3 ms·

Sure... religious/political discussion forum

• dang 12y ago
  It's easy to see how this post is of intellectual interest and therefore in scope for HN: it's a substantive review of a scholarly work on one of the most influential texts ever written. The topic also has religious and political implications, but that doesn't make it off-topic. It does mean that we should be extra careful to post only thoughtful comments and edit out flamebait. Not every such thread degenerates, and HN has penalties for the ones that do.
  • jblow 12y ago
    Is there an underlying presumption that smart hacker-type people do not have spiritual interests? I think a lot of smart hacker-type people would disagree with that.
    • dang 12y ago
      > Is there an underlying presumption that smart hacker-type people do not have spiritual interests? It's unclear to me where you sensed that presumption—in my comment, the community, HN moderation, or some other place. My comment didn't mean to imply that. I was just writing about garden-variety flamewars—because from experience, there were flammables afoot. Such a presumption may exist in segments of the community. Personally I think it's wrong. If the corpus of HN discussions counts as evidence, it's almost certainly wrong. From an HN moderation point of view, there's no reason why spiritual and religious matters should be off-topic. They're part of the great traditions and excite intellectual curiosity just as lots of other things do. They also excite dogmatism, including unconscious dogmatism, and incivility, and those things are problematic here. So while intellectually substantive stories on those subjects are not off-topic (which is why the OP was welcome here), empirically those threads tend to violate the site guidelines more and so get penalized more.