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Comment by insomagent | Hacker News Reader

Actually, Gavin, I think you're an excellent writer, actually, and I rather enjoyed your articles. I hope you'll keep posting.

It's just that... the US government, OSB and FBI agents, whoever is handling your application... They don't really have a sense of nuance when doing background investigations, nor should they be expected to have the resources to do so.

I don't mean to shit on your dream of flying commercially, in fact I hope you achieve it. I really just pointed out what I saw, something that might be a "code smell" type red flag that could lead to bias in the FAA's selection process, consciously or not.

I hope that my initial comment wasn't too crass, but sometimes people need to hear what they need to hear.

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I see. I apologize. I didn't understand at first. woodruffw helped me understand that that was your purpose.

I added a note to that post that says this:

> Edit 2023-05-11: After confusion on Hacker News, I want to clarify the previous statement.

> I believe that the United States must die, but I believe that God alone must do it by natural disaster, as with what happened with Sodom and Gomorrha. It is not for any individual or group to do, especially not the Latter-day Saints.

> > We believe that all men are bound to sustain and uphold the respective governments in which they reside, while protected in their inherent and inalienable rights by the laws of such governments; and that sedition and rebellion are unbecoming every citizen thus protected, and should be punished accordingly;

> > – D&C 134:5 [1]

I hope that fixes the problem.

I apologize. I acted the way I did because I have people grab random posts and say that they can ignore me because I'm religious and then rail on me, forcing me to defend my faith. This felt a bit like that, but I was obviously wrong about that feeling.

[1]: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-test...

Still sounds ridiculous to me

So? I know my beliefs are not fashionable. They wouldn't be worth anything if I discarded them just because of random Internet comments.

Your beliefs are probably equally resting on thin air, they are just shared by everyone around you so this doesn’t occur to you.

I think this problem is fairly interesting. Basically religious language has become extremely non-operationalized. “God will destroy X” has always been a metaphor for X not working long term and collapsing on its own. “God” is just a way to frame parts of reality that we don’t understand, it is a manner of speaking that has fallen out of mainstream usage. It’s weird how we have lost sight of this for the most part. Why is everyone so literal?

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