It was trollish and I was trying to bait the OP, in the sense that it was completely off-topic and that I was suggesting the OP was an hypocrite. Which I still believe to be true. Duh. Christianity and usury? I thought it was obvious for everyone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#New_Testament

I would have liked to know how the OP solves the cognitive dissonance between his beliefs and the accepted practices of today's world. I hoped to get an intelligent answer other than the usual 'everybody does it' or 'I could not get by otherwise' fallacies.

Unfortunately, the only thing I learned is that HN threads are not to be taken off-topic. Curiosity is for the weak.

"Unfortunately, the only thing I learned is that HN threads are not to be taken off-topic."

Then you learned something that I don't believe is true. HN threads are taken off-topic all the time.

You just took this thread somewhere that most people don't believe belongs on hacker news. That's all.

Politics, religion, sports, and popular culture are areas probably better served elsewhere.

I made the mistake of saying the word "Bible" to illustrate that oppotunities can come from the least expected places. Next time I'll say, "At a group meeting..." Sorry.

>Politics, religion, sports, and popular culture are areas probably better served elsewhere.

I know it perfectly well, and usually I love HN exactly because of it, but right now I'm in too much of a bad mood to appreciate it.

I hope your bad mood is from the down votes and not anything anyone said here. I also get frustrated by downvoters who don't comment. I hope you will continue to love HN in spite of this.

Once again, I am willing to continue this discussion off-line. I think the community has made it clear that's where it belongs. This is my last post in this thread. Since I have no other way of contacting you, your move.

There are prohibitions against usury in the literature of most of the major religions. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Obviously, the contemporary versions of these religions have loosened their positions. Protestants, for example, haven't been seriously opposed to usury for centuries. Islam, however, is still opposed to it. The Muslim world has its own banking system. Would you have made the same comment if the OP hinted that he was Muslim?

I never meant to "hint" at anything. Sorry if that's what got all this started. I was just sharing antecdotes to encourage others to pound the pavement and find good gigs.

I'd be happy to fill in any missing pieces and point out some logical flaws in this thread. Offline please.

"I would have liked to know how the OP solves the cognitive dissonance between his beliefs and the accepted practices of today's world."

All you ever had to do was ask.

My email address in is my profile.

I prefer discussion on a public forum such as HN, where other people can contribute.

This continues to be a troll, but I'll bite. Hopefully in such a way that no one else has to.

Arguing from obviousness about religious beliefs? Come on, people have fought wars over the iota in homoiousious. Arguing from obviousness in interpreting a passage in the New Testament? Learn about hermeneutics. One text, many interpretations, and as many as there are people willing to approach the text authentically.

And let me give you something only a Christian would say, so you can be educated. Bible study is not an end in itself. It is a means to becoming more like Jesus, becoming closer to Jesus. So I take a dim view of arguments that purport to assume a Christian belief and the status quo, then derive a contradiction. These arguments are about the periphery of Christianity. If you want to create some cognitive dissonance, head for the center.

I read that (crappy) Wikipedia article on usury, including the strands of Christian thought that disagree with the non-interpretation of those New Testament passages in the Wikipedia. For instance, the section on the scholastics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Usury_in_scholastic_theol...

So instead of taking the reductionist appeal to obviousness and playing word games with quotations that you interpret privately, maybe you can go through the two millennia of source material on the question and offer the definitive breakdown. Send me a link to your dissertation when you're done.

More to the point, this and many other religious beliefs inhere in systems of thought, not random answers to random questions. You just asked, "When did you stop feeling cognitive dissonance about your beliefs?", and I might rightly be skeptical that you even cared about the answer.

You don't understand a religion until you understand it from the perspective of someone who lives it. You don't understand a religious belief unless you locate it in the network of beliefs, the worldview, that it belongs to. And you don't discredit a religion by raising questions about disputable matters.