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Comment by charonn0 | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

>“I called on the people. I asked, ‘Who here is a Catholic? Come, we will pray the rosary.'"

"And a lot of people came and prayed with me. We prayed the whole rosary.” Angela’s suffering echoed around them through their invocation, the ritual comforts of one belief system colliding with the atrocities of another.< (emphases mine)

This speaks, I think, to your underlying point. Superstition played a role both in perpetrating this crime as well as in squandering an opportunity to put an end to it. Instead of "a lot" of people helping, "a lot" of people prayed.

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Did you not read the article? The nurse struggled to stop the violence, and was threatened with a similar fate before the crowd of natives complacently watching the torture forced her away. It was then when she began to pray.

I can't believe you would cherry pick that quote and spin it in a negative context, just to prove an opinion about religion.

HN astounds me sometimes.

Point being, Catholic missionaries who succeed in replacing one superstition with another may seem to fix the immediate problem, but the rest of us are facepalming hard enough to leave marks.

I'm not sure what your trying to say, but with the people of countries/areas like PNG, the only real option is to replace their violent, torturous and inhumane superstition with one that is, at it's core, focussed on something more positive. These people are very spiritual and evangelising atheism simply would not work in the short or medium term.

> "seem to fix the immediate problem"

But the thing is, it is a fix to the immediate problem. Those people that were praying with her were praying. Not torturing and physically abusing. Even if you think it will just lead to issues down the road, we need to stop this torture and abuse in whatever way possible. In my opinion, the best way to do that without restructuring the government and pouring in money to cut down on corruption seems to be evangelising.

But, what I'm more interested in knowing is why you're face-palming hard enough to leave marks. Yes, humans will do things that are horrible no matter what the religion, but what's so terrible about teaching them to follow doctrines that forbid what they're doing rather than ones that compound the problem?

Catholicism has sin, shame, and guilt at its core. It's not 'focussed on something more positive' at all. Not to mention that Catholicism's upper echelons still believe in possession and exorcism - something which isn't going to particularly stop people who currently believe in 'black magic' - they'll just change the underlying story and still 'exorcise demons', but in their own way. Magic is still a significant tenet of Catholicism - transubstatiation is the very core of their doctrines. "Don't murder people because your black magic is not real, but this wafer and wine are literally flesh and blood"?

Buddhism would be a better religion for this, if you were to choose one. Buddhism's basic goal is to get people to be happy with their lot in life, instead of Catholicism's angle that we're all sinners and only a magic man can cure you.

It's not about "evangelizing atheism", it's about evangelizing knowledge. If someone in their community died, perform an autopsy to determine the actual cause of death and banish the specters of ignorance surrounding it. Create schools, encourage education. Praying is an empty gesture.

Secular thinking can also become a folly, just like any religious thinking. For example, believing that anything and everything can be measured in numbers, or refusing to acknowledge any phenomenon which cannot be explained scientifically.

A rational mentality does lead to a more civilized society, but sometimes it can be just as cruel.

Rejection of catholicism doesn't mean you think everything can be reduced to mere numbers. Nor does secular thinking mean that you consider everything can be measured by numbers. I would say that most secular people don't believe this, given that most secular people are simply areligious rather than STEM fans.

Secular thinking can also become a folly

No, it can't. If it's a "folly," then either it was not really secular, or it was not really thinking.

Secular thought can still be wrong or incomplete, but as far as the folly of the process itself goes, it is the only process that has advanced Mankind over the course of thousands of years. Anyone who criticizes it must be prepared to provide a better alternative. So far that hasn't happened.

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