Comment by nzmsv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nzmsv | Hacker News Reader

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> Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested.

Good luck testing one of the currently accepted "ethical system"-type religious beliefs.

The only kind of outcome of such a test that is "allowed" is full agreement with the ethical system. A lot of these systems are just as self-reinforcing and barely based in reality as Christian apologetics of Aquinas or Chesterton. The people holding these beliefs know this on some subconscious level and will viciously attack anyone who disagrees. It is only over time with many such "attacks" that a mass belief will die and be replaced by another one.

In fact, every one of these "ethical" religious beliefs came about the same way: it defeated another commonly agreed upon dogma.

This mechanism by the way is what runs civilization. One meme fighting another.

In my experience having been near many church splits I still feel this simply isn’t true. Churches operate like git forks and merges of ideas.

This is actually a really good analogy that applies to some other argument, but not the one I was trying to make :)

Git forks and merges still share a common ancestral history and are basically an evolution of the same idea. This is true of a real Git repo (it's one software project after all) and the kind of churches you are likely talking about (it's all just a theist religion after all). Christianity is a branch in the same repo as the ancient Roman gods. The Saturnalia feature is even there still :)

I was thinking more about ideas like: - can people be property? - is it a good thing to kill "infidels"? - can women vote? - can a 10 year old get married?

These are "religious" questions because there is no objective truth to the answer either way. It's all based on beliefs and consensus.

Before you downvote me into oblivion: the answers to all of these have historically been different than they are today. People in both times (past and present) would attack you if you disagreed with the status quo (there was even a certain civil war fought about the people=property one). I am not actually disagreeing with the status quo on any of the above.

However, it would be naive to think that we do not presently collectively believe some things that would be appalling to a future human. A good heuristic for these is: would I get attacked or mocked for questioning this?

See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

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