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Comments that set me off were ones such as "May God have mercy on his soul." and "I am sorry. Please forgive me. Maybe then you can forgive yourself." Even the

Comments that set me off were ones such as "May God have mercy on his soul." and "I am sorry. Please forgive me. Maybe then you can forgive yourself." Even the general "Lord, let your loving kindness be upon him; you came to us first, knowing we could not reach you on our own." seems more religious than consolatory, which bugged me as I got the impression from the note that religion was the facade his family and his abuser used to present themselves as good people and rationalise their inner demons.

cookiecaper 16y ago
It's likely that many commenters on sites like Gizmodo or Huff Post read the summary and skimmed the note, and left a "generic suicide consolation". That's my guess anyway. That has little to do with the religiosity of those people, I think, it mainly just has to do with a group of people that has very little prudence about speech in general. You shouldn't set your standards too high for the unwashed; Hacker News is anathema to people that don't read, as just about everything here is wall-of-text; no funny cat pictures or YouTube memes to attract the less attentive crowd, and generally no stupid political nit-picking, or anything non-business or non-compsci. Huffington Post is a content farm, essentially, and is filled with lots of distractions. It is also a home base for ideologues, with its founders and editors frequently appearing on talk shows and injecting themselves into political commentary. Much of its readership happens to be religious or Christian, just as most people you meet in the West will happen to be religious and/or Christian. Perhaps we should consider that though many of these people are leaving religiously-oriented comments, the propriety of their writing is not necessarily correlated with their religiosity so much as its correlated with other factors.

cookiecaper 16y ago

It's likely that many commenters on sites like Gizmodo or Huff Post read the summary and skimmed the note, and left a "generic suicide consolation". That's my guess anyway. That has little to do with the religiosity of those people, I think, it mainly just has to do with a group of people that has very little prudence about speech in general. You shouldn't set your standards too high for the unwashed; Hacker News is anathema to people that don't read, as just about everything here is wall-of-text; no funny cat pictures or YouTube memes to attract the less attentive crowd, and generally no stupid political nit-picking, or anything non-business or non-compsci. Huffington Post is a content farm, essentially, and is filled with lots of distractions. It is also a home base for ideologues, with its founders and editors frequently appearing on talk shows and injecting themselves into political commentary. Much of its readership happens to be religious or Christian, just as most people you meet in the West will happen to be religious and/or Christian. Perhaps we should consider that though many of these people are leaving religiously-oriented comments, the propriety of their writing is not necessarily correlated with their religiosity so much as its correlated with other factors.