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Comment by reylsonnick | Hacker News Reader

Religion is the Earth's cancer. I don't see how this is special apart from the fact that this person belonged to one religious belief. I hope to see rationality and logic prevail over bullshit over the short course of life left for me and my fellow earthlings.

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People who insist that religion must never be mentioned, however briefly, are just as weird to me as people who insist that every activity must involve a prayer.

Maybe I'm not being clear enough. This is a long piece about the process of grieving a lost loved one that mentions religion very briefly, at the beginning, and then never again. You apparently read the first sentence and were so overwhelmed with rage that you were compelled to assume the entire piece was just gonna be the first sentence over and over again. Try reading next time.

Generalizing, dogmatic attitudes, some of which are religious - and some of which are expressed in your comment - are harmful.

It's just as silly - and intellectually easy - to blindly condemn culture and religion as it is to blindly follow them.

There's a wonderfully epic two-part South Park episode that makes this point:

http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s10e12-go-god-go http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s10e13-go-god-go-xii

It is not silly at all to condemn silly and harmful beliefs and children indoctrination. The more I see the more convinced I am that Hitchens was right: religion poisons everything.

No religious flamewars on Hacker News, please.

One aspect of religion is belief in god, indoctrination, and so on. The other is the manual for leading a "good" life - not good as in "approved by god" but as happy, balanced, whatever. I think religion has a lot of experience with dealing with all sorts of challenges in life. I don't necessarily like all the solutions, but sometimes there is some wisdom in it.

I think to get rid of religion (which I would approve of), one shouldn't focus on the ridiculousness of believing in god. One should look at what religion provides to people, and how to replace that with something secular.

You must be an unbelievably horrible person.

Please leave HN and never come back.

Whilst I also think the parent comment is callous and stupid, I don't think your comment is called for.

HN is a great community, with smart comments and good people.

It will only stay that way if people call out bad behavior.

Especially in a case like this where someone made an account just to post such a nasty comment.

Responding to nastiness with more nastiness is the surest way to destroy HN. The way to help is to gently point out that we all need to follow the site guidelines.

Sure, but there are ways to call out behaviour and I don't think we need to descend to "FOAD" types of comments. I wasn't criticising the gist of your comment, just the way it's phrased.

Arguably, this comment wasn't worthy of a response, just a downvote and flag.

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