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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

We've asked you many times before to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. This was a doozy—snarkily veering straight into religious Nazi flamewar, which is close to pure internet hell.

Please don't do this on HN. It's nasty, repetitive, and off topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why aren't you saying something like this to the comment I responded to? They posted inflammatory nonsense, and I responded with a factual refutation.

Two reasons: (1) The GP comment seemed less flamebaity to me because it acknowledged its bias. Yours, by contrast, went straight into battle mode. (2) Your account has a history of posting flamewar comments here and us asking you to stop (including recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580711).

I've posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017883 now though.

The word "factual" is basically a no-op in these things since mostly what flamewar commenters do is bash the opposing side with their carefully selected "facts". No doubt some are genuine facts, some not, and some are facts-with-spin—but if the spirit of an argument is to smite enemies, then it's against the site guidelines regardless of how facty it is. (As I've pointed out before, there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves—humans do that.)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

What we want here is curious conversation, where commenters seek to learn from each other, not tell each other how wrong and bad they are. Curiosity is an open state, where flamewar and battle are (very) closed ones.

The pope may not have been, but several german priests such as Herman Muckermann certainly gave german Catholics a way to support eugenics and race theories.

Some priests did, but overall the Catholic Church was very against eugenics.[1] On the other hand eugenics was quite popular among US intellectuals.[2] Forced sterilization of the mentally disabled is still legal in the US.[3] Herman Muckermann was at one point in favor of forced sterilization, but turned against it when the pope denounced it. Herman Muckermann was also against Nazism and euthanasia.

>In 1933, he left his post at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, as he opposed Nazi biological racism and the belief that the Nordic race was superior (Dietrich, 1992).[4]

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/103/2/498/1750...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_law_in_the_Unite...

[4] https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/tree/5233675d5c2ec500000...

I don't think "not as bad as Hitler" is a bar one should be aiming for. I was specifically referring to the Catholic Church's penchant for treating unmarried mothers and poor children like trash.

Like in Ireland: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/9-000-children-died-irish...

And in Britain and Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/nov/03/catholic-chu...

And in Canada: https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220728-canada-says-po...

I was too tired and angry to search further.

Please don't perpetuate religious flamewars, or any flamewars, on HN. They make us all tired and angry, and are not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hmm, well let's ask a poor child born to an unmarried mother about his experience.

I was born in a Catholic hospital, where abortion was out of the question. My father refused to marry my mother, so she felt she didn't have a "choice", and wept many tears as she "voluntarily" signed the papers to relinquish custody to the State, placing me for adoption.

I was adopted by Catholic parents who ensured I received the Sacraments regularly, as well as religious instruction and we attended Mass always. They sent me to Catholic schools run by religious orders whose mission and charism involves caring for the poor, needy, and marginalized.

These religious orders (including Irish sisters) upheld my dignity, respected me and my classmates, and they demonstrated in tangible ways how much God loves us. They did all of this while giving me a top-notch education, often at discounted tuition or on scholarship as necessary to keep me in school.

When I was homeless, unemployed and penniless, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul met my material needs and helped me survive long lonely nights with a few meals and kind words.

I dunno, if anyone ever made me feel like trash, it wasn't the Catholic Church. Quite the opposite.

Username checks out.

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