"""

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.