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".

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.

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.

There are lots of different bible worshippers but there is only one academia. There might be small differences of opinion they all preach the same "proverbial" creation myth.

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.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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.

But murdering people in wars is quite ok, isn't it ? /s

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...

So you are against the 2nd amendment?

In the New Testament, Elizabeth who is pregnant with John, says the following when greeting her cousin Mary, pregnant with Jesus: "43 But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? 44 As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy."[Luke 1:43-44] Elizabeth here describing the reaction and importance of hearing the Mary's greeting, and surely the visit of the baby in her Womb, Jesus Christ.

I am aware that certain rabbinic traditions might allow for abortions under certain circumstances, but Jesus tend to tighten the interpretation of the Ten Commandments rather than loosen it: " “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”" [Matthew 19:8-9] And even the disciples thought He set the bar high, as they responded with the following: "10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”"[Matthew 19:10 and read the following verses for Jesus’ response]

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".

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

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.

But sadly, only nazis and japanese are bad, others (CIA) are good.