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.
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.
