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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

It's obviously great from a business perspective, you found a niche and you're serving a community's needs. Kudos for being a smart startup. It's also funny if Ryan isn't actually Muslim... lol.

But I mean elephant in the room, I don't like religious institutions or traditional societal norms based in religion, any religion. Goes without saying but it's all on the way out anyways, since we now know magical people who live in the sky or magical books full of the truth of magical people are not actual things, and it's ultimately dividing us, if even just opportunity cost of the world we could build together if there were no magic people making you feel content with how things are, or making you think of some other group as 'others'. So yeah, I don't agree with the app on that level. Sorry to be preachy, since HN is basically my self-indulgent fun of the day when I'm procrastinating from work.

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Religious flamewar, which this counts as, is always off topic and particularly not allowed on Hacker News. Nothing good can, or ever does, come of it. So would you please not post like this again?

I respect your work as a moderator dang, but when it has a healthy amount of upvotes and is just bluntly stating that religion is not going to be around in the future, I find that pretty sad that it's being censored. I did not speak in a respectful manner towards religion, granted, which I don't feel great about, but at the same time I don't really believe religious institutions deserve our respect because of the opportunity costs I listed. Is this view really 'starting a flamewar'? Would someone like Richard Dawkins or really even any of the primary authors of the French Enlightenment be allowed to participate on HN?

Your views against religion seem as dogmatic as any religious views I've heard.

You say you worry about religion dividing us but use language aimed to offend people of all faiths. Many of those people would offer you more respect than your offering them.

And many would not? Do people who don't like religious institutions have an obligation to be more respectful than the average person or else their arguments are invalid?

I think they have exactly the same obligation to be respectful. I'm religious, but if this had been a thread about an atheist dating site I wouldn't have commented like you did, and if another religious person did I'd have been just as critical of them.

You are correct many would not, but you get to choose what group you emulate. Personally I'd prefer to be respectful where possible.

And no being disrespectful doesn't invalidate your argument. But it does cause division, something you didn't seem to want.

I used to agree with you, then I read sapiens and it introduced me into the importance of religion in human development and society.

That's funny because if you look at my recent past comments, one is a review on Sapiens. It's a very preachy low-citation work whose interesting parts are the early chapters, but which you would already know the content of if you had taken a college anthropology class.

To address your argument, there is no reason to emulate our pre-historical past, if we even could.

  >> "we now know"

That's what "they" say as well. There isn't a thing such as universal truth, because so much depends on the point of view.

Also, you can simply move magical people from the sky further into the stars.

And did you know that Einstein was a believer? That helped me to cross the threshold of tolerance.

Nobody cares about your opinion on religions. HN is not the place for this.

> Sorry to be preachy

Then don't.

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