God link | Hacker News Reader

God link

9 pointssrtsmith13 comments

i've never considered posting here but the God post disappeared, it really struck a chord and now it feels like it was an apparition. where did it go?

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Here's the URI, for those who didn't see it: http://journal.rinich.com/post/249408496/god

It might have been deleted by whoever posted it, auto-deleted if enough people flagged it, or removed by an admin (pg, others?). I have no way of knowing, but it doesn't seem likely that it was flagged off by the community. (Even blatant spam often takes a long time to get flagged; good-faith posts don't generally seem to attract enough flags before they reach the upvote threshold and become immune.)

A moderator killed it. If you turn on 'showdead' in your profile, it's still there, it's just not displaying.

Possibly it's the title, because Hacker News has a no-religious-stories clause, but the article itself isn't remotely religious.

The article is clearly theistic. It is also long, people read the first quote and flagged it thinking you might be trying to introduce them to a theistic notion of some sort. Atheists on the internet are like that - if they weren't they'd be agnostic.

I fail to see how it's theistic. I'm an atheist myself, and in the opening segment it criticizes people who worship an actual God.

It clearly was secular humanist and not theistic at all, you just did a really good job of making the analogy to "regular" religions.

I give broad latitude for HN submissions particularly so I can pick up pieces like this. It reminded me of all the times great works of art have made me transcend the human experience. What a feeling! Wow!

I think the flagging system is terribly broken. You got whacked because of the word "God", plain and simple.

I did a 3-part series this summer "Does God Exist?" that examined the proofs for and against the existence of some sort of thing beyond our understanding. I didn't espouse a particular religious view (I really don't have any) and just tried to logically look at the debate from the point of view of being intellectually curious.

Every one of them were flagged. But I submitted all three anyway.

Keep up the good work and don't let the bastards get you down!

Also, the way to see the actual link for a dead story once it is killed is to change the URL for the story from item?id=x to edit?id=x

I posted it, I didn't remove it.

I wrote the article (noticed it was posted here because my site suddenly started getting loads of hits); by the time I saw it it was deleted.

I don't want to say if it was appropriate for HN or not, but can a moderator at least explain why it was deleted? I'm curious what in the article violated guidelines.

UPDATE: It was flagged to death by users, not moderators. Them's the breaks.

I'm getting quite tired of spam being on the new page literally for hours after being flagged but postings like this disappear in minutes.

If a moderator has killed it, especially for the reason unalone mentions, then please put it back up.

Read the article, not just the title damnit.

I agree, it's a wonderful article.

Choose a better title, damnit.

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