Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

not sure why you highlighted religions. Something being a "religion" isn't a get out of bigotry free card.

I didn't make any comment suggesting a narrow minded devotion to any particular viewpoint. What I called out was the claim that making the "Slightest conservative view" -> "You're a Nazi". I live in the Bay Area, I work in tech, and there are plenty of conservatives at my office who somehow manage to talk about their beliefs without being called nazis. The classic case of people accusing some "conservative" of being a nazi is when a racist, homophobe, transphobe, etc makes a racist, homophobic, or transphobic comment and gets called out for it.

Re [2] I appreciate that you went trawling through my comments and then linked to me ... questioning whether libertarian members of congress were really uninterested in governmental overreach given the strong push for christian laws? Seriously, you went to the effort to trawl, why that particular comment?

What are your thoughts on Sam Harris, and in particular his positions on Islam [1]? Are you aligning with alt-right ideology?

How is Christianity, or any religion for that matter, germane to the linked discussion?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/28/alt-ri...

    But it may be said that very little proof is required in a charge of this nature, since it takes very little argument to expose a person's guilt; for it is said in the Canon de Haereticis, lib. II, that a man makes himself a heretic if in the least of his opinions he wanders from the teaching [...]

    - Malleus Maleficarum

I'm unsure what my thoughts on his positions on Islam are - it's sounds like he feels he went into islamophobia territory, in which case I'm going to take the headline as implying he got out of whatever extremist alcove he got trapped in and that he thinks that that is a good outcome.

> How is Christianity, or any religion for that matter, germane to the linked discussion?

The comment you dug up was using the example of libertarian ideologues protecting people from encroachment by the government. Libertarian politicians in the US are a conservative bloc and fairly consistently enforcing their conservative beliefs on others, so I was calling out the inaccuracy of "Outside of a few ideological libertarians".

Personally, I agree with you: religion should not be a part of people's day-to-day lives outside of interpersonal relationships. No one's religious belief should have any impact on the rights or ability of anyone else. The problem is when people try to claim that legally recognizing the existence of different cultural groups is somehow forcing them to change their religious beliefs, and more importantly failure to acknowledge those other groups is not a direct attack on rights of the victims.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com