'that religion is the problem, let's persecute them' repeatedly and we end up in the sort of fascist dystopia we were reminded of literal moments ago in the article.
It's not ok to do it to Jews or Muslims, which means it's not ok to do it to Christians. And it's not ok to let people spread those messages in bad faith, which means I've got to call out those spreading the same message in presumed good faith.
My neighbours are just annoying me, I can deal with that. Christians are just kinda weird but whatever, we've all got our foibles. Racists, dogmatics and puritans can believe whatever they want, I just won't listen to it.
And I invite you to step away from the brewing culture war too. It's more fun discussing tech and stuff.
Because it's not.
I've been interrogating this sort of question for most of my life. I am a queer agnostic who grew up in a religious part of the South and saw shades of this kind of abuse firsthand, mostly around queerness.
At first, I did blame religion, but with the benefit of hindsight, I realized something. In the context of queerness, almost nobody I ran into growing up hated queer people because they heard their preacher say so and thought it must be true. They hated them because they were massively insecure. They were terrified of being labeled gay. They were terrified of guys hitting on them. They were terrified of hitting on a woman who turned out to have been born as a man.
Religion isn't the problem. Instead, religion gives these sorts of insecure people a trump card that requires very little interrogation. However, if these folks weren't Christian or weren't even religious, I have no doubt that the underlying insecurities would remain, and simply manifest in a different way.
Once I realized this, it was actually a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. In particular, I was no longer confused as to why my friend groups that were majority Christian continued to be nice to me and treated me with respect, despite me being a atheist queer at the time. It opened the door to connecting with them on a deeper level of understanding, as well as leading to me dabbling with my own forms of non-Christian spirituality.
So yeah, religion isn't the problem. It's merely a mechanism that allows shitty people to be shitty.
Or, put another way, if a person's religion conflicts with their values (including prejudices), which one is more likely to give first?
This is literally an example of individuals choosing their religion based on their own values. Folks on one side of the schism might criticize folks on the other side of the schism for not being true Christians, but it's ultimately a dispute over "Thou shalt not lie with another man," versus "Love thy neighbor."
This is the original programming. You might visualize it complete with a bug tracker, version control, patches, feature updates and programming languages. We can only see it when absurd enough but it gets much more absurd than this and the software may run for thousands of years.
I remember reading and seeing videos about training child soldiers. The weak or injured ones were killed as hunting targets and the more they killed the higher their rank. In the final ceremony that completes the training they had to shoot their parents. It was a great honor and they truly enjoyed it.
We have to remember death is nowhere near the worse punishment. It might be the nicest thing on the list.
Perhaps it is even worse if people don't notice they are in a similar program because it has been refined to such extend.
Imagine if you left the house without clothing. Like a default human, like any other species, or if you like, how god put you on this earth.
Or say, who decided you must use language? Not just that, you must say the correct things at the correct time.
If you get the dress code wrong, fail to speak or construct the wrong sentences well conditioned people from all over the world will come to beat you back in line.
We force the little ones to sit on designed to be uncomfortable chairs the whole day, the entire week. They must sit, not move, shut up and listen.
Someone once "rescued" a small child living on a garbage heap. Gave him foster parents and put him in school. The kid escaped, he went back to playing in the garbage. When asked why he said he wanted to play with his friends. With a look on his face as if he was talking to a crazy person. It was obvious he didn't want to sit, shut up and not move.... forever?
Seems to me we have many bug reports to fill and that patches are welcome. Our cult is far from perfect.