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!
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 :)