sych

hummm ... why does a technical website devote its time to religious debate?

Have you read slashdot much?

Each "story" posted also has a discussion forum, and people basically get in there and discuss anything and everything, often not all that related to the original topic (but usually having stemmed from it somehow). It's rare for a story not to get at least 300 comments on it, and there are about a dozen stories every day... so that's a lot of discussion.

This particular "story" was actually about a comment on a previous story being taken down because someone, for fun/stupidity/i-dont-know-what/ pasted the text of some scientology rubbish into their comment and clicked "submit". Subsequently, lawyers working for Scientology found the text, wrote a cease-and-decist letter, and slashdot (for the first time in its history, purportedly) removed the comment. They then wrote a new story explaining why they'd removed the comment, which is where the religion discussion started.

But really, this could have occurred on almost any slashdot story. It usually goes from a discussion on Microsoft -vs- something else, to the merits of free (libre) software, possibly to software licences, to patents, to politics, to philosophy, to religion, to flame-wars, etc. It's rather entertaining :)

oh. right. the advent of forum flaming.

i do admit that i do not read slashdot much. but if its a forum like you said, then it does reminds of the soc.culture.singapore newsgroup, back when i still actively participate in it.

for every minor altercation, people seemed ready to jump the gun and opine their own dogmas and agendas.

for now, i just read news from the RSS feed on Livejournal, although mostly they are from ZDnet, hence, I can always see the microsoft-flaming contingent. haha.