Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really get what you find disrespectful. Religious people generally believe that death is just a transition into a different plane. Why shouldn't a religious person be able to represent this in a comment? For the record, I read the note, and there's nothing in it that would make it inappropriate to leave a comment like "hope he is happy now" or whatever. Even if he asked people not to say this about his death,…
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…
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.