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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Are you implying that secularism is the cause of counterfeit goods on Amazon? Or am I reading you wrong?

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Secularism, changes in 'christianity' in the US. I'm not some christian nationalist but I do believe changes in values allowed Amazon to do this. Maybe I'm wrong and people will end up going against this in the long term. The 'christian' view of this behaviour didn't come from a vacuum. My biggest worry is the passivity/docile nature of people nowadays can't bring such change.

Looking at it through a religious lens is pretty narrow-minded. Secular people have values too. You're limiting your ability to understand the world around you.

I would reckon looking at these kinds of things through religious lenses is actually VERY useful.

I don't follow sportsball, but there are masses of population and massive institutions that are built upon for and on sportsball.

So, seeing large changes or shifts within sportsball can be useful in gleaning some sort of trend.

While, I don't fully follow the gp comment, I can see the other side of yours.

It's more like following astrology - entirely irrelevant to reality.

Your comment is entirely irrelevant to most of the human beings on this planet.

And yet, you took the time to type it out. And will even spend some time defending it, proposing it.

Narrow worldviews have utility to one, but don't encompass "reality" as such.

Some secular people have values, I don't think religious people are saints. Secular people however don't have a framework to 'force' others with supposed values to adhere to them. I don't believe it's narrow minded to believes changes in religion might have an effect on things, the way people follow their religion is influenced by external factors, don't see why it wouldn't be the other way around as well. Atheists are quite new we'll see what happens.

> Atheists are quite new

What ever you're smoking, I'd like to try. A break from reality sounds nice right now.

Gallup polling says 1% of people in the US didn't believe in god in 1967, 17% in 2022. Of those 17% i'd imagine many believed at some point (or went to church/temple/...), these people don't really behave like a 'pure' atheist would. They're very much still influenced by the religious ideas they grew up in. So yes it's a rather new thing if you're thinking about society.

I think your problem is you don't seem to be aware of history before 1967 or society outside of the US. Your local community college might offer some courses in history and sociology.

You are deeply mistaken as to roots of this culture difference. There many highly religious cultures which absolutely lack the "social agreement" framework. The real reason why "social agreement" countries exist is feudalism. Feudal structure of power was the second on this planet (after ancient Greece, but that culture had been exterminated) to allow bidirectional agreements between kings and wealthy nobles. The only countries which managed to preserve this tradition unbroken were European ones, NA colonized by the Europeans and Japan which had societal structure close enough to adopt this culture without big changes and who later transferred them to its own colonies in Korea and Taiwan. And that about all countries valuing "social agreement". This is not because of religion or lack of it, it because of the accident - not being conquered by a despotic empire in the middle ages.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (John Adams)

I agree with some of their sentiment but disagree that it is secularism specifically.

If anything, my observation has been that social media provides better avenues for exploitation by bad actors and, for lack of a better term, people unwilling to do 'self work'.

It used to be a lot harder to 'grift'; historically, a community would eventually suss out bad actors which leads to shunning/etc.

But, when your 'community' is an entire country or a large area of the planet, the signal/noise ratio changes along with the behavior of the bad actors.

As an example not directly related to Amazon, I've worked with more than one person who would be a decent programmer if they worked on their job skills as much as they worked on their job hopping skills; online job posting (at least for a while) made it way easier for someone to just hop from job to job collecting a paycheck before the 'well now they should be onboarded and productive' red line is crossed and they are found out.

I've seen it with more than one person that is happy to screw over multiple 'friends' because they just use the internet to find the right groups to make new friends [0].

I've seen it with acquaintances where they just keep burning through 'matches' on dating sites without any introspection as to their own toxic behavior[1].

And sure, in all these cases people bad actors can still get 'outed'. However the bad actors are also happy to be dishonest in their own messaging, which again messes with the SNR. They'll just try to drag you through the mud and drain your endurance fighting their lies if you try to speak up, and unless you've really got time to burn... everyone stays quiet.

And, well, society is worse as a result.

[0] - They'll even pick up new interests in the process, once they've sufficiently burned themselves in a given community.

[1] - My favorite example was two narcissists that -both- were looking to replace the other before they broke up with each other...

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