Please don't inject religion into HN threads. Nothing good ever comes of it.

I should have left the word Christian out. It was not really needed. By the time I saw what it had spawned, it was too late to edit.

Yes, it really does boil down to just that word. We can speculate about the reasons, but the effects on a large forum like this one are predictable.

The problem with excluding religion is that it's relevant. Imagine excluding any other branch of philosophy (science, math, photography, morality, logic), and the effect it would have on conversation. It would make no sense, and it would make it impossible to have meaningful discussions about many topics, as well as impossible to arrive at certain truthful conclusions about them. To exclude religion is essentially a (very closed-minded) religion unto itself.

I absolutely agree in the first bit. I'm a strong believer in "trust but verify" where you develop relationships based on trust by default with a healthy layer of auditing to inspire confidence long term. My concern is that the ROI of trust by default in the past has opened up our contemporary systems to an unprecedented attack vector.

The surprising part is that this phenomena has extended to geopolitics: having control over the GPS constellation is the kind of thing that would have single handedly decided both world wars, yet is now taken for granted by intelligence operatives of hostile nations using our GPS system. It's hard to believe it's worked for so long.

As for the Christian value of honesty stuff, I strongly disagree. Communities of chimpanzees and prairie dogs!! commonly exhibit social behaviors that would be indistinguishable from humans despite the fact that they have no formalized moral framework. Chimpanzees or prairie dogs who yell wolf too many times will be ignored. Those that are dishonest or manipulative are shunned. Those that are too aggressive are put down by the tribe.

Christianity has nothing to do with it. Honesty is a necessary trait for survival of any complex species dependent on communication for survival

> trust but verify

That's not trust.

It can be. You can trust someone to have done the job like they claim, but can still verify it to make sure they did it correctly. A second set of eyes rarely hurt.

That's not quite right; the point of "trust but verify"[0] is to assume in the short term that they did the job they claim (correctly, even), and start doing work that depends on it, but verify in the background, and roll things back if they didn't. This gives you some of the benefits of a high trust environment while still coping with the occational lying scumbag.

Of course, if it's fast/cheap enough, you can go with the much superior "verify and don't even waste time asking", but that's often impractical.

0: Well, the steel-man interpretation anyway; the historical version seems to just be a euphemism for "Don't trust, but claim you do so they look bad if they try to complain about it.".

> I think the whole bone of contention with the statement is pretty much a semantic argument.

> What is "trust"?

Actually I was talking exclusively about the phrase "trust but verify". Absent context, "trust" is like "know"; it's a useful shorthand but shouldn't be used if you're trying to speak rigorously about what's actually happening.

Yeah, that's why the "verify" bit is so important.

It's a bit parochial to hear someone in the twenty-first century describe honesty as a particularly Christian value. You do know you're talking to the whole world here? Most human cultures have valued honesty to a similar degree. Even many animal communities value honesty.

Religion has historically and continues to play a major role in geopolitics... there's nothing parochial about it. The Christian belief system was objectively instrumental in the creation of the West's institutions, system of government, beliefs about trade, etc. You don't have to be religious (as I am not) for this to be true.

People, especially Americans, conflate Christianity with Western culture. But this is erroneous thinking:

1) Western liberal values are not co-extensive with Christianity. Christianity is geographically much larger. This has been true historically, and even more true today with the rise of Christian nations like South Korea and various nations in Southern Africa.

2) Western liberal values came to predominate in Europe centuries, even millennia, after Europe was Christianized.

3) Many Western liberal values are easily traced to pre-Christian movements, such as Greek Stoicism.

4) The Christianity of most Western Europeans today is not the Christianity of centuries ago, let alone millennia ago. The Protestant Revolution was like a giant flask where people took Christian doctrines and mixed them together with contemporary civil and philosophical values which emerged from the Enlightenment and then the dawn of the scientific and industrial ages. It's one thing to say that Christianity was conducive to the emergence of those other phenomena; it's quite another to say that they were Christian.

1) Christianity has been a major export of the West through missionaries and colonization. It was hardly the native religion of, say, Mexico or the Philippines.

2) That's hardly a compelling case against the influence of religion on Western values. It could even be a contributor, or neutral.

3) These values were well-documented but, for whatever reason, did not spread to the Muslim or Hindu world first. Islam had its brief progressive renaissance but was not able to sustain liberal values over the long-term. There are some small exceptions - Ismaili Muslims are quite liberal - but they're a tiny fraction of the Islamic world.

4) America was essentially founded by religious zealots and/or adherents to marginalized religions. The very architecture of early America - the gothic styling of Boston, for example - is of that era and persists. You can't wipe out that kind of influence in 100 years.

I'm not saying religion is the ONLY factor, but I find it odd that people try to ignore the impact it's had on the shaping of the modern world. I'm an atheist so I view this more as a historical fact - I'm not a fan of organized religion and would be perfectly happy if it went away.

It's a problem of timing and geography. Eastern Orthodox falls under the Christian religious umbrella, but it's very different under the surface demonstrating how western culture has influenced Christianity.

The Protestant Reformation was a religious movement, but ended up importing a lot of western beliefs into Christianity. Democracy for example is a western belief, Christianity is closely tied to Kings.

Nobody is arguing that religion did not have a substantial and dramatic impact on western culture, though it's disputable whether much of that impact was at all positive, let alone a net positive.

EDIT: wahern's reply above is far better than mine. Read that one instead. I'm removing most of what I originally wrote except for this bit:

-----------

I would argue that Christianity has influenced western culture far less than western culture has influenced Christianity. And that the key benefit attributable to Christianity—insofar as it was the lucky religion which happened be closest to the people who built western civilisation—is arguably its adaptable and relatively non-invasive nature compared to many of its contemporaries.

We do have a parallel universe. Christianity and "the West" are not co-extensive. Christianity was and is much more widespread. The West emerged from a corner of the Christian universe, and what made that corner unique is readily distinguishable from Christianity. At best one could say that the Christian universe was relatively more conducive to the emergence of Western values.

For example, Christianity is tolerant of the concept that God primarily operates indirectly through physical laws, a concept which was normatively rejected early in Islam (circa 1100). Thus, Christianity was relatively more conducive to the emergence of science. But, Christianity is hardly the only religion so tolerant, so it's not like it deserves special credit in that regard. Indeed, this tolerance is sort of a fluke and really a vestige of Roman and Greek influence--influence that Muslim scholars were deliberately rejecting.

Western philosophy predates the Christian belief system. It's slightly more accurate to say Christianity was influenced by western culture than western culture was influenced by Christianity. (Though clearly adoption occurred in both directions.)

Christmas trees and holly are obvious, but compare old vs new testament and it's much deeper than that. On top of that you get the Protestant Revolution which really westernized Christianity.

They were talking about the rise of western culture, for which Christianity is the major religion.

And they were talking as if "don't trust" was the default before Christianity, which is wrong, absurd even.

Human and technological development in spite of Christianity and other religions.

I've not heard honesty considered a peculiarly Christian virtue. They're sort of orthogonal.

Perhaps you're thinking of guilt and conscience, which means people might think that not being affirmatively honest could be considered wrong. Christianity is sometimes conflated with guilt culture (which emphasizes personal conscience), but Western guilt culture comes from Greek Stoicism and it took awhile to permeate through Europe--much longer than Christianity (like millennia longer). And there are plenty of modern Christian converts (entire countries, in fact) which are devoutly Christian but absolutely have not internalized a guilt culture. Very little, if anything, about Christianity requires a guilt culture--indeed, all of the Old and much of the New Testament is perfectly consonant with a shame/honor culture.

Note that not telling the truth is not the same as lying. For example, you could choose simply not to disclosure unless asked. Also, the Abrahamic commandment, "thou shall not lie", aka "thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor", was a legal rule. Most societies have this rule. Twisting it into a personal moral rule about how you go about your daily life is a result of our guilt-based culture which, again, is separate from Christianity, per se.

Barring the Christianity angle, I strongly agree. Trust is a very powerful optimization that humans have figured out. It gives us absurd efficiencies across the board - because without it, we have to add lots of complexity to verify things, and then some more to patch loopholes.

That's why I'm suspicious of technologies and systems that are meant to be trustless. They seem like a step in the wrong direction.

Human values are not derived from religion; religions are built around existing value systems - to the point of misappropriating them.

Rational arguments are not derived from gonvaled; gonvaled is built around existing rational arguments - to the point of misappropriating them.

Maybe you could provide an example moral value which was introduced by religion, and not appropiated from the already existing society?

There are a few problems with your request.

One, it's stated vaguely. What would qualify? Which religion, and which society? You would likely claim that there was some society somewhere which already had such a standard, and that therefore religion had nothing to do with it. It's too easy for you to dismiss any example because your requirements are not well defined.

Second, how far back are you willing to go? Go far enough back in human existence and we can't trace the provenance of a certain moral value.

Third, it depends on your existing beliefs about religion, creation, etc. If you believe that humans were created by a creator being who endowed them with certain abilities and tendencies, then who's to say whether a certain tendency was a matter of religion or society? If one believes that the tendency first came innate from our creation, and later was made explicit in revelation, was that tendency from religion or society?

On the other hand, if you believe that life happened spontaneously and that humans gradually evolved from single-cell organisms, then you have already eliminated religion as a possible source of anything, because no religion would be true, in which case everything would fall under the category of "society." (Alternatively, anyone can claim, "A god spoke to me and you should do what I say," and that would qualify as religion. In which case, I could claim that a god spoke to me, and that you should therefore believe everything I say. And then "religion" ceases to be a meaningful category, leaving us once again with only "society.")

So, as you can see, your request is not so simple, and is really just fodder for useless Internet arguments. If you want to discuss it seriously, you will have to address these matters first.

Let me further specify my request: provide a documented example of any religion (existing or disappeared) that introduced a new moral value which was not present (and documented) in the society where said religion appeared (absorbed moral value), or in societies with which said society was in contact (imported moral value). No need to go back to prehistoric periods.

This is completely orthogonal to the belief question: that is, you could perfectly believe that Jesus is the son of God, and still you will observe that all moral values introduced by Christianity were already present in the existing society.

Note: actually, to be precise, discussion with believers will always reach a point where rational discussion completely breaks down, since, by definition, humans can not understand the ways of God. At some point I will struggle to understand a situation which says the "wall is black and the wall is white", and a believer will rightly point to me that understanding this is simply over my head, and that I just need to accept it as it is.