The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
211 comments
·March 23, 2025smithkl42
washadjeffmad
I'd hesitate to write off the severity of their difference to any Christianity you might recognize.
The Green family wields a personal antinomianist doctrine reserved for the rich and powerful. Under their brand of Creationism, God has given them literal dominion over the world (Genesis 1:26-31), and not exercising that, whether or not in defiance of conflicting secular laws, would be a denial of the mission of their faith.
I remember my first time hearing them called "Wahabbi Lobby" in the mid-2000s after the FBI had "spoken to them" about ISIL targeting early (pre-)Christian sites to plunder artifacts, knowing the Greens had a taste for them.
Consider the implications. What would have happened if your local church had sent money or took a secret mission trip to aid Al-Qaeda?
themaninthedark
I think there is a little difference in culpability between directly sending money or traveling to a terror cell vs contacting buyers to purchase artifacts.
If my local church was attempting to support African businesses by purchasing goods but the buyer was getting good from a factory that used slave labor, I would expect the FBI to come talk to the church as well.
washadjeffmad
The article mentions the family had tens of thousands of looted artifacts (there's no legal way to acquire them) and attempted to evade detection by customs by mislabeling them. They knew what they were doing, were told to stop, and they kept doing it.
If you discovered the clergy or elders in your church wanted a supply of something so badly that they secretly used your tithe or offertory to fund a warlord who then enslaved people to acquire it for them, how would you feel? That's a closer equivalent of what Hobby Lobby did to their customers.
Unrelated, but how would you summarize the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
snypher
This is the same logic that got DJI a ban from some proposed invisible link to Uyghur oppression.
themaninthedark
The author's tone is...definitely not neutral and it make it hard to believe them when they put pure conjecture in: "Between the high demand and likely paying workers a subminimum wage" with footnote "...While this practice was completely legal (current federal law permits employers to pay disabled workers a fraction of minimum wage), it’s certainly questionable practice coming from a guy whose entire schtick revolves around stewardship."
I was waiting to read how it was possible that Green might have kicked a puppy or drown some kittens.
armchairhacker
Although it sounds very bad, there’s actually a good argument for paying disabled workers below-minimum wage:
- Disabled people get paid (what is supposed to be, but not actually, a living wage) by the government, so they aren’t living on the wage.
- No company would hire them if they were forced to pay minimum wage, because companies are greedy and would always hire a more productive non-disabled worker.
- Many disabled workers want to work not for the pay, but because they enjoy the work and/or want to feel productive. As stated, they get paid by the government, so in theory they don’t have to work if they don’t want to.
With the caveat that disability payments outside of work should be raised, so that nobody (disabled or not) feels like they must work a too-boring or too-hard job to afford a decent standard of living (unless absolutely necessary for society to subsist, but that’s another discussion)…I think it’s a great practice.
Maybe there are good arguments against it, but a good argument needs to provide the full context.
gadders
Yes, there was debate about this in the UK. If a disabled person can only do one widget per hour, and an able-bodied can do 10, what is the correct wage for that disabled person?
If you think they should both be paid the same, who should pay the additional cost?
null
giraffe_lady
idk I read all that and it still sounds very bad to me.
Iulioh
My counterargument would be:
If it is bellow ""living wage"" it should not be allowed.
(that was easy)
You can find other workarounds to incentive the hiring of disabled people and we (in italy) have a few:
-Requirement of medium and big firms to hire them (reduced ability, they can still perform)
For example where i work there is a janitor that has dawn syndrome and an IT guy with dwarfism
-tax breaks (so the worker still get paid minimum wage but to the company he costs less)
Digory
It’s fine to be inexperienced with Christianity, but it skews the reporting.
For example “kingdom giver” is not someone who gives kingdoms, it’s someone who gives to Christ’s kingdom. But the widow and her mite is an example of kingdom giving as much as the Greens.
Fluorescence
>> someone who gives kingdoms
The article doesn't claim that so it seems your Christian sensitivities have skewed your reading comprehension.
It's referencing a Forbes article using the term to distinguish between thoughtless arbitrary giving vs. giving with purpose:
"Even the most generous Christian philanthropists often don't see the purpose of their giving," says Dr. Mark Rutland, the new ORU president and founder of the Global Servants evangelical ministry. "There are impulse givers, people who give to their alma mater or their church or some particular ministry with which they become familiar—but the Greens are Kingdom givers. ... They consider it an honor; they consider it a mission."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2023/02/13/this-bil...
Digory
The sentence from the article is:
"While the total amount the Greens have made in charitable contributions has been kept private, former Oral Roberts University president Dr. Mark Rutland may have worded it best when he described the family as “kingdom givers”.
It doesn't link to the Forbes article's definition. Without more, I'd read that sentence to say "Kingdom givers" is a descriptor of the total amounts given by the Greens -- we don't know the amount, but they give kingdoms.
As I explained above, "Kingdom" is unrelated to the size of the gift, as made clear from the quote you cited.
jt2190
> Have been told that I have to “drop the sarcastic tone” if I want to be “taken seriously” as a “““reporter””” but the jokes on them because that criticism implies that I’ve crossed the threshold into being a “journalist” rather than a “guy with a substack”
themaninthedark
There are several comments here using the same logic, which I find to be rather...odd:
>It's a blog post not a news article or scholarly report. - The topic is a business run by people who ostensibly make decisions based on their faith to justify actions which cause various harm to others. Taking a critical view of those actions and the motivations is reasonable.
and the author shares the same view....
I am being asked to take a critical look at Hobby Lobby, the reasons are outlined in the linked Substack. However, if I have any questions or criticisms of the Substack article, please note that it is not a professional work it is just a guy with a microphone.
If I can't trust the source material, how can I trust the claims?
null
doug_durham
It goes deeper than their "faith". These are the people who took away healthcare benefits from all Americans because they didn't personally want to fund birth control and women's health. It's reductive to say that the author looks negatively on the family because of their faith alone.
WillPostForFood
These are the people who took away healthcare benefits from all Americans because they didn't personally want to fund birth control and women's health.
This is not true though.. Most Americans have these benefits. Hobby Lobby just pushed for an extension of the existing Religious exemption to also apply closely held businesses. It affected a tiny portion of the population.
turtlesdown11
> It affected a tiny portion of the population.
> According to a 2009 research paper from NYU Stern School of Business, these corporations account for 52 percent of private employment and 51 percent of private-sector output in the country. Those percentages might be outdated now but still give a sense of just how many workers are employed at closely held corporations. Fifty-two percent of today’s private sector employees comes out to approximately 60.4 million people, based on the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
https://slate.com/business/2014/06/hobby-lobby-supreme-court...
giraffe_lady
It's not wise or historically accurate to consider these unrelated projects, or their goals unknowable. If you found it important to argue for it that way in 2017 I would call it naive, for doing it now I call you complicit.
MrMcCall
[flagged]
oersted
For reference:
> But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
-- 2 Timothy 3:1-5
watwut
Bible is full of contradictions. And old testament is quite cruel at places.
They are Christians. Destructive Christians on the quest to harm others ... but Christians.
gadders
Are you a Christian?
kevin_thibedeau
They've used their wealth to lobby against the liberty of American citizens. They deserve the ire of the masses.
hn_throwaway_99
Completely agree. I think the author's tone in this article, in a nutshell, exemplifies what was a huge driving force of so many evangelical's in the US now being firmly in the MAGA camp, even though that seems paradoxical to many of us.
For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly". And look, I'm an atheist who has felt acute harms from religion in some very specific ways, so I get it - a lot of times I believe that religion is backwards and silly. But Trump and MAGA came along and essentially said "you're not backwards and silly, you're the righteous ones, the ones who are condemning you are backwards and silly". And yes, Trump has been married 3 times, had an affair with a porn star while his wife was pregnant, values displays of material wealth above all else, etc. etc., so I struggle mightily many times to understand how a community that preached "family values" so stridently for my entire youth supports him now so unconditionally. But, IMO, it's because Trump really constantly drove home this message of "you should be proud, and the only people who should be ashamed are 'the other side'".
I know that may feel like a tangent, but I've seen the general dismissive tone of this article repeated so many times (e.g. in much reporting about the Chick-fil-a family) that it now feels easy to recognize.
beedeebeedee
> For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly"
Most of the criticism that I have heard and read is not about evangelicals being "backwards and silly" but is about their hypocrisy for claiming the mantle of Jesus Christ and then saying and doing things that are antithetical to his beliefs.
SauciestGNU
I'll cop to treating them as a mix of "backward and silly" and "malevolent violent threat to the continued existence of people I love". There are a lot of reasons to disdain American Christianity, and my personal experience with the exercise of that religion makes it extremely hard to treat its practicioners with anything other than distrust and contempt.
zdw
The problem is that in the 70's when conservative/libertarian economics and the religious right had a shotgun marriage which spawned Reagan and most of the "government is the enemy" schtick, usually the former group actually was driving the agenda, using a carrot of "we'll get rid of abortion" to lead the latter.
The problem is that this almighty dollar worship is far more corrosive and destructive to society and ethics of everyone involved, and ends up eroding any sort of moral high ground that the cojoined group has.
HumblyTossed
> For a long time now, many people who's religious values are deeply important to them have felt disrespected and looked down upon by "the left" (yes, I'm obviously painting with a broad brush here). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the elite left essentially said "you all are backwards and silly".
A lot of them DO come off as backwards and silly. Christianity boils down to two commandments. TWO! Love God and love your neighbor. Who is your neighbor? EVERYONE! And you can't do one of those commandments without the other. And if you're calling yourself Christian, those are not OPTIONS - you can't choose not to do those. And yet, here we are...
adamc
Just to drop a link that is largely consonant with this viewpoint: https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/
"Silly" and "backwards" aren't the terms I'd use, though. What bothers me about a lot of it is that it is mean, even cruel, and utterly inconsistent with the character of Jesus given in the gospels.
ultimafan
I don't know why people are down voting you, your observations are something I've sadly noticed happening for a long time now.
The perception of Christianity among people who don't identify with any religion or people who fall into more "liberal" circles has absolutely been tainted by sects/members of Christianity that do not at all represent the teachings in the Bible. There is justifiable resentment towards these groups that spills over into unjustifiable resentment towards Christians as a whole.
I can't count the number of times I've heard, living in California, either said directly to me by someone who didn't know I was Christian, overheard in a conversation, or discussed at some event completely out of pocket claims or insults towards Christianity that most people would find absolutely inappropriate to say about other groups.
It doesn't bother me because I understand where those people saying it are coming from. But it absolutely leads to the phenomenon of otherwise moderate or formerly left leaning Christians moving towards the group that doesn't wear their not so thinly veiled hate openly on their sleeves for something deeply personal and important in their lives. You are the company you keep and shifting over like this brings you more in line mentally overtime with the kind of people you don't want to emulate.
Rational or not rational, it just doesn't feel good as a human being to receive hate and disdain for something you consider an irreplaceable part of your life and worldview.
This doesn't apply solely to Christians and is really something the left has been doing for a long time and why it's been "losing" the propaganda war to the right and seeing so many people who formerly wouldn't want to associate with the kind of rhetoric found there today at least passively accepting it. Rhetoric of the left seems to far more often embrace (at least on a smaller scale between people) snark, putdowns, wholesale "intolerance" ie making individuals feel some combination of bad/guilty/stupid/backwards for "ignorant" views instead of engaging with them openly. The right uses an approach of playing the "reasonable" man that is open to discussion, support, of all views and then slowly getting people to get on board with the more radical ones.
pesus
> But it absolutely leads to the phenomenon of otherwise moderate or formerly left leaning Christians moving towards the group that doesn't wear their not so thinly veiled hate openly on their sleeves for something deeply personal and important in their lives. You are the company you keep and shifting over like this brings you more in line mentally overtime with the kind of people you don't want to emulate.
If you're talking about Christians moving to right wing political groups because people were insulting them, then they're proving their detractors' points and actually encouraging this phenomenon.
chuckadams
You're right, they're not "backwards and silly". They are fascists.
insomagent
Christians, as a whole, are fascists? News to me.
kalensh
I really don't think we can lay the responsibility for this at the feet of "the left."
I don't doubt there are those who have had uncomfortable, rude encounters with anti-religious people, but I do doubt how frequently this occurs. I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and we openly prayed before meals at restaurants and never had a single issue. I attended a public school and had plenty of friends who were remarkably tolerant of when I got a bit weird about religion (including calling a friend's family "heathens" for not following the right type of Christianity). Yes, there was one classmate in high school who was outspoken, a bit angry and sometimes rude about her "leftist" beliefs but she was one classmate among many! And yet every week in Church I heard about how the world was against us, we were so persecuted and hated, silly comments like "oh you'd get in trouble if you brought a bible in your backpack to your public school" which wasn't true at all.
In my experience it's an identity built on being "different", on believing that others want to tear you down because of your beliefs. And a narrative that pushes this identity, by amplifying anything that could come across as disrespectful or dismissive, setting it up for someone to come in and say "you should be proud of yourself." And when this includes stupid things like Starbucks changing their cups to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas, I really don't think "be nicer" is going to help.
duped
Some beliefs deserve to be looked down upon and disrespected because they are backwards. I wouldn't call them "silly" because they're very serious.
I don't believe in treating religious fundamentalists with compassion and empathy anymore. That's how we got the nutjobs in power, by not deriding them enough in public and private. There can be no tolerance of hate, and the people you are talking about are motivated by hate of others.
hn_throwaway_99
Look, in many ways I agree with you, but I guarantee that mindset is essentially doomed to failure if you want to win elections in the US where 68% of Americans identify themselves as Christian in some way.
The problem is not so much wanting to coddle up to the fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists. It's that a lot of people who used to have what would be considered "standard", middle-of-the-road religious views have been told, again in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that they're stupid. Whether you believe this to be true is not the point. Calling a large portion of the country stupid is a great way to push them into the arms of an extremist.
gadders
Do you apply that rule equally to all religions, or just the ones that aren't likely to kill you/get you fired for expressing it?
//edit//And I say this as an atheist.
anonfordays
Some beliefs deserve to be looked down upon and disrespected because they are backwards. I wouldn't call them "silly" because they're very serious.
I don't believe in treating religious fundamentalists with compassion and empathy anymore. That's how we got the peace trucks, by not deriding them enough in public and private. There can be no tolerance of hate, and the people you are talking about are motivated by hate of others.
emchammer
A lot of it is just about maintaining healthy boundaries. I am a transgender person of faith. It’s not really a big deal except for the assholes.
amanaplanacanal
Unfortunately those assholes are now in power, and you are now an un-person.
RandomBacon
I find it interesting that the Episocopal Chirch in the United States has both old conservative members and young liberal members, and they all seem to get along as far as I can tell (many of them also believe in Theistic Evolution and don't shun science like others seem to think). I think it's a flavor of conservatism that is more libertarian. The Episcopal Church also has openly-gay priests and women priests, all of which whom can marry.
cozzyd
Yes, it's not the people with the insane viewpoints who are fault, but the people who are insufficiently deferential to the insane viewpoints.
cratermoon
Prosperity gospel is a peculiar American brand of protestant pentecostal evangelism that is the motivating aspect of the Green family. While it has no Biblical basis, it does riff on Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth and has a number of parallels in the so-called Effective Altruism movement.
shaftway
Every time I've shopped at a Hobby Lobby, I've gotten a weird feeling that there's something else shady going on. They don't use barcodes to price any of the goods. Everything has a sticker on it, and the cashier types up everything by hand. Your receipt ends up just being a list of dollar amounts and a total, nothing identifying your purchases in any way.
I just assumed that they're doing this so they can falsify audits. Similar to how they purchase land and donate it, claiming a bigger tax write-off, I assume they're doing the same with their merchandise. How could you audit it if there's no real stock tracking system?
gwbas1c
When I was a kid, a store called Spags was popular in my town. They hand-wrote a price on every item.
For some stores it's part of the charm.
EnergyAmy
There's no barcodes because they're batshit insane and believe in the "bar codes are the mark of the beast" thing that was popular back in the 90's.
People deflecting in this thread are either ignorant or also batshit crazy and should be ignored.
shepherdjerred
EnergyAmy
That doesn't disprove it at all. It just states that they owners haven't said that's the reason, and that they've given other reasons. Their actions are entirely consistent with someone having batshit crazy beliefs, but knowing that they can't tell people those beliefs.
wrp
Many upvotes here due to the political/religious aspect, but there should be some comment on the archeological issue. From what I've gathered in the past, the main points are:
1. An organization with very deep pockets sets out to collect Near Eastern antiquities.
2. Due to turmoil in the Middle East, many relics of dubious provenance are hitting the market.
3. The org decides to buy as much of this stuff as they can, knowing that some of it will be dubious.
4. The org voluntarily has their purchases inspected, knowing they will not be compensated for things that have to be returned to their rightful places.
In outline, this sounds like the buyers doing the right thing in a bad situation.
boomboomsubban
Hobby Lobby openly admitted to falsifying documents to smuggle in artifacts. I've never seen anything suggesting they take your fourth point seriously, at least not before the courts got involved.
And, as mentioned in the article, point five would be that they're effectively using this as a tax avoidance loophole.
turtlesdown11
The claims made above with regard to 3 and 4 are false.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/hobby-lobby-settles-3-mill...
wrp
The article confirms #3 and contradicts #4.
turtlesdown11
The press report from ICE does not confirm that they "knew some would be dubious". The press report makes it clear that all the purchases were not done above board.
Beestie
Unclear as to the intent of the word "Heist" in the title. Seems they are paying top dollar if not more for collections sometimes not even authenticating them.
As long as they make everything available to the public and to researchers, I don't see anything wrong with it.
Also unclear on why this is a two-part story. Is there some big shoe to drop? Trying to avoid the impression that the author is not terribly fond of the Green family.
1986
The "heist", which presumably gets covered in part 2, is that a lot of these items were originally looted from Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. US Customs ended up seizing a lot of them, and about 15,000 items ended up having to be returned.
piokoch
Well, visit British Museum, you will learn what is professional looting (a.k.a. robbery), not some amateurish second hand purchases done by those hobbyists.
damnitbuilds
The British Museum saved many artifacts which would have been destroyed by various nutty religious types ( a' la Greens ) over the centuries.
In doing so, I doubt that they broke any export regulations.
And entrance to the British Museum is free, for everyone.
yannis
To be honest and I am from Cyprus, the BM paid for a lot of archaeological expeditions at a time when Antiquity Laws were laxed and the expeditions could take 2/3 of the finds. The 19th century was another story, Cesnola for example (the, then American Ambassador to Cyprus) literally smuggled almost 30,000 objects, which formed the basis of the Metropolitan Museum.
turtlesdown11
Whataboutism aside, claiming that collecting tens of thousands of artifacts for a museum operated in Washington DC, is a hobbyist endeavor, is clearly wrong.
Electricniko
It isn't that they weren't authenticating the items, it's that they weren't authenticating previous ownership. A lot of the items were stolen, as you can imagine there was a bit of wildness in the Middle East at the time (after the US overthrew Saddam Hussein). Which leads to the big shoe to drop. The people they were buying from and essentially funding is the group who became ISIS.
Beestie
Appreciate the informative replies and citations. So, I'm a bit of a n00b in such matters so will politely ask how this situation (how to get ill-gotten artifacts of great anthropological value back into the public domain) typically gets resolved.
The idea cited in a reply that such purchases are funding ISIS (chilling to say the least) kind of implies that ISIS (or a stooge acting on their behalf) is the seller so a trace on the transaction should lead investigators to their door where the items can be confiscated and returned to the museum or public collection from which they were plundered.
I'm probably being too naive about how all this works. But I certainly understand the article much better now thanks to the informative replies.
kortex
The complexity lies in the fact that there is rarely a bill of sale like "Priceless scroll taken from tomb under ancient church before it was demolished - ISIS". There's a lot of laundering and changing of hands before they even go up for sale by these brokers whom HobbyLobby purchase from. This is completely antithetical to the ideal process for the sake of scholarship and preservation, which is meticulous and slow, documents all of the context before even touching anything, maintaining a chain of custody so that context is preserved even after removing artifacts from the site, etc.
smithkl42
I think it really is a problem if they're getting artifacts without clear provenance. They've had to return some manuscripts, and I thought that they'd cleaned up their acquisition process. But perhaps not?
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2020/04/bible-museum-steve...
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-museum-bible-w...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/museum-of-the-bibl...
1shooner
> The speed and volume with which Carroll and the Greens collected sounded an alarm – to good and bad actors alike – of a willingness to participate in the gray market, where the legality of goods is questionable enough that accredited institutions dare not tread. Many governments prohibit the unlicensed export of culturally significant items, and UNESCO outlawed the trafficking of cultural property back in the 1970s.
Without anything concrete, this seems more like innuendo then an explicit accusation. But finding someone to pay and claiming to make artifacts 'available to researchers' doesn't necessarily make archeological trafficking legal or ethical.
throwawaysleep
They were involved in trafficking and were fined for it. They labelled antiquities "tile samples" and other things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal
No innuendo.
finnthehuman
> The cuneiform texts of an ancient Mesopotamian people should, in theory, hold little interest to an arts and crafts vendor based in the midwestern United States.
Why shouldn't it? People with money buy artifacts and art of note. The rest of us buy replicas and less noteworthy stuff. People from the Midwest can take interest in ancient Mesopotamia.
When writers casts the reader as dumb so they can twist it with an upcoming reveal, it's a signal I use to stop reading. If the twist was good I wouldn't need to be made to think little of the Hobby Lobby owners.
chiph
I'm sort of surprised that they haven't approached Bob Jones University. They have one of the largest collections of religious art in the US.
Virtual tour: https://museumandgallery.org/tour/
ch4s3
It's a bit off topic but the drop ceilings and wall to wall carpeting in that gallery are so redolent of churches from the 1990s that I could have almost guessed this was at Bob Jones University from the photos.
neuroelectron
Kind of weird that this has 103 upvotes and all the comments are wondering what the point of this story is.
g-b-r
Kind of weird that there's all this support for Evangelicals on an Hacker News discussion.
alabastervlog
The bulk of this discussion could feature prominently in a museum of Internet trolling.
An unsolved problem of Internet discussions is that, for a variety of reasons, those with poor literacy and weak background knowledge are overrepresented in the comments (and responses to them may dominate, as well, since such posts tend to act as flame bait at best, and as very-effective classical trolling at worst) and that's something HN struggles with ordinarily, but this particular thread is really something special.
hk1337
The author seems to go down a dark rabbit hole describing how seemingly unrelated events are connected. They also seem to placate to any anti-Christian sentiment a reader may already have.
brightball
I’m trying to understand why this is still on the front page? It doesn’t appear on topic for tech and there’s clearly a flame war developing in the comments.
RandomBacon
Please read the HN guidelines.
zippyman55
When I visit that store, I try to imagine what the store would look like with all the “made in China” products removed. My visual is the store would almost be empty.
Cthulhu_
This is the reality of things, China's manufacturing capacity and international sale is insane. There's a chain of stores in the Netherlands too called Action, full of cheap Chinese produced items. It's not even particularly bad or anything.
flocciput
Is it just me or has HN as a whole become... more Christian lately? A lot more defensive comments here than I would've expected, and I've seen in other threads people actually openly recommending religion/Christianity specifically as something that solved their problems. What's the deal here? I would've thought this would be a relatively atheist/agnostic community, if not one that eschews discussion of religion entirely.
akovaski
I don't know about HN in particular, but I do feel like religions have significantly boosted their online proselytizing in the last 5-10 years.
My suspicions:
* The normie barrier has continued to lower, so more traditional and progress-reluctant religious people are now connected to social media.
* Some sects may be intentionally targeting online communities, just like they target IRL communities for converts. Beliefs that don't require a devotion of forcing the belief itself upon others will naturally fade into the background. Beliefs that don't claim to solve your problems will also fade into the background.
* Social media algorithms prefer religious posts. Religious posts often invoke some sort of emotional response. Religions are some of the oldest memes after all.
All of this is just a gut feeling based on the religious material I've been exposed to on the web. I think it's fairly consistent with how religions have spread throughout history. Secularism is squashed unless you specifically fight for it, which itself may require a kind of religious fervor.
This is possibly the natural result of any human community growing large enough. There will be those who ask unanswerable questions, and there will be those who have the answers to those questions. Those who need order, and those who need to order.
finnthehuman
Capital-A atheism is a dead fad. It was a few years of people loudly dunking on something that that was safe to dunk on. The overall culture found them grating and insufferable, even to other atheists. Over time we swung to the point where you see more discussions like these.
>What's the deal here?
Without making a jab at the bay area culture bubble, I dunno what to tell you.
I don't need religion to be bad, that was Capital-A atheism's thing. I just need it to leave me alone. And it does.
Some people are religious, and a lot of those who are would recommend it. When it comes to defending religion, as an atheist I still think bad takes are bad takes even if they're against the religion I left.
RandomBacon
Maybe people are more comfortable sharing online and in less fear of being ganged up on?
__MatrixMan__
Are you proposing that now is a safer time to express oneself online than any other time? The idea that my online speech could make me the target of offline violence feels realer than ever now that AI can do the legwork of correlating my identities.
boesboes
Not sure, but the less technical a story, the more brigading and gaslighting you get in the comments it seems. It is a bit like when there is something about apple, the entire comment section is people complaining about the fanboys in the comments. Who are not there. I exaggerate a bit of course, but in general it is the same with any 'divisive' topics such as AI, crypto etc. Technical discussion is minimal.
Either it's bots, or we are all just tired and frustrated. I know I am and it doesn't help to stay civil..
michaelsbradley
> I would've thought this would be a relatively atheist/agnostic community, if not one that eschews discussion of religion entirely.
Briefly, why?
34679
I can't speak for OP, but for me it's because this place is full of engineers who place their faith in evidence-based reasoning.
RandomBacon
I have an engineering background, and was even gifted The Knack.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.
For example, there is the idea of Theistic Evolution.
I definitely like evidence-based reasoning, but it doesn't answer everything.
bee_rider
Engineering (as distinct from something like math or science) is more about applying, rather than discovering, knowledge. Some folks just treat the models and equations as mantras handed down by some all-knowing being (the professor). The equation shall be recited in the homework, at length in the project, one final time in the exam, and then we shall release it to the universe and free our minds of it.
xboxnolifes
This kind of implies you believe there are no Christian (or any religion) engineers. Which is very clearly not true.
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worsethanhitler
[dead]
boomboomsubban
Destroying mummies to see if they reused parchment while making them is nearly as egregious as the nineteenth century practice of grinding up mummies as a panacea.
It'd be like smashing Fabergé eggs just in case one had something hidden in it.
I wish the author was a little less over-wrought in her descriptions of the Green family's religious commitments. I've heard complaints before about the Green's artifact acquisition process, and they've had to return some manuscripts: it's a story worth investigating and telling. But it distracts from the author's main point when she's making snide comments about their faith. Yes, they're Christians who are successful at business and who take their faith seriously - so? If the author is trying to convince people she's an even-handed reporter, she'd do better to drop the sarcastic tone.