alt Hacker News> I struggle with the hypocrisy of religion sometimes
That doesn’t really make sense to me. Do you mean the hypocrisy of people who follow those religions?
I tend to think that blaming outside forces for bad behaviour by people lets them off the hook a bit too easily - in particular it lets leaders off the hook far too easily - and disincentivises change because “I do X because Y makes me” rather than “I do X because I choose to”, which is the truth.
Religions might contain good teachings and bad teachings but, ultimately, people choose how they behave and so it’s the people who show hypocrisy.
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This is a weirdly dissonant comment that misunderstands both religion and the nature of choices.
Religions don't exist without the people. The scriptures have no narrative power if they are not told by people to people. The rites and traditions only serve to reinforce habits and pass themselves down throughout time to new people. The religion evolves with the people because keeping followers become the fitness function.
No religion knowingly offers its followers "bad teachings". Anybody who thinks a religion has "bad teachings" quickly becomes an impostor and gets pushed out. The self selection means that there are no "bad teachings".
Also, you are trying to pretend like the choice is only applied by the cognitive brain by the individual human at the time of an action. This ignores both group psychology and the role of habits / indoctrination.
The Catholic Church internal policies target the ages of 4-14 for indoctrination and habit forming. What 10 year old will resist their parents, resist their church authority figures, resist all of the teachings of thousands of years of their people, resist the "word of God", have the knowledge and self awareness to know the difference between God's voice and typical bipolar ruminations?
Yeh it’s the hypocrisy of the people that follow religion but also religion in general requiring you to deeply believe a version of a story, whilst rejecting other religions version of that story. I know “rejecting” is in the realm of fundamentalists, but even moderate believers will trust their version over others when in reality all these stories can be traced back to the exact same source story. I knew this was true for mono-theistic religions, but I’m amazed it can apply even outside of those bounds.