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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
> 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”
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
> even though that seems paradoxical to many of us
I think the only people in denial about it were those who view evangelical values as something other than the standing in the schoolhouse door values they demonstrated for centuries.
This seems like a common pattern: someone writes about sociopathic excesses of MAGA, but without sufficient empathy and respect, and the writer becomes responsible for the sociopathic excesses.
The article could definitely be more professional and mature. But something seems wrong with blaming people who are horrified by bad behavior for the bad behavior.
Would you ever excused leftist, feminist or atheist from massive hypocrisy or fraud with "conservatives are talking with disdain about them, therefore they have no moral agency"? And being from conservative environment, things that were being said about left, feminists, democrats were widely insulting for years.
Plus, you mean, any criticism or anyone pointing out hypocrisy or frauds or lies? As in, we all need to pretend these people never do wrong, because otherwise they might turn berserk? The same people who scorn and mock frequently and regularly need to be treated with niceties they never awarded to own opponent? They are at MAGA camp, because their values are compatible with MAGA, because they don't mind any of what Trump does.
If a compliment is all that it takes for you to reject your claimed morals, you never had them. And to credit of democrats, but Musk and Trump tried to get power through that camp first. They tried to take progressive cloak to get power and again, to credit of progressives, their hypocrisy was noted. That Christian right embraced those people does not imply they are victims, they are perpetrators.
> 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"
Imagine saying this on the thread of an article that is literally about people using their faith to justify artifact smuggling and other crimes. The disrespect was entirely brought on by their insanely shitty and sociopathic behavior. Their faith isn't what is causing them to be disrespected. It's their behavior.
Aside from what I called out in my sibling comment these two are pretty snide:
"A fortune built on the sales of sewing notions and glitter has paid for many of the country’s most influential megachurches and scriptures delivered to the most remote corners of the world. A careful calculation of potential proselytized souls drives every financial decision."
"Perhaps the Greens, in their inexperience, did not understand the magnitude of their actions. Perhaps the Greens just didn’t care. Maybe when you believe that human souls are on the line, it’s easy to unshackle yourself to the ethical and legal trade guidelines that shackle secular academics. Maybe the money saved and the ancient items procured were powerful enough to make the risk worthwhile. "
> What exactly do you find "snide" or "sarcastic?"
I haven't read the article, but certainly the phrase "whose entire schtick" doesn't belong in journalism that purports not to be sarcastic or snide. That's the kind of thing that goes in a Tumblr post.
It singlehandedly has held back the world for centuries, caused the suffering and death of millions if not billions.
It's completely made up, thousands of years before anyone knew anything about anything and then as science is learned the world is bent to its superstitions and not the other way around because it can never ever change because some ignorant dude said so way back when.
The only way religion survives is indoctrination, it makes ZERO sense to anyone who learns to apply the smallest amount of logic to it.
And Christianity might be the very worst of all abrahamic-rooted nonsense because it basically stole all it's practices and beliefs from every other religion at the time.
They didn't have microscopes, telescopes or even eyeglasses but yet not only do they insist on somehow knowing a specific exact god but all the rules and why such an all powerful being would give a damn about anything.
It's control, manipulation and very often a profit seeking scam.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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?
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.
I was waiting to read how it was possible that Green might have kicked a puppy or drown some kittens.
- 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.
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.
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...
https://substack.com/@meghanboilard/note/c-102976235?
>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?
> 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
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.
Dead Comment
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.)
Jesus never opposed "capitalism" in secular life.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I think the only people in denial about it were those who view evangelical values as something other than the standing in the schoolhouse door values they demonstrated for centuries.
Deleted Comment
The article could definitely be more professional and mature. But something seems wrong with blaming people who are horrified by bad behavior for the bad behavior.
Plus, you mean, any criticism or anyone pointing out hypocrisy or frauds or lies? As in, we all need to pretend these people never do wrong, because otherwise they might turn berserk? The same people who scorn and mock frequently and regularly need to be treated with niceties they never awarded to own opponent? They are at MAGA camp, because their values are compatible with MAGA, because they don't mind any of what Trump does.
If a compliment is all that it takes for you to reject your claimed morals, you never had them. And to credit of democrats, but Musk and Trump tried to get power through that camp first. They tried to take progressive cloak to get power and again, to credit of progressives, their hypocrisy was noted. That Christian right embraced those people does not imply they are victims, they are perpetrators.
Imagine saying this on the thread of an article that is literally about people using their faith to justify artifact smuggling and other crimes. The disrespect was entirely brought on by their insanely shitty and sociopathic behavior. Their faith isn't what is causing them to be disrespected. It's their behavior.
The thesis of TFA is that their faith motivated the crimes. You can't tell the story without talking about how they choose to practice their faith.
"A fortune built on the sales of sewing notions and glitter has paid for many of the country’s most influential megachurches and scriptures delivered to the most remote corners of the world. A careful calculation of potential proselytized souls drives every financial decision."
"Perhaps the Greens, in their inexperience, did not understand the magnitude of their actions. Perhaps the Greens just didn’t care. Maybe when you believe that human souls are on the line, it’s easy to unshackle yourself to the ethical and legal trade guidelines that shackle secular academics. Maybe the money saved and the ancient items procured were powerful enough to make the risk worthwhile. "
I haven't read the article, but certainly the phrase "whose entire schtick" doesn't belong in journalism that purports not to be sarcastic or snide. That's the kind of thing that goes in a Tumblr post.
Dead Comment
It singlehandedly has held back the world for centuries, caused the suffering and death of millions if not billions.
It's completely made up, thousands of years before anyone knew anything about anything and then as science is learned the world is bent to its superstitions and not the other way around because it can never ever change because some ignorant dude said so way back when.
The only way religion survives is indoctrination, it makes ZERO sense to anyone who learns to apply the smallest amount of logic to it.
And Christianity might be the very worst of all abrahamic-rooted nonsense because it basically stole all it's practices and beliefs from every other religion at the time.
They didn't have microscopes, telescopes or even eyeglasses but yet not only do they insist on somehow knowing a specific exact god but all the rules and why such an all powerful being would give a damn about anything.
It's control, manipulation and very often a profit seeking scam.
Dead Comment
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?
For some stores it's part of the charm.
People deflecting in this thread are either ignorant or also batshit crazy and should be ignored.
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.
And, as mentioned in the article, point five would be that they're effectively using this as a tax avoidance loophole.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/hobby-lobby-settles-3-mill...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal
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.
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal
No innuendo.
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.
Virtual tour: https://museumandgallery.org/tour/
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.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43426885