I'm the Canadian who was detained by ICE for two weeks

>I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me. She had never seen a Canadian there before. When I told her my story, she grabbed my hand and said: “Do you believe in God?”

>“I believe God brought you here for a reason,” she said. “I know it feels like your life is in a million pieces, but you will be OK. Through this, I think you are going to find a way to help others.”

You've got to be fucked in the head to think this is an appropriate thing to do as an agent that's part of a federal process. Keep your god out of work!

America has always been a theocracy under a veneer of democracy. She's lucky she didn't get renamed to Offred.

yeah no it hasn't

"Servers must be strict in expression and loose on interpretation" (RFCs); "Respond to the best possible interpretation" (guidelines)...

That person was apparently trying to be humane, in her own personal way. Possibly ingenuous, probably in good faith and intention.

Technically, that's not what the separation clause is about. That was not, however, professional behavior for a nurse, but I see extremely religious nurses on the reg. Much less so with doctors, but then again religiosity is inversely proportional to education.

Yeah, I was thinking what would have I, an atheist, said in that situation. "There are five lights" indeed.

Superstition can be inversely proportional to education. Cultivation should be proportional to education.

That term you used is very slippery (actually, you used it as the opposite of a "superstition" - you gave it only the interpretation typical of later uses).

> Keep your god out of work!

That is very easy to type from the comfort of your home on your mobile phone.

After several days of deprivations and hardships, including sleeping in a fully-lighted cold cell without even a blanket, you will get any help and support that you can get.

As an atheist, I too stopped and re-read that particular section to think how I felt about it.

In the end, we don't know the motivation of the nurse. Could be that the nurse isn't even religious herself, which is why she asked if Mooney believed in god first, and since Mooney said she does, the nurse tried to help her mentally in a way that spoke to her. If Mooney said she didn't believe in god, the nurse might have said something else.

I say this because as an atheist who used to work in elder-care, I've had many conversations with very religious old people, where I "play their game" because they respond better to it, and seemed happy about it. Even if I don't believe in god, talking with people as if I did, just makes sense in situations where people seemed to have lost all hope.

Isn't the bible involved in the whole inauguration part? Besides, candidates routinely discuss their faith, and "In God We Trust" appears on the currency.

Edit: Hah, I just realized that congressional sessions open with prayer as well. Not sure what other countries does this?

Proselytizing isn't help. A mentally ill woman shrieking about a wizard who lives in the sky isn't support.

The entire country of France manages to have government workers that don't talk to you about their god just fine

Freedom of religion means you get to choose which sect of Christianity you worship, and if you're quiet about it you're allowed to be Jewish.

And they make great baguettes. But you didn't get my point.

I am an atheist. I do think that what the nurse did is wrong and unprofessional.

My point is: I would still have absolutely clinged to it, if I was in the same situation as this woman. I would have talked with this nurse, and would have told her that yes, maybe God had something to do with it. And you would have too, probably.

If you are drowning in the ocean, you don't discard a piece of floating wood because it has growing fungi. Claiming virtue is very easy ... until you experience real hardship.

Perhaps, but you would not have said that to her if you were there.

I absolutely would have. I don't need the support of an imaginary friend when facing oppressive customs laws.

Only because that person is an implicit threat, not because they are helping. My first thought would be akin to "oh fuck, the lizard people are here now."

Coincidentally or not, this is a standard cult brainwashing technique - abuse someone for an extended period, then offer them a "friend."

See also, good cop vs bad cop.

Just wait until you see the two huge fasces in the House Chamber.

if your takeaway from this article is that the most objectionable thing was that somebody gave her some religious encouragement but only after first making sure she was actually religious, then I feel like you are giving the rest of us atheists a really bad name.

And yet, it gave her great comfort. Perhaps she knows her job better than you?

It's really a way for her to externalize the responsibility to blow the whistle on the injustice she sees, enables, and takes part in: In the mind of that nurse, God is in control, so she doesn't have to feel guilty that she's complicit in illegal activities because it must all somehow be part of God's masterful, inscrutable, but absolutely, by definition "good" plan.

The quotes from this comment suggest the nurse was trying to use her position to evangelize to Mooney, but that's clearly not the case when you read Mooney's full account. The nurse was clearly trying to comfort a person in distress. That's part of a nurse's job. "God brought you here for a reason" is not a line that would comfort me but it was evidently comforting to Mooney by her own account, so I'd say the nurse read the room accurately and did the best she could given the terrible situation and her position in it.

Christianity is a popular religion in Mexico, and most of the people that nurse has dealt with recently are probably facing potential deportation back to Mexico. There isn't much you can say to comfort a person in that situation. Appeals to faith could reasonably be one of the few methods the nurse has to offer comfort. That's certainly better than the nurse being cold and uncaring.

Or maybe I'm just "fucked in the head".

Missing context from Mooney's account:

> I told her I had only recently found God, but that I now believed in God more than anything.

> At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. She asked if she could pray for me. I held her hands and wept. I felt like I had been sent an angel.

where is this guideline text from? Want to explore, tx.

The thing is, I know that you are not that kind of übermen. Because übermen don't waste their valuable time on Hacker News :).

You're making a lot of unfair assumptions about this nurse. It's certainly possible that the nurse was a callus asshole who used her faith as justification for her actions. It's also very possible that the nurse was a sympathetic individual who didn't have the power to get Mooney out of her situation but did her best to comfort Mooney despite it.

If it's the latter, I think I'd prefer to have more people like her involved with immigration in the United States - not less.

Fully agree. It's abhorrent. It works, because we are human.

Telling someone in a seemingly hopeless situation that there is a high probability that things will get better because their imaginary friend is more powerful than the machinations of a despotic state is actually preferable to telling them that there's no imaginary friend and nobody is coming to save them. It's a common enough theme in prison camp survival autobiographies.

The so-called "logical" thing to tell them in this hypothetical scenario is not the optimal thing, so maybe it's not the most logical thing to say/do.

The bible is involved at the behest of the inauguree; we've had christian presidents, and so they've largely sworn in on the bible. John Quincy Adams used a book of laws, and Coolidge didn't use a book at all (there are a couple others, but they were unintentional).

Likewise, the US prayer is non-denominational (it typically is monotheistic though). Ireland, Canada, South Africa, and the UK also have parliamentary prayers.

UK currency often features the letters "D.G.", which are the initials to a latin phrase meaning "by the grace of God", but other European currency references to God have ended with the switch to the Euro.

The US certainly has above average entanglement of religiosity and governance, but hardly in a sense that makes it a theocracy. Politicians talking about faith and God is a very different thing from, eg, the country being run by the pope.

No, I meant religiosity:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/04/26/in-america-d...

I don't think it takes a special kind of person to not be comforted by the imaginary when facing an uncaring machine ready to devour them.

It is also clear that Mooney had already "found God," so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about for this woman to affirm her beliefs in this context. Politics aside, this woman was clearly a comfort to her in a very difficult time. Why anyone would begrudge someone comfort in such a situation is beyond me. It strikes me as a type of cruelty or even sadism.

? You have been here for a while, of course I meant

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I got confused on some words in my memory during the rush, sorry.

Did you understand any different reference?

Yes, sorry, of course you meant that aspect. But the term remains too slippery, too far away from its real content - as can be apparent already in the stats you mention: first of all they are about a public expression, which are reasonably lower in some demographics for more reasons, and secondly they conflate very different phenomena (such as a very ambiguous idea of attributed "importance" vs the subscription to some dogmatic details).

There are also other reasons why you see different behaviours in doctors and nurses: already linguistically, the "nurse" "nourishes", the "doctor" remains the "learned" - one has a direct rapport, the other detached, out of the basic role construed. It just follows that the nurse more probably consoles and the doctor more probably communicates flatly.

>their imaginary friend is more powerful than the machinations of a despotic state

This is the sort of thing that makes a lot of sense if you have an imaginary friend but sounds a little deranged if you don't.

no but other countries don't invoke the bible all the time when debating laws.

>America has always been a theocracy under a veneer of democracy.

Describes every govt out there.

Why would you think it's the most objectionable thing? How likely is it that somebody exists who would even think that?

There were already 190+ comments when I wrote mine. I don't write comments if there's already one that expressed the same thought