Yea I think this thread wasn't necessary. Cheers for bringing it up, it wasn't my intention but I agree I shouldn't have opened it like that and a lot of the followup discussion could have been avoided. I think I'll stay clear of anything touching religion as we see where that gets us. Point taken!

May I ask you though why you downvoted a bunch of my comments which I think had nothing to do with a flamewar, for example the ones in the discussion with origin_path? It must have been you because due to the age of the comments normal users are not able to downvote them anymore. I'm not saying I shouldn't be downvoted for the stuff that played into the flamewar but why the other stuff? My guess is that those also are not welcome on HN I'm just not 100% sure why or which rule these comments broke. Clarification on that would be welcome. I've duly reviewed the guidelines.

Anyways, thanks for the slap back to reality :)

Thanks for the kind replies, I know it's not pleasant to get a moderation scolding like that.

There's sort of a fuzzy line between outright flamewar and generic ideological tangents (which religious topics certainly are covered by), both of which are against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I agree that not all those exchanges were equally flamey, but I just don't think generic religious argumentation is on topic here. If you want to argue that I was a bit too indiscriminate, I'd say you may have a point :)

On the other hand, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32619634 was on topic and a really nice historical contribution to the specific topic of the thread—the point at which the discussion went generic-religious (flamewar or not) was the point at which the quality of the discussion plummeted.

I hope this helps explain things a bit!