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Their only way of providing 'evidence' for an Intelligent Designer is fallacious at best [2]. Like all creationists, they can only provide bad faith arguments of ignorance and the god of the gaps. They can't even differentiate between what is 'designed' and what is 'natural', what's worse, they think everything is designed in the first place.
Let's say the modern synthesis of the theory of evolution is wrong, and the evidence put forth is wrong (160+ years of evidence.) If this were the case, neither creationism nor intelligent design is suddenly the alternative.
Intelligent design does not have any scientific merit. It does not explain anything about the abundance of evidence we actually have. It cannot make predictions, nor can it be falsified. It's a worthless unscientific mess that should have been put to rest many times over by now.
If there was ever evidence of 'design', that's evidence of 'design', not evidence of a designer. Before anything, you would first have to meet the burden of proof on the designer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-flaws-in-intell...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: We've had to ask you this kind of thing many times before - here's a small sample:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29916978 (Jan 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687837 (Dec 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578435 (June 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578417 (June 2020)
Edit 2: It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political and ideological (and religious) battle. We ban accounts that do this. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended. That means for curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest.
Now, what the above is, it is pointing out an organized disinformation campaign, which uses religious beliefs for its purposes. I’m pretty sure that fighting propaganda used to be part of the hacker ethos. And we’re not going to solve this problem by pretending this particular propaganda somehow deserves anyone’s respect or that it is any different from others. Would you be opposed to comments against antivax theories? If not - can you explain where do you see the difference?
Also, I can’t help but notice that while comments that are openly racist are widely tolerated here, pointing it out is an “ideological battle” - as evidenced by your own examples above. Don’t you find it a bit… curious? I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person frustrated with it.
It has to do with inflaming discussion to the point where people angrily hurl talking points and attacks at each other. That's far removed from the curious conversation, respectful across differences, that we want here.
This is not a difficult concept for anyone familiar with internet threads. Moreover, the ways that you've been breaking the site guidelines are not borderline cases. Please just fix this.
Pointing fingers at the bad behavior of others doesn't seem relevant to this point. You've been breaking HN's rules badly for a long time now. If you first fix this, and then have something to say about other people's bad behavior, or about moderation failures, I'd be happy to address it.
By the way, you've also posted lots of good comments that are perfectly within the site guidelines. I appreciate that, and I definitely don't want to ban you. Unfortunately, bad comments do more damage than good comments add value; plus they add to existential risk (since the default fate of most internet forums is self-destruction, sooner or later). So we need to do something about the bad comments.
After I fix it, what should I do next time I encounter a racist comment? Should I just pretend it’s not there?
And no, I don’t believe the natural fate of forums is self-destruction. We have plenty of examples showing otherwise, from Usenet to 4chan to the entire scientific publication system. The fate of every _commercial_ forum is self-destruction, because it self-regulates into something that doesn’t quite align with the commercial owner’s best interest, because it’s different from users’ best interest - and it appears that this problem can only be toned down, but not fixed in a sustainable way. An example of this is the vast majority of current startup culture.
You're changing the subject a bit, though, because most of the abusive comments you've posted here have nothing to do with that scenario.
Did you warn users who posted “abusive comments” towards covid denialists or flat earthers?
If you're asking whether we moderate, scold, and ban other accounts that break the site guidelines, regardless of which views they're for or against, the answer is certainly.
That does't mean we catch every case, but that's because we don't come close to reading everything that gets posted here. There's far too much.
Re "politically incorrect to you": every politically passionate user who gets moderated here feels like the mods must secretly be conniving with the other side. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... This perception is a function of political passion. People either don't notice the cases going the other way, or discount them.
I don’t feel like you’re “with the other side” - of course your interests here are different than mine, but that’s orthogonal. What I do feel is that certain topics - like the fringe theories on religion and politics - are a taboo here. And that’s a problem, because same way you can’t understand computer architecture without at least general grasp on manufacturing, or the fashionable web technologies without understanding the startup business model, the same way you can’t understand the world without understanding the forces governing it - including the pathological cases, which appear to be a taboo here.
Don’t you think enforcing taboos goes against the hacker ethos?