Literally nobody is saying this reduces culpability. What he is saying is this isn't a unique thing to religion, Catholicism, clerical celibacy, etc.

Nobody seems to randomly bring up sexual abuse (and the various cover ups) of public school teachers when schools are brought up. When is the last time you saw a thread about Catholicism where it isn't brought up? The post has literally nothing to do with abuse and yet it is brought up for no reason other than to attack the Church.

If somebody did this with schools they would be down voted and told it is unrelated to the topic.

Please don't post religious flamewar comments, or any flamewar comments, to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

We've had to warn you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561153. Eventually we have to ban accounts that post like this and I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please stick to the rules from now on, we'd be grateful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Could you explain why my comment is a flamewar comment but the comment I was responding to is not?

It certainly was, but I'd already responded to that user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39220614.

When someone is breaking the site guidelines 16 times in a single thread, I can't post 16 responses, nor would readers want me to.