It's sad you have to qualify it—religion is part of all our past, whatever our opinions of it now, and it will only increase our wisdom to understand our ancestors.
Oh, don't worry, Silicon Valley still has some forms of religion. Like the idea of Singularity, with Kurzweil as a prophet. You also have Saint-like figures such as Steve Jobs, whose achievements are God-like for all his believers, no matter how he mistreated employees, competitors and humans in general.
It's a strange thing, actually, to see people reject older nonsensical beliefs while creating their owns devoid of all rationality.
I suspect most modern Catholics would agree with you. I don't think its vet productive going round blaming each other for what our predecessors did hundreds of years ago.
Most modern Catholics are ignorant to all the suffering their religion has caused. As are most people of all religions, otherwise they would abandon it.
Your point rests on the premise that institutions carry some kind of permanent guilt with them that delegitimises what they stand for. There's a number of issues with that, not least of which is the fact that institutions are not neat abstractions that behave uniformly without contradiction or change.
This creates two issues for an institution as old and decentralised as the Catholic Church. Firstly, the church is not a corporation where processes and orders dictate the behaviour of employees and people are fired for insubordination. In practice it is highly decentralised, and the idea that it is centrally run by a single old man at the end of his life in Rome without access to a computer is farcical.
Secondly, the church is the oldest institution in the world. Even the United States, a 'modern' institution by historical standards, has to contend with the slaughter of native peoples, the enslavement of thousands of innocent human beings, countless wars (many of which have little to no serious justification), the destruction of the environment etc etc etc. And the US is by far the most just superpower by historical standards. In spite of all those things most people will agree that it has been an unprecedented force for human progress in its (relatively) short history.
Your comment was probably just a throwaway insult that didn't warrant such a detailed response but comments like it really irk me for some reason.
is pretty clear when you realize that only 4.3%[0] of their profit is for charities that they _only stand for money_, they use the rest for privately own businesses (incl. hospitals and schools, but completely private and run like businesses)
They also (currently, not in the past) been linked with money-laundering [1]; by the way your premise of the organization being decentralized and consequently non-responsible for the doings of their members is false; specially when they have special access to far more financial secrecy than the average bank or person.
Plus they are still a great spot for pedophiles[2] to do their things, even with the current pope they do not accept their bad handling of the acussations [3]
ivanca - let those of you without sin cast the first stone. I'm sure if you name a group you're a member of we can find something less than savory about it.
You should consider getting in touch with SpaceX and sign up for a one-person, one-way trip to Mars. Disassociation with all potential wrong-doers guaranteed.
My experience suggests the contrary (full disclosure, I'm Catholic, although I don't go to church regularly). Your argument is against religious INSTITUTIONS, which are, like all system we create, flawed. Religion itself is separate from what people do in the name of religion, just like the things the US has done in the "war on terror" is separate from the idea that terrorism is bad. Yes there have been bad decisions, but over thousands of years, for many of which the governments of the time did horrible things, it is not that surprising.
The reason many Catholics started coming to services again under the new Pope is not that they suddenly believed in God again, but that they feel the church has shifted to a stance they can support.(although it still has a ways to go IMO)
If an organization claims its legitimacy based on an unbroken line of continuity, and also claims certain fundamental values, then violations of those values at some point in the past should be seen as a break in continuity and a loss of the organization's legitimacy.
that would then mean that no government in the world is legitimate. Maybe we should invalidate all laws/regs passed during Obama's presidency, since he has fundamentally reneged on the promises he made in his campaign?
Ridiculous. I could list dozens of important Catholic scientists over the centuries but I'm sure I'd be wasting my breath. Can you even name a persecuted scientist besides Gallileo? (The new secular darling Bruno was not a scientist)
Bruno was also executed for, among other things, denying the divinity of Jesus and the virginity of Mary, not any of his pseudo-science. (This a bad blemish on the current run of Cosmos; he should be remembered as a whacko philosopher rather than one who contributed to our current scientific corpus.)
How so? What if the church prevented some research while allowing other? At the end of the day, there might have been some research but the church still would have prevented progress.
> The new secular darling Bruno was not a scientist
My original comment was more about how you excused yourself out of providing proof, rather than stating that there were no such people. For anyone curious about the contents of your link, here's a TL;DR of the people listed:
Rhazes - Muslims beat him over the head with his own book. Crazy stuff.
Sevetus - Executed for theological reasons. Ironically beaten to his scientific discovery by a Muslim, Ibn-al-Nafis who figured it out some 300 years earlier. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulmonary_circulation
Galileo - Well known, put under house arrest.
Domagk - Nazis kept him from getting his Nobel prize.
Einstein - Nazis got mad at him after he left the country.
It's not as simple as that. Religion was part and parcel of those cultures just as it is in many cultures today. It's not just about the one or two overt cases that we know about hundreds of years later, but the fact that for every one of those people there were likely hundreds or thousands more whose voices were never heard, not because they were forgotten by history, but simply because they chose to remain silent.
Maybe in the western / Catholic world; while they were busy burning witches, they kept going on mathematics and mechanics and whatnot in the islamic world.
Blaming religion for the flaws of humanity got really old about 5 years ago. It reached its peak at Reddit but it's no longer popular. Turns out people realized that blaming an object (gun), a religion (islam, christianity), a movement (athiesm, feminism), or a philosophy (conservative, liberal) is dismissive of humanity's flaws.
When you get rid of religion, extremists do not go away, people find something else to be extreme about.
We are not blaming the flaws of humanity, just its own flaws, but that is enough to get downvoted. So maybe maybe the vote ring is incidental or not, is still one.
There's a small cluster of people who seem to think that, every time religion is mentioned, it's important to jump in and make negative comments no matter what the original topic is (and, on some sites, a small cluster of people who seem to think it's a good time to try to convert people.) The thing is, those comments (on both sides) are generally boring and unenlightening, two things we don't like to see on Hacker News.
The idea that a group is digitizing a whole bunch of ancient documents is interesting and has potentially deep intellectual consequences for people interested in researching the topics covered in the ancient documents as well as for those interested in other ancient documents that might be digitized using the knowledge gained from this project.
Kvetching about how harmful religion X is or was in the past is boring. Nobody in this thread has said anything genuinely new or insightful; you can hear these exact sentiments just by making a religious comment in a semi-public way (with a large group of friends, on FaceBook, etc.) On other sites they might provoke a flamewar, but here on HN we prefer comments to be thought-provoking. We downvote flamebait. Consider it a signal from the HN community: make more thoughtful and worthwhile contributions.
I think you got downvoted because you implied the community is protecting something you don't agree with, therefore there must be something wrong with the community. (I didn't think it deserved downvotes at all, it was just a question)
It was silly for OP to pick on the Catholic church when all throughout history, from World War 1 and 2, to the African Genocides, and the inter European wars, and the Mongolian & Muslim invasions, and the European colonizations, and the Japanese massacres, and the Chinese wars and communist caused famines.... Hundreds of millions have died needlessly. We should look past it and be glad we as humans have evolved past those points. Human beings take advantage of large groups, infiltrate them and use them as their personal armies. Sometimes to do good, sometimes to do bad.
The OP got downvoted into unreadable "grey hell" for a broad comment that brought nothing thought provoking.
