There's a small cluster of people who seem to think that, every time religion is mentioned, it's important to jump in and make negative comments no matter what the original topic is (and, on some sites, a small cluster of people who seem to think it's a good time to try to convert people.) The thing is, those comments (on both sides) are generally boring and unenlightening, two things we don't like to see on Hacker News.
The idea that a group is digitizing a whole bunch of ancient documents is interesting and has potentially deep intellectual consequences for people interested in researching the topics covered in the ancient documents as well as for those interested in other ancient documents that might be digitized using the knowledge gained from this project.
Kvetching about how harmful religion X is or was in the past is boring. Nobody in this thread has said anything genuinely new or insightful; you can hear these exact sentiments just by making a religious comment in a semi-public way (with a large group of friends, on FaceBook, etc.) On other sites they might provoke a flamewar, but here on HN we prefer comments to be thought-provoking. We downvote flamebait. Consider it a signal from the HN community: make more thoughtful and worthwhile contributions.
There's a small cluster of people who seem to think that, every time religion is mentioned, it's important to jump in and make negative comments no matter what the original topic is (and, on some sites, a small cluster of people who seem to think it's a good time to try to convert people.) The thing is, those comments (on both sides) are generally boring and unenlightening, two things we don't like to see on Hacker News.
The idea that a group is digitizing a whole bunch of ancient documents is interesting and has potentially deep intellectual consequences for people interested in researching the topics covered in the ancient documents as well as for those interested in other ancient documents that might be digitized using the knowledge gained from this project.
Kvetching about how harmful religion X is or was in the past is boring. Nobody in this thread has said anything genuinely new or insightful; you can hear these exact sentiments just by making a religious comment in a semi-public way (with a large group of friends, on FaceBook, etc.) On other sites they might provoke a flamewar, but here on HN we prefer comments to be thought-provoking. We downvote flamebait. Consider it a signal from the HN community: make more thoughtful and worthwhile contributions.