Poll: Atheist, Deist, Theist?

I'm sorry I have to disagree with the fundamental assumption of your argument.

Polls like this one attract new people and change the community.

Any one article will not profoundly change HN, but a steady stream will over time do just that.

And then HN will not be interesting any more.

Count me as an agnostic theist. I believe that there has to be something or someone responsible for our existence, and this entity is therefore at least minimally interested in the progress of our population, and that we simply lack the ability to fully comprehend how the universe works within the confines of our existence. Whether this relates directly to the Christian God that I was raised to believe in is not within my power to understand.

I find it far simpler that some entity has created our existence as it is, rather than our existence merely having spawned from a nothingness for no reason and by no creator.

I also know that this also pulls in the argument of "if our universe was created by an entity, then who or what created that entity?" To that I simply say point to my initial belief that there is likely a proper explanation for both the entity and our existence, but that it is beyond our capability to comprehend or reason about it.

So because one cannot disprove X, then "the whole universe is X"?

The guidelines of hacker news say that any topic that piques one's intellectual curiosity is allowable. In that light, I am disappointed that the moderators have decided to mark dead anything that has to do with religion, since Hacker News is one of the few sites where the populace has the intellectual maturity to handle the topic. For example, there was a recent high-quality comment thread on a religious topic that got my synapses firing (you might need show dead on to see it):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469620

Now the article was admittedly of low quality compared to the discussion, so maybe that is why it was dead-ed. Then again, maybe pg just fears that allowing religious topics will eventually erode the overall quality of Hacker News. Dead-ing topics is certainly his prerogative. However, I would prefer that he make such policies explicit.

As something that is part of the life of most people on earth, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand religion if we also want to understand our customers, bosses, relatives, and leaders. It seems to me that an intelligent study of religion should be undertaken by any intellectually curious human.

This is the stupidest thing you've ever posted and you should be ashamed of yourself. There are plenty of other sites where you can wallow in junior-high level discussion and polls about off topic subjects. These types of posts encourage stupid people to comment, contain no useful or interesting information, and bring out the worst in smart people.

The religion and "meta" discussions of late have polluted the /newcomments link to the point where it is almost useless. The lame thing is that even if the post is marked dead, you still get the inane discussion from the bozos who don't know or don't care that the original post is dead.

My suggestions for technical improvements are removing comments on dead posts from newcomments and raising the karma for posting topics about religion to 10000+.