Over the course of the 19-year program, more than 2,300 U.S. Army soldiers, many of whom were trained medics, contributed to the Whitecoat experiments by allowing themselves to be infected with numerous different kinds of bacteria that were considered likely choices for a biological attack. While some volunteered immediately after basic training, for conscientious objectors at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas (before they began their medic training), the near certainty of being assigned as a combat medic in Vietnam helped some medics choose instead to remain in the United States with the Whitecoat program. The goal of the program was to determine dose response for these agents.
"""
I attended an SDA high school and was a member of the church for a couple years in college (I dated an SDA woman). It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism. They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday. Conversely, this generally included a desire for religion not to get too involved in government, which I respected quite a lot.
I never really believed, and left the church after breaking up, but I really miss the sense of community. Every Saturday I'd go to a service with a boring sermon but some _fantastic_ singing (the entire congregation could, and did, sing, and those walls rang with "Down By The River To Pray" in 4 part harmony), then have a vegetarian (albeit cheesy) potluck after, and then just chill at the beach with friends. Society would do well to adopt the sabbath as a cultural practice. The minister where I was seemed pretty chill with marriage equality - I remember he gave a sermon about marriage while people protested California's prop 8 outside and he pointed out how badly LGBT couple wanted marriage at the same time others took it for granted.
I wonder if it's still like that.
dataviz1000 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> California Adventists have higher life expectancies at the age of 30 years than other white Californians by 7.28 years (95% confidence interval, 6.59-7.97 years) in men and by 4.42 years (95% confidence interval, 3.96-4.88 years) in women, giving them perhaps the highest life expectancy of any formally described population. [0]
SDA live a lot longer.
The SDA vegetarian diet was also the driving force behind the Kellogg's Cereal company [1]
Vegetarian diet, abstinence from alcohol and smoking, and maybe most of all pretty strong (albeit also quite insular) communities. They seemed to be pretty well-off too, for the most part.
MrMcCall [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I can only imagine how much better a person does in college when they're not drinking or smoking and perhaps even minimizing their promiscuity.
That's gotta improve their chances against over 90% of their peers, at least, I imagine.
"Youth is wasted on the young" is only true because our youth are not taught how to not conserve and utilize their energy.
TeMPOraL [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What I wasn't taught as a youth, is that 90% of the value of college is in friends and acquaintances you make while there. Guess what really helps with that: drinking, smoking, promiscuity. Conversely, do you know what actively hinders that? Yes - avoiding parties and socializing in general, because you don't want to engage in drinking, smoking and promiscuity.
Looking back, I really wish I wasn't so "conserving" about my "youth energy" back then.
MrMcCall [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If a person has a problem with your attending a party sober, then they're the one with the problem, my friend, and you're probably not going to be creating a healthy relationship as a result of that interaction, anyway.
The relationships I should have focused on in my college career were my professors, at least a couple of them; I literally had zero understanding of graduate school, even as I was in college. But if I wasn't partying every Fri and Sat night I would have been able to better take advantage of the incredible opportunity I had at the time. Unfortunately, I was ill-prepared to make the most of it, though I was lucky that my passion for programming drove me to become a skilled practitioner. It was crucial that I got a mainframe help desk job where I manned a phone that never rang, and I got to teach myself C and superscalar programming (vector-based on an IBM 3090) and early internet protocols and stuff, using brand-new RS/6000s and Sparcstations and the like. Writing an Asteroids clone for X-Windows (using XLib) and a couple of vi clones was pure fun but foundational in a way.
I say all this without regret, or blame for the people around me. I'm just a product of my society, and I find great wisdom in Tolkien's notion that Hobbits don't come of age until 33. Knowing that the frontal cortex doesn't mature until 25 should have been a guiding force for this 17yo idiot matriculating too early and with no guard rails. Especially with regards to binge drinking, but it is difficult to escape one's culture alone at such a young, inexperienced age. Luckily, I basically stopped drinking only a few years later, and having never drank daily, but I lived the life of a fool, sans mentor, for those college years.
My kids have the benefit of my experience, however, because I am very typically not American in many cultural ways, thank God. Life has been gracious to me to get to experience many different world cultures, not being so enamoured with my own, though I love many of my fellow Americans when they are kind and accepting of others, though they grow more rare by the day.
Peace be with you, friend. Thanks for helping me vent a bit this morning. I am at your service.
Brybry [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Anecdotally, I didn't smoke or drink and was celibate during college and I dropped out twice.
My sister drank a lot and was very promiscuous and went on to become a doctor.
I think doing well in college is probably more about factors like time management skills and social support network than about vices.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I never got into drinking and smoking, but I wish I'd been a little promiscuous in college. I'm pretty hung up on it
MrMcCall [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah, it's difficult to find the middle path between too much and too little. Those little mental gremlins always try to push us too far in the opposite direction. It's the nature of our internal enemy, the enemy of both our inner peace and happiness and our outer peace and happiness with other people.
Peace be with you, friend.
ToucanLoucan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism.
Creationism is a canned joke ideological point that American Christians of all types seemingly can't get enough of. It's hilariously bad "science" at the very best, and outright farce at the worst. But for some reason simply acknowledging evolution is, seemingly as of the last 20 years or so, utterly untenable, and so they perform.
> They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday.
I mean that just sounds like garden variety Christian persecution complex to me. I don't think a certain segment of the Christian population can properly reckon with reality if they don't feel they are being somehow oppressed despite running... basically everything.
CalRobert [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Well, they view Genesis as a literal account. I agree with you, though.
As far as the latter point - it was mostly that, at least where I was, a desire to keep government out of religion paired with a desire for religion not to be too involved in government. Among other things they knew that other denominations were more powerful than them and would have far more influence in government.
I'm not an SDA booster (I'm not a member and haven't attended any church for 20 years, and found the insularity of the community stifling) but I still think it's a really interesting denomination.
jncfhnb [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The origin the dispute is not so much arguing that Genesis must be literal but that acknowledging evolution diminishes the special uniqueness of the human soul
wizzwizz4 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
In what way does it? I thought all that was because of a distinction bestowed by God, not because of anything material.
mistrial9 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Creationism is a canned joke ideological point that American Christians of all types seemingly can't get enough of.
this is uninformed and prejudiced on its face. In Theology graduate class, the first week of lecture included the division between "literalist" Biblical traditions, and others. It is well known among anyone who has studied comparative religion in any way that Christians are not at all unified in the interpretation of Genesis, despite outward appearances.
sepositus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I don’t usually expect nuanced theological discussions here. It’s usually the equivalent of bumper sticker comments.
The “appetite” for Young Earth Creationism amongst my Christian group is very low if nonexistent. In fact we often spend more times groaning at the antics this crowd gets into.
VincentEvans [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What other antics and policies do “we” groan about and then nevertheless elect politicians to govern the rest of us? Policies attacking female reproductive freedom? Attacks on LGBT? Attacks on freedom of religion? Attacks on separation of church and state?
I feel like you are trivializing the dogged, uncompromising, and ceaseless war organized religion wages against intellectualism, progress, and tolerance.
genewitch [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I just realized "reproductive freedom" sounds like an emotive conjunction. It isn't about the freedom to reproduce, it's literally the freedom to not reproduce.
I have a very reasoned and nuanced view on this topic that I probably will never share online. I don't know why I didn't notice this weird phrasing before.
lynx97 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It struck me as an euphemism as well. But thats the whole abortion debate. After all, pushing the timeline up from conception to a convenient point where abortion "feels" like it isn't murder yet is a pretty deliberate move as well. All in the name of personal freedom. The freedom to not have to care.
MrMcCall [3 hidden]5 mins ago
As a Sufi, I agree with the overall truth of your analysis, but it is absolutely not true for we Sufis, who believe in love above all.
I will state it clearly that we believe in always loving our fellow human beings, regardless of their ethnicity, form of religion (including none at all), sexual preference, or gender identity. The only time we have a problem with someone is if they're abusing others, irrespective of reason; in that case, we must love the oppressed differently than we love the oppressors, and prevent the abuse.
I am a lifelong reader and appreciator of science, scientists, and engineers, and have some level of understanding of the evolution's beauty on this Earth over the past 4B years. That's how God manifested this wonderful creation, perhaps two trillion galaxies with maybe hundreds of billions of stars in each, and this lovely oasis, Earth, with so much water and life, over the last ~14Gy since the CMBR's Big Bang origin.
Remember, you can't blame science if a person says they're a scientist then claims that the Earth is flat. Most religious tradition is just as off-base. If it ain't about love, it's not from God, for God only wants us to be happy, no matter what the belligerent hypocrites, liars, and cruel oppressors of this world do in God's name. To love someone means to want them to be happy, on their terms, so long as they're not hurting others in the process (which wouldn't create happiness, only cruel pleasure).
God freely gave us our free will to do with as we please, for good or ill. But It also made this universe such that it keeps a karmic tab on all our actions towards others, and we will reap what we so, each of us, in calculus-like precision in this universe of integrated information systems.
Life is the realest, most deadly-serious game you can ever imagine. And your happiness is at stake, so choose well how you evolve your heart and treat your fellow human beings.
VincentEvans [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thank you for thoughtful post. I know near nothing about Sufi religion. Sounds enlightened and good for them/you! My words were very influenced by frustration rooted in my experiences in US, especially as of late.
MrMcCall [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm of the same feelings, my friend.
You can peruse my religious-oriented posts from today to get a pretty complete picture of our Sufi perspective.
To be Sufi is to be the small part of all forms of religion that truly try to manifest compassion, kindness, generosity, and all the virtues, to ALL our fellow human beings, by self-evolving ourselves from vice-ridden to virtue-manifesting. The spiritual process is a purifying of ourselves, not of others. They must do it themself, and only our lovingkindness can help them.
Peace be with you. Thank you for caring about true compassion.
sepositus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I suppose this will surprise you, but I'm strictly against religion and government mixing. When Jesus said, "My Kingdom is not of this world," I take that very seriously. It's why I've never associated with the Republican party, which has increasingly high-jacked the evangelical vote.
I'm not sure why you're accusing me of trivializing anything. I'm simply commenting on the religious discussions on HN and how I usually find them sorely lacking. But I wouldn't expect any different, considering most "hackers" tend to be secular in my experience, which is fine.
autoexec [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Out of curiosity, would you support things like removing "in God we trust" from currency and abandoning the motto, removing the words "under God" from the pledge of allegiance, banning religious requirements to hold public office, removing tax exemptions for churches, the removal of "blue laws" that ban or restrict certain things (like sales of cars or alcohol) on Sundays, and the banning of the 10 commandments or nativity scenes from public schools, court houses, and other government buildings?
I've known a few Christians to support some of those things, but I haven't met one so far who would have religion removed across the board.
jack_pp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I feel like you are trivializing the dogged, uncompromising and ceaseless war liberals wage against common sense and decency.
I'm sorry but when the other side of the war wants me to pay fines, go to jail or be expelled because I subjectively hurt someones feelings I gotta go with the church whatever their faults
ToucanLoucan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Can you name an example of this actually happening, or is this just yet another echo of the utter nothing-burger that was Peterson's complaints back when he transitioned from being an educator to a professional grievance monger that, and I can't stress this enough, has never, once, ever, one time, produced an actual complaint that has resulted in actual penalties?
jack_pp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I don't need to name examples. There was a proposal for a draconian law, it got brought up to light, it was fought and it didn't pass. All that because of people like Peterson.
This was in 2016. In 2023 I went to a climbing gym in Bucharest, got friendly with a foreign (EU) guy that was visiting, asked him what was he doing in Bucharest. Apparently he was representing a leftist party that sounded very good on the surface policy wise and goal wise but then I asked him..
"What do you think about punishing people through the law for misgendering someone?". He started avoiding answering directly, said we shouldn't be assholes etc but it was clear by simply refusing to give a direct answer what his position was.
mola [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Maybe his position was that he didn't think it is a good law? And at the same time he thinks purposely migendering someone is being an asshole?
My friend, this sounds like an example of you projecting your fears of "liberal suppression"
BobbyTables2 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Christians do seem to revel in how the early believers were persecuted for their faith…
Of course, they too shared that experience with others in the times of the Charlemagne and that of the Inquisition.
aredox [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's funny; unethical human experimentation during that period is often excused as "it was common practice at the time" (to "forget" to consult patients before enrolling them into experiments), and here we have people of the same period making sure to follow proper ethical procedures...
(The same way that even at the time slavery was common - be it XIXth century or Antique Greece - there were already quite a lot of people revulsed by it...)
sofixa [3 hidden]5 mins ago
For what it's worth, enrolling patients without consent in unnecessary procedures still happens today. There's even a whole Wiki article about one category of those (which was banned in France in 2016, and US in 2024, but probably remains legal and pervasive in a lot of other countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelvic_examinations_under_anes...
tdeck [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Unbelievable that this was and is a thing and that I've never heard of it before.
thimkerbell [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Isn't experimentation.
timewizard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm sure the patients are comforted by the difference.
rendaw [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think GP's point is that calling it experimentation euphemizes it.
foxyv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Just a quick reminder, slavery is still common in the United States.
kjs3 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Just a quick reminder, 1/3 of 1% is not 'common'. Unless you (predictably) redefine math and English so you get to be right.
3.3 people per thousand is pretty common for something that isn't meant to exist at all.
I could meet 1000 people and, due to the ostensibly advanced & cultured world we live in, I would be confident none of them should be slaves.
Being so inflexible with the definition is not the same as being honest. Astrophysicists and statisticians often use the word 'common' to refer to vanishingly small numbers, and us uneducated laypeople are usually just fine with that.
MomsAVoxell [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The Prison-slavery industrial complex is very, very real.
foxyv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Only 7 of 50 states ban forced labor. Seems pretty common to me.
"there were already quite a lot of people revulsed by it...)" does not imply all of "Antique Greece" felt this way. Only that some people did.
senderista [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Who?
MisterTea [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Ask the GP. I was just clarifying the misunderstanding. However, an extremely cursory search turns up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece#View... where it is mentioned that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcidamas is one such person. Though it seems that slavery in ancient Greece was normalized and deeply intertwined within their society. I am sure there were critics but like everything unpopular, may have been discarded or suppressed.
mr_toad [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think the question of whether any ancient society was (as a whole) opposed to slavery is a valid one.
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is a fascinating paper with a lot of interesting context, the mid-1900s were a different time for medical ethics.
I grew up in the Adventist church and it's been wild seeing it drift so far from its original distinguishing stances.
When I was a kid, I primarily went to Adventist schools. However, one year after my family moved there wasn't an Adventist school available. I went to a local evangelical school instead. It was a real eye-opener.
The evangelical school had a program of outright child brain-washing about abortion that I'd never heard as an Adventist. As a fifth grader I was getting daily updates about the Supreme Court nomination battle over (disgaced Nixon lackey) Robert Bork, because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement. There was daily news about abortion protests they were running. When I went home and asked my parents about it, they told me as Adventists we had the bible's stance on abortion: the bible says nothing about abortion. Adventists hospitals even allowed abortions to be performed on prem since they had no doctrinal problem with it.
Fast forward to now, a lot of Adventist members are loudly anti-choice, anti-vaccine (the church leadership had to post a very delicately worded statement about vaccines because they operate respectable medical schools, and had to please both the many facebook-addled cranks in their pews as well as the sane professionals in their medical school staff), generally indistinguishable from generic right-wing evangelicals. The Adventist core membership of today I have no doubt would've been mostly pro-slavery and definitely would have no qualms about shooting people in war.
The paper talks about the church's effort to go from 'sect' (firm moral stances putting them at odds with the majority) to 'denomination' (compromising their morals to fit in), and the church of today I'd say has run as far away as they could from being a sect.
CalRobert [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I recall an organization that was proud of Desmond Doss (one of only 3 conscientious objectors to get the medal of honor) and pre-political Ben Carson (I never was able to square the person I saw campaigning with the extremely well-regarded neurosurgeon). I wonder what happened.
timewizard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement.
Bork was a staunch capitalist and wanted to destroy anti monopoly laws. His position on abortion was that it should be a state legislature issue.
You spot the problem but I believe you misattribute the source in a way that actually only benefits Bork and those who would champion him.
paxcoder [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder, what with science informing us that human life begins at conception and our consciences, and God's moral law recorded in good book that murder i wrong.
I notice you use the word choice and classify the pro-life position s "anti-choice" which makes it seem like a bad thing. However the "choice we are talking about here is directly and intentionlly causing death to an innocent human being. I think it is very important to understnd that.
To borrow an atheist trope, you and I agree that murder is evil and immoral in most cases. I just think it's wrong in one more case, when the victims are yet unborn too (I reckon murder is intrinsically evil and immoral)
tbrownaw [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> what with science informing us that human life begins at conception
No. Science can't say when life begins any more then it can say how much sand is needed to make a heap. Because it's a question of how we choose to define things, not a question of objective fact.
(And fyi... since what makes humans special is our rather absurd level of ability to think and learn things, human life begins with the ability to form long-term memories. Which is well past the end of infancy. This may seen counterintuitive, but there's a sound scientific basis for it.)
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder
Which christians are you referring to? Plenty of christians disagree with you and will tell you it's a complicated issue with no black and white answer. There isn't even a completely agreed-upon definition of what a christian is[1].
> Christianity opposes abortion in accord with the prohibition of murder
But murdering people in wars is quite ok, isn't it ? /s
chinathrow [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Boy am I glad I went to a state school without this crap.
dang [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Ok, but please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. They're invariably less interesting (because more repetitive, and more indignant) than the specific point they tangent off from.
The ideological games being pushed on children in state schools is different, but it's not entirely absent.
That being said, I'll take historical revisionism over the history of the empire over, uh, the evangelical option.
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Main ideological information I learned in state schools: “there are these different ideologies” provided without judgement. There was even a devil’s advocate argument for the south and slavery.
In religious schools, even the best of them, I learned nothing about any ideology but the “true” one, everything else was people being deluded by the devil.
ty6853 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Our state school played the pledge of allegiance every morning, had police with drug dogs doing sweep to great praise of the administration, and military recruiters begging us to come kill enemies of the state. The sanctioning of these activities for all to witness was part of the indoctrination -- praise for god was just replaced for worship of the government. Meanwhile basic civil stuff like how to invoke your rights a traffic stop was never even mentioned.
This is why even as a hardline atheist I have sent at times my kid to private religious education, and I hope I can continue to afford it. Neither system is great but worshipping someone who exists only as an ideal entity in your mind seems marginally better than worshipping the world's largest incarceration machine and military aggressor.
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Our state school played the pledge of allegiance every morning
I had the opposite experience, I never did the pledge in public school (or in the Adventist schools), at least not regularly enough for me to recall, but in the evangelical school it was the entire school doing it together in a big room every damn morning, first thing. I'd argue religious schools are more likely to drill it into you than public schools on account of the "under God" part that they've retconned in.
I also never saw military recruiters in public school, neither in military-dense Hawaii nor in deep red central Oregon.
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If you didn't notice the military recruiters in your US public school, I have to imagine you weren't paying attention. They posted up during lunch with tables and stuff where I was. Maybe they were just capitalizing on the 2008 recession.
There was never an assembly dedicated to them; it was always just a kiosk-type thing students could walk up to.
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
>Main ideological information I learned in state schools: “there are these different ideologies” provided without judgement. There was even a devil’s advocate argument for the south and slavery.
Did you hear a "devil's advocate" argument for the burning of Tulsa, Oklahoma by white supremacists?
Both-Sides-Ism isn't a real way to account for ideological coercion in education. It's just painting a picture that includes your enemies. What your enemies look like in the picture is LADEN with ideology.
almostgotcaught [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> The ideological games being pushed on children in state schools is different, but it's not entirely absent.
People say this all the time and it's facile. Yes ideology is everywhere and you cannot be completely free from it. But the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.
econ [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Nah, you can't really. Before you question the textbook you have to wonder if it is worth it. Since the successfully indoctrinated believers won't let you get away with it it is not worth it. So much so that they never get to hear other versions of anything.
almostgotcaught [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Nah, you can't really. Before you question the textbook you have to wonder if it is worth it.
This is some weird goalpost moving - I didn't say it's easy I said it's possible. Contrast with the fact that you fundamentally cannot question religious ideology - it's literally against the rules.
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
>Contrast with the fact that you fundamentally cannot question religious ideology
Martin Luther was pretty successful in his questioning.
But I guess he did get excommunicated for it, didn't he?
Well, I guess that could easily be described as "not easy".
kibwen [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> But I guess he did get excommunicated for it, didn't he?
This is wildly underselling the consequences of challenging the church: two centuries of unrest and war that would eventually result in millions dead, amounting to a significant fraction of Europe's population.
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Right, so contesting the church isn't impossible, but it isn't easy.
almostgotcaught [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You're again hitting the nail exactly on the head as to the difference: the Lutheran reformation gave way to Lutheranism, it did not actually reform the Catholic Church (cf the counter reformation). So again you see an instance where questioning foundational ideology from within is not possible.
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I have a feeling that it's a lot more difficult to purchase indulgences nowadays than it was during Luther's time.
But luckily, I'm not Catholic, so I have no idea.
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Arguably the entire hack created by protestantism was the infinite free indulgences "salvation by faith alone" glitch.
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Okay, so you are admitting that Martin Luther had a measurable impact on the practices of the church, right?
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You seem to be saying that religions are open to having their dogmas questioned and then growing from that, something that they are famously not open to (kind of the whole idea of a dogma).
Obviously 'Not all religions,' etc. However the Catholic church is notoriously dogmatic. Usually the more you press a dogmatic group to change, the more they dig their heels in about it. It's only when the organization is wounded by a schism or massive loss of membership do they suddenly start getting word from heaven that God has changed his mind.
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I asked you a very simple yes or no question, actually.
Your lack of answer to that question speaks a lot.
MSFT_Edging [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What textbook taught in the United States has anything with an ideological stance that isn't at the very least revisionist towards making the US look better?
Most history taught in the states already waters down the historical facts to make us look better.
jncfhnb [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Depends on how you characterize the War of Northern Aggression I suppose
skyyler [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Also depends on how you characterize the genocide of the natives.
mmcdermott [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.
This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the most repressive regimes in human history were or are secular. Maybe the "properly functioning" part is doing the heavy lifting, but if so, it makes the statement almost meaningless.
nsxwolf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You cannot question modern gender ideology in any public school around me.
All children are indoctrinated with something. There is a competition for who gets to do it.
wolfhumble [3 hidden]5 mins ago
[flagged]
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> I am surprised that Adventist Church, or the one you went to, said that the Bible does not say anything about abortion. The sixth commandment explicitly say that: "You shall not murder."
I'm not a theologian, but I know the Adventists took a much harder stance against killing real, live people in war than they did about in the abstract in utero, and that makes rational sense to me. Everyone has a different take on scripture so I expect for other religions it will say what they want to it say.
> Reading all these verses – and many others – and combining them, I don't think it is correct to state that: "the bible says nothing about abortion".
Great, don't get one. In any case, that's not how the Adventists have historically seen it, and I'm not an Adventist now in any case.
6stringmerc [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The Bible says a lot more directly about holding slaves and that being acceptable than anything you could argue regarding abortion as a divine directive. Even the New Testament is pro slavery in some respects. The citations noted, regarding abortion, are really stretching things.
Remember this is the same book that says “Oops we can’t let the Benjaminites die out because the prophecies won’t come true unless there are 12 tribes so because we won’t intermarry with them as punishment they can kidnap and keep women from a nearby people as wives so they survive.”
The article is fascinating.
bitsage [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If one considers life to begin at conception, abortion unambiguously violates the commandment not to kill. I grew up Adventist, and contrary to OP, I didn’t know anyone pro-abortion. Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion. The Bible doesn’t command Christians to own slaves and keeping other commandments literally would conflict with chattel slavery, but it does command not killing (murder).
dragonwriter [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Ironically, literalism by evangelicals is why they opposed chattel slavery and now oppose abortion.
The largest organized religious group in the United States is an evangelical community founded specifically in support of slavery, and against a movement within its former parent community to oppose slavery.
Evangelicals, did not, as a while, oppose chattel slavery, whether for literalist or other reasons.
bentobean [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I grew up in the Adventist church. I am still a Christian (although no longer Adventist). While I don’t agree with it at all, it is actually true that there are some weird pockets within the denomination that either overtly or tacitly approve abortion. It’s very bizarre.
mullingitover [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Not just tacitly approved, the church has run hospitals that have performed a lot of them[1].
> Early Adventism published positions in harmony with the Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion, though it was not active in that movement. The church produced its first set of abortion guidelines in 1970, when American attitudes toward abortion had changed and some of the church's hospitals were experiencing in creasing pressure from their communities to provide abortion services.
> Less than a year after the first set of abortion guidelines was developed, the church revised and expanded it. The resulting liberalized guidelines have allowed Adventist hospitals a great deal of freedom in their abortion practices, a freedom that has resulted in a large number of abortions being performed. Although the church has been hesitant to let it be known, at the present it is clearly not, in either policy or practice, limiting its medical institutions to therapeutic abortions.
^ From 1991.
I think the church, historically, has been so conservative that they are unwilling to contort the scripture to get it to support their political ambitions to the same extent other churches are (although lately that's not so true). This is similar to how the Southern Baptists initially supported and ran an op-ed praising the Roe v Wade ruling[2].
The spermatozoid and the ovule are living cells. /s
bentobean [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It’s important to bear in mind the distinction between slavery and indentured servitude. While both are terrible, projecting modern day morales onto scripture on this subject isn’t appropriate. It’s not like people could file for bankruptcy as we know it 2,000 years ago. You had to work it off.
hulitu [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> the mid-1900s were a different time for medical ethics.
But sadly, only nazis and japanese are bad, others (CIA) are good.
"""
Over the course of the 19-year program, more than 2,300 U.S. Army soldiers, many of whom were trained medics, contributed to the Whitecoat experiments by allowing themselves to be infected with numerous different kinds of bacteria that were considered likely choices for a biological attack. While some volunteered immediately after basic training, for conscientious objectors at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas (before they began their medic training), the near certainty of being assigned as a combat medic in Vietnam helped some medics choose instead to remain in the United States with the Whitecoat program. The goal of the program was to determine dose response for these agents.
"""
I attended an SDA high school and was a member of the church for a couple years in college (I dated an SDA woman). It was interesting that they had a ton of dentists, doctors, etc. and ran well-regarded medical schools, but also espoused young Earth creationism. They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday. Conversely, this generally included a desire for religion not to get too involved in government, which I respected quite a lot.
I never really believed, and left the church after breaking up, but I really miss the sense of community. Every Saturday I'd go to a service with a boring sermon but some _fantastic_ singing (the entire congregation could, and did, sing, and those walls rang with "Down By The River To Pray" in 4 part harmony), then have a vegetarian (albeit cheesy) potluck after, and then just chill at the beach with friends. Society would do well to adopt the sabbath as a cultural practice. The minister where I was seemed pretty chill with marriage equality - I remember he gave a sermon about marriage while people protested California's prop 8 outside and he pointed out how badly LGBT couple wanted marriage at the same time others took it for granted.
I wonder if it's still like that.
SDA live a lot longer.
The SDA vegetarian diet was also the driving force behind the Kellogg's Cereal company [1]
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Keith_Kellogg
That's gotta improve their chances against over 90% of their peers, at least, I imagine.
"Youth is wasted on the young" is only true because our youth are not taught how to not conserve and utilize their energy.
Looking back, I really wish I wasn't so "conserving" about my "youth energy" back then.
The relationships I should have focused on in my college career were my professors, at least a couple of them; I literally had zero understanding of graduate school, even as I was in college. But if I wasn't partying every Fri and Sat night I would have been able to better take advantage of the incredible opportunity I had at the time. Unfortunately, I was ill-prepared to make the most of it, though I was lucky that my passion for programming drove me to become a skilled practitioner. It was crucial that I got a mainframe help desk job where I manned a phone that never rang, and I got to teach myself C and superscalar programming (vector-based on an IBM 3090) and early internet protocols and stuff, using brand-new RS/6000s and Sparcstations and the like. Writing an Asteroids clone for X-Windows (using XLib) and a couple of vi clones was pure fun but foundational in a way.
I say all this without regret, or blame for the people around me. I'm just a product of my society, and I find great wisdom in Tolkien's notion that Hobbits don't come of age until 33. Knowing that the frontal cortex doesn't mature until 25 should have been a guiding force for this 17yo idiot matriculating too early and with no guard rails. Especially with regards to binge drinking, but it is difficult to escape one's culture alone at such a young, inexperienced age. Luckily, I basically stopped drinking only a few years later, and having never drank daily, but I lived the life of a fool, sans mentor, for those college years.
My kids have the benefit of my experience, however, because I am very typically not American in many cultural ways, thank God. Life has been gracious to me to get to experience many different world cultures, not being so enamoured with my own, though I love many of my fellow Americans when they are kind and accepting of others, though they grow more rare by the day.
Peace be with you, friend. Thanks for helping me vent a bit this morning. I am at your service.
My sister drank a lot and was very promiscuous and went on to become a doctor.
I think doing well in college is probably more about factors like time management skills and social support network than about vices.
Peace be with you, friend.
Creationism is a canned joke ideological point that American Christians of all types seemingly can't get enough of. It's hilariously bad "science" at the very best, and outright farce at the worst. But for some reason simply acknowledging evolution is, seemingly as of the last 20 years or so, utterly untenable, and so they perform.
> They also were generally suspicious of government involvement in religion, with many worried about a "national Sunday law" and being disallowed from worshipping on Saturday.
I mean that just sounds like garden variety Christian persecution complex to me. I don't think a certain segment of the Christian population can properly reckon with reality if they don't feel they are being somehow oppressed despite running... basically everything.
As far as the latter point - it was mostly that, at least where I was, a desire to keep government out of religion paired with a desire for religion not to be too involved in government. Among other things they knew that other denominations were more powerful than them and would have far more influence in government.
I'm not an SDA booster (I'm not a member and haven't attended any church for 20 years, and found the insularity of the community stifling) but I still think it's a really interesting denomination.
this is uninformed and prejudiced on its face. In Theology graduate class, the first week of lecture included the division between "literalist" Biblical traditions, and others. It is well known among anyone who has studied comparative religion in any way that Christians are not at all unified in the interpretation of Genesis, despite outward appearances.
The “appetite” for Young Earth Creationism amongst my Christian group is very low if nonexistent. In fact we often spend more times groaning at the antics this crowd gets into.
I feel like you are trivializing the dogged, uncompromising, and ceaseless war organized religion wages against intellectualism, progress, and tolerance.
I have a very reasoned and nuanced view on this topic that I probably will never share online. I don't know why I didn't notice this weird phrasing before.
I will state it clearly that we believe in always loving our fellow human beings, regardless of their ethnicity, form of religion (including none at all), sexual preference, or gender identity. The only time we have a problem with someone is if they're abusing others, irrespective of reason; in that case, we must love the oppressed differently than we love the oppressors, and prevent the abuse.
I am a lifelong reader and appreciator of science, scientists, and engineers, and have some level of understanding of the evolution's beauty on this Earth over the past 4B years. That's how God manifested this wonderful creation, perhaps two trillion galaxies with maybe hundreds of billions of stars in each, and this lovely oasis, Earth, with so much water and life, over the last ~14Gy since the CMBR's Big Bang origin.
Remember, you can't blame science if a person says they're a scientist then claims that the Earth is flat. Most religious tradition is just as off-base. If it ain't about love, it's not from God, for God only wants us to be happy, no matter what the belligerent hypocrites, liars, and cruel oppressors of this world do in God's name. To love someone means to want them to be happy, on their terms, so long as they're not hurting others in the process (which wouldn't create happiness, only cruel pleasure).
God freely gave us our free will to do with as we please, for good or ill. But It also made this universe such that it keeps a karmic tab on all our actions towards others, and we will reap what we so, each of us, in calculus-like precision in this universe of integrated information systems.
Life is the realest, most deadly-serious game you can ever imagine. And your happiness is at stake, so choose well how you evolve your heart and treat your fellow human beings.
You can peruse my religious-oriented posts from today to get a pretty complete picture of our Sufi perspective.
To be Sufi is to be the small part of all forms of religion that truly try to manifest compassion, kindness, generosity, and all the virtues, to ALL our fellow human beings, by self-evolving ourselves from vice-ridden to virtue-manifesting. The spiritual process is a purifying of ourselves, not of others. They must do it themself, and only our lovingkindness can help them.
Peace be with you. Thank you for caring about true compassion.
I'm not sure why you're accusing me of trivializing anything. I'm simply commenting on the religious discussions on HN and how I usually find them sorely lacking. But I wouldn't expect any different, considering most "hackers" tend to be secular in my experience, which is fine.
I've known a few Christians to support some of those things, but I haven't met one so far who would have religion removed across the board.
I'm sorry but when the other side of the war wants me to pay fines, go to jail or be expelled because I subjectively hurt someones feelings I gotta go with the church whatever their faults
This was in 2016. In 2023 I went to a climbing gym in Bucharest, got friendly with a foreign (EU) guy that was visiting, asked him what was he doing in Bucharest. Apparently he was representing a leftist party that sounded very good on the surface policy wise and goal wise but then I asked him..
"What do you think about punishing people through the law for misgendering someone?". He started avoiding answering directly, said we shouldn't be assholes etc but it was clear by simply refusing to give a direct answer what his position was.
My friend, this sounds like an example of you projecting your fears of "liberal suppression"
Of course, they too shared that experience with others in the times of the Charlemagne and that of the Inquisition.
(The same way that even at the time slavery was common - be it XIXth century or Antique Greece - there were already quite a lot of people revulsed by it...)
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie... https://ourrescue.org/education/research-and-trends/modern-d...
Being so inflexible with the definition is not the same as being honest. Astrophysicists and statisticians often use the word 'common' to refer to vanishingly small numbers, and us uneducated laypeople are usually just fine with that.
It wasn't the democracy of Athens... >Participation was open to adult, free male citizens (i.e., not a metic, woman or slave). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy
I grew up in the Adventist church and it's been wild seeing it drift so far from its original distinguishing stances.
When I was a kid, I primarily went to Adventist schools. However, one year after my family moved there wasn't an Adventist school available. I went to a local evangelical school instead. It was a real eye-opener.
The evangelical school had a program of outright child brain-washing about abortion that I'd never heard as an Adventist. As a fifth grader I was getting daily updates about the Supreme Court nomination battle over (disgaced Nixon lackey) Robert Bork, because as early as the eighties court packing was a core strategy for anti-choice movement. There was daily news about abortion protests they were running. When I went home and asked my parents about it, they told me as Adventists we had the bible's stance on abortion: the bible says nothing about abortion. Adventists hospitals even allowed abortions to be performed on prem since they had no doctrinal problem with it.
Fast forward to now, a lot of Adventist members are loudly anti-choice, anti-vaccine (the church leadership had to post a very delicately worded statement about vaccines because they operate respectable medical schools, and had to please both the many facebook-addled cranks in their pews as well as the sane professionals in their medical school staff), generally indistinguishable from generic right-wing evangelicals. The Adventist core membership of today I have no doubt would've been mostly pro-slavery and definitely would have no qualms about shooting people in war.
The paper talks about the church's effort to go from 'sect' (firm moral stances putting them at odds with the majority) to 'denomination' (compromising their morals to fit in), and the church of today I'd say has run as far away as they could from being a sect.
Bork was a staunch capitalist and wanted to destroy anti monopoly laws. His position on abortion was that it should be a state legislature issue.
You spot the problem but I believe you misattribute the source in a way that actually only benefits Bork and those who would champion him.
I notice you use the word choice and classify the pro-life position s "anti-choice" which makes it seem like a bad thing. However the "choice we are talking about here is directly and intentionlly causing death to an innocent human being. I think it is very important to understnd that.
To borrow an atheist trope, you and I agree that murder is evil and immoral in most cases. I just think it's wrong in one more case, when the victims are yet unborn too (I reckon murder is intrinsically evil and immoral)
No. Science can't say when life begins any more then it can say how much sand is needed to make a heap. Because it's a question of how we choose to define things, not a question of objective fact.
(And fyi... since what makes humans special is our rather absurd level of ability to think and learn things, human life begins with the ability to form long-term memories. Which is well past the end of infancy. This may seen counterintuitive, but there's a sound scientific basis for it.)
Which christians are you referring to? Plenty of christians disagree with you and will tell you it's a complicated issue with no black and white answer. There isn't even a completely agreed-upon definition of what a christian is[1].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6gzr6p/americans...
But murdering people in wars is quite ok, isn't it ? /s
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That being said, I'll take historical revisionism over the history of the empire over, uh, the evangelical option.
In religious schools, even the best of them, I learned nothing about any ideology but the “true” one, everything else was people being deluded by the devil.
This is why even as a hardline atheist I have sent at times my kid to private religious education, and I hope I can continue to afford it. Neither system is great but worshipping someone who exists only as an ideal entity in your mind seems marginally better than worshipping the world's largest incarceration machine and military aggressor.
I had the opposite experience, I never did the pledge in public school (or in the Adventist schools), at least not regularly enough for me to recall, but in the evangelical school it was the entire school doing it together in a big room every damn morning, first thing. I'd argue religious schools are more likely to drill it into you than public schools on account of the "under God" part that they've retconned in.
I also never saw military recruiters in public school, neither in military-dense Hawaii nor in deep red central Oregon.
There was never an assembly dedicated to them; it was always just a kiosk-type thing students could walk up to.
Did you hear a "devil's advocate" argument for the burning of Tulsa, Oklahoma by white supremacists?
Both-Sides-Ism isn't a real way to account for ideological coercion in education. It's just painting a picture that includes your enemies. What your enemies look like in the picture is LADEN with ideology.
People say this all the time and it's facile. Yes ideology is everywhere and you cannot be completely free from it. But the critical difference between secular ideology and religious ideology is that (in a properly functioning society) you can challenge/question/probe secular ideology.
This is some weird goalpost moving - I didn't say it's easy I said it's possible. Contrast with the fact that you fundamentally cannot question religious ideology - it's literally against the rules.
Martin Luther was pretty successful in his questioning.
But I guess he did get excommunicated for it, didn't he?
Well, I guess that could easily be described as "not easy".
This is wildly underselling the consequences of challenging the church: two centuries of unrest and war that would eventually result in millions dead, amounting to a significant fraction of Europe's population.
But luckily, I'm not Catholic, so I have no idea.
Obviously 'Not all religions,' etc. However the Catholic church is notoriously dogmatic. Usually the more you press a dogmatic group to change, the more they dig their heels in about it. It's only when the organization is wounded by a schism or massive loss of membership do they suddenly start getting word from heaven that God has changed his mind.
Your lack of answer to that question speaks a lot.
Most history taught in the states already waters down the historical facts to make us look better.
This feels like an odd statement, given how many of the most repressive regimes in human history were or are secular. Maybe the "properly functioning" part is doing the heavy lifting, but if so, it makes the statement almost meaningless.
All children are indoctrinated with something. There is a competition for who gets to do it.
I'm not a theologian, but I know the Adventists took a much harder stance against killing real, live people in war than they did about in the abstract in utero, and that makes rational sense to me. Everyone has a different take on scripture so I expect for other religions it will say what they want to it say.
> Reading all these verses – and many others – and combining them, I don't think it is correct to state that: "the bible says nothing about abortion".
Great, don't get one. In any case, that's not how the Adventists have historically seen it, and I'm not an Adventist now in any case.
Remember this is the same book that says “Oops we can’t let the Benjaminites die out because the prophecies won’t come true unless there are 12 tribes so because we won’t intermarry with them as punishment they can kidnap and keep women from a nearby people as wives so they survive.”
The article is fascinating.
The largest organized religious group in the United States is an evangelical community founded specifically in support of slavery, and against a movement within its former parent community to oppose slavery.
Evangelicals, did not, as a while, oppose chattel slavery, whether for literalist or other reasons.
> Early Adventism published positions in harmony with the Physicians' Crusade Against Abortion, though it was not active in that movement. The church produced its first set of abortion guidelines in 1970, when American attitudes toward abortion had changed and some of the church's hospitals were experiencing in creasing pressure from their communities to provide abortion services.
> Less than a year after the first set of abortion guidelines was developed, the church revised and expanded it. The resulting liberalized guidelines have allowed Adventist hospitals a great deal of freedom in their abortion practices, a freedom that has resulted in a large number of abortions being performed. Although the church has been hesitant to let it be known, at the present it is clearly not, in either policy or practice, limiting its medical institutions to therapeutic abortions.
^ From 1991.
I think the church, historically, has been so conservative that they are unwilling to contort the scripture to get it to support their political ambitions to the same extent other churches are (although lately that's not so true). This is similar to how the Southern Baptists initially supported and ran an op-ed praising the Roe v Wade ruling[2].
[1] https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1991/08/abortion-hi...
[2] https://billmoyers.com/2014/07/17/when-southern-baptists-wer...
The spermatozoid and the ovule are living cells. /s
But sadly, only nazis and japanese are bad, others (CIA) are good.