The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist

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?

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.

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.

> 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”

https://substack.com/@meghanboilard/note/c-102976235?

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.

It sounds like you are intentionally leaving out the meat of the article’s criticisms, which is that the schemes involving “charity” and “giving” are essentially tax dodging.

> Less evident these charitable contributions equate to sizable tax breaks. These tax write-offs are calculated using the highest appraisals possible, which is not necessarily indicative of the actual sum of money paid out by the Green family for the land. Counterintuitive as it may seem, this practice frequently allows the Greens to save far more money than what they spend via hefty deductions.

Hobby Lobby is, according to this article, taking advantage of the nebulous valuations of artifacts to minimize tax burden in a way that is morally questionable at the least.

Matthew 19:24

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.

Isn’t the hobby lobby crew also notoriously queer bashers?

I would think the issue is not so much that they’re Christian, it’s that they’re hypocrites who use Christianity as a smokescreen for bigotry.

(The relevance being, they’re using Christianity as cover for capitalism in a way that Jesus himself, as depicted in the Bible, would certainly never have sanctioned.)

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.

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.

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.

The claims made above with regard to 3 and 4 are false.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/hobby-lobby-settles-3-mill...

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

Kind of weird that there's all this support for Evangelicals on an Hacker News discussion.

Please read the HN guidelines.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe people are more comfortable sharing online and in less fear of being ganged up on?

> I would've thought this would be a relatively atheist/agnostic community, if not one that eschews discussion of religion entirely.

Briefly, why?

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..

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