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Comment by beders | Hacker News Reader

More of a misdirection, really.

I cry over the thousands of years of wasted time where humanity has tried to figure out the demands of an entity that simply doesn't exist.

Instead, we got dragged into wars, instigated by rulers who manipulated followers of so-called 'holy books' into killing their brethren. We denied education to large parts of the population. We suppressed anything resembling science&progress because it might offend an imaginary being.

It's a frigging disaster.

Imagine a world where we would have followed science and reason early. Where we didn't destroy libraries, but gradually improved their wisdom. All those years down the drain. Sigh.

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> Imagine a world where we would have followed science and reason early.

Having seen the history of tribalism fused with areligious and antireligious ideologies and empowered by applied science in the modern era, I can't see it as particularly better than the results of tribalism fused with religious ideology but without systematic science earlier in history.

Science is a powerful multiplier, but inherently value-free; the values to which it is applied necessarily come from elsewhere

There has only ever been one source for values: people.

Couldn't agree more.

You can use science to verify ethical statements.

That said: The definition of 'tribe' already implies shared values (more often than not centered around a primitive version of the golden rule)

> You can use science to verify ethical statements

No, you can't. (And not just in the sense that science falsifies rather than verifies.)

Ethical/moral statements always have a value component that is empirically unfalsifiable. They sometimes also have a falsifiable factual premise that, along with a set of value premises, supports a conclusion. Science can falsify the fact component, and sufficient failute to falsify can justify belief in the false component, but cannot falsify or (by failing to falsify) justify the value component, and therefore cannot justify the statement as a whole.

Not only wasted time, but also wasted intellectual energy. Many theologians and apologetics are often smart people that could use their intellect to more useful (i.e. right direction) domains.

Moral questions are religious questions. Can suffering be scientifically observed and quantified? The "right direction" is a fairly large, old, and subtle debate without an easy or obvious answer. While I'm totally on board with the idea that furthering scientific knowledge is a net positive, we're definitely suffering these days from an overabundance of powerful technology and a deficit of "right direction" for that technology. Thinking deeply about what exactly the right direction is in no way strikes me as wasted intellectual effort.

Can suffering be observed and quantified using religion? I would still use science for that.

Moral questions are moral questions, and they are hard. Religion has just convinced you, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, that you should equate religion with morality, when only one look at their 'holy' places and institutions should suffice for any one to conclude they are not in the least related.

Organized religion would like you to think that 'Moral questions are religious questions.'

That's just flat our wrong. Morality is fluid and has been re-defined by people living in tribes or larger societies. One can argue fairly well that we would already live in a more just world if we would have skipped that non-sense of believing in a higher being.

For example, we now agree slavery is kinda bad. Yet, not too long ago the bible was used to justify slavery around the world. Who's to thank for this progress? Certainly not religion.

> For example, we now agree slavery is kinda bad. Yet, not too long ago the bible was used to justify slavery around the world. Who's to thank for this progress? Certainly not religion.

The Christian religion (including the Bible, but not always by the subset of Christianity which holds that the former is entirely contained in the latter) was likewise used to justify abolition, and this, like justification of slavery, goes back to the fairly early days of organized Christianity.

What does it say that it was actively used with authority (and horrifyingly is still being used) by both sides of the slavery debate? Shouldn't the literal word of the most moral being in the universe be clear regarding slavery, at the very least?

> What does it say that it was actively used with authority (and horrifyingly is still being used) by both sides of the slavery debate?

That Christianity isn't a unified hive mind?

> Shouldn't the literal word of the most moral being in the universe be clear regarding slavery, at the very least?

Arguably it should be, but then the idea that the Bible is the literal word of God is not, itself, a doctrine shared by the whole, or even majority, of the Christian community (it's a doctrine primarily of the evangelical and fundamentalist branches of Protestantism.)

> That Christianity isn't a unified hive mind?

If they claim to have direct communication with the creator of the universe, like all christian communities do, they should have at least a minimum standard of congruence. Or is he just having a laugh with some of them?

> If they claim to have direct communication with the creator of the universe, like all christian communities do, they should have at least a minimum standard of congruence.

Well (1) all Christian communities do not claim that all Christian communities have direct communication of that kind (in fact, Christian communities often claim that other such communities are deficient, and perhaps willfully so, in there regard), and (2) I don't even think all Christian communities claim that even they themwelves have communication of the kind that would support any conclusion much stronger than that that community’s authoritative teachings are free from error (certainly not that any subject of a specified degree of material impact should be addressed.)

They would love to claim a whole lot more, and in fact originally and for a long time they did. But I know that with so little to back them up, that is what they've been resorted to claim.

> Moral questions are religious questions.

Moral questions are (or at a minimum involve subordinate questions which are) outside the scope of empirical science; in this way they are similar to many religious questions (and the categories overlap), but they are not the same as, or a subset of, religious questions.

Moral questions are not outside the scope of empirical science. Religious moral questions are outside the scope of any meaningful questions. (see the various god-related commandments in the 10 commandments, none of those make sense to non-believers)

> Moral questions are not outside the scope of empirical science.

Yes, they are. Science can answer is, it can't answer ought.

(It can help reach practical conclusions from moral axioms applied to concrete facts, but that's not really answering moral questions: the choice of axioms is the thing that answers the moral questions, and science can't help you there.)

> Instead, we got dragged into wars, instigated by rulers who manipulated followers of so-called 'holy books' into killing their brethren. We denied education to large parts of the population. We suppressed anything resembling science&progress because it might offend an imaginary being.

Actually, the biggest and dirtiest wars of at least our recent history were actually driven by men who were atheists (or at least non-theists). Hitler, Pol-pot, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Lenin... all atheists with body counts in the tens (hundreds?) of millions.

Furthermore, Some of the biggest advances in the sciences (take for example the scientific method as described by Sir Francis Bacon assumed that the universe itself was ordered by God and therefore science was actually possible) and the institutions of higher learning were started as ways to train people for purposes of theology (thinking here of places like Oxford and Princeton).

Religion has actually been a huge driver in our ability to teach and understand the world.

No.

Hitler was a catholic, he killed atheists and despised the evolutionary theory. After all, Arian people were supposed to be god's chosens not those jews. He wrote this himself in Mein Kampf.

Stalin was a student at a seminary.

Every US president has been at last a theist. How many wars has the US been in? How many deaths?

Wars have many reasons, most of them non religious. Religion is just used as a excuse and it works every time.

> Hitler was a catholic ... Stalin was a student at a seminary

If you can prove to me that these men were actually acting in accordance with the stated doctrines of the institutions that they claimed, then your point might be valid. However, it isn't and it won't be because they were not.

Man corrupts religions to his advantage—that is not religion's fault. It is man's.

Ah, the No-True-Scotsman fallacy.

First you lie and claim Hitler was an atheist when in fact he was a catholic until the day he died, and then is somehow my fault? Isn't lying in the ten commandments?

I don't know if in his heart he was truly a devout servant of the lord or if he was just pretending, but most importantly, you don't either. All we can be sure is that he claimed to be one, and that the Catholic church embraced him, made treaties with his government, celebrated his birthday officially every year and never excomulgated him. That sounds like a better catholic than most, he made the church a lot of money and, they gladly took it.

Whatever he was, he was not an atheist. And he didn't claim to be one, in fact, he claimed the opposite.

It's a very narrow viewpoint you are having. Dragging out the few instances where churches allowed and protected some science. Completely disregarding the hundreds of years of oppression of intellectual progress.

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