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, which he didn't do, or even remotely hint at, they still would. It's just the common way of addressing death. Most people are religious.
The problem here is that these things are not disrespectful for individual Christians to say, but they are inappropriate for Christians 'as a group' to say. The group should stfu and take a long hard look at their shortcomings as a group. You don't get to address this guys death in your religious way, if you don't address the religious ways that caused his death. If there is anyone in the position to get fundamentalist Christians to change their ways, it's the moderate Christians. But I don't hear them speak out against, on religious grounds, against the extreme, religiously inspired, stuff that gets shouted around by national celebrities that get to keep televising that propaganda for decades. Instead, everyone expects the atheists to carry the burden of moderating the extremists, who are naturally much less eficient at that. To add insult to injury, in the public debate moderate Christians continuously choose the side of the fundamentalists when push comes to shove. I continuously moderate the quacks in my scientific family; you moderate yours, damnit.
A fallacy that could not be used if Muslims openly and harshly criticised their fundamentalist brothers, instead of remaining silent and ocasionally nodding in agreement when others are described as unworthy, because that feeling is most fundamental and hardest to overcome. The core of what binds people together is the united enemy and appeals to hating the enemy are easy. At least they have the excuse that most of them are usually being repressed, by the government or the direct social community, and don't dare voice their opinion.
Moderate American Christians, on the other hand, could easily wipe out the ridiculous overpresence of fundamentalist Christians on national television. This is assuming the majority actually consists of moderate Christians. If that assumption is false, then the feelings of nopassrecover are justified by appeal to the probability that the commenters are actually the type of people that are guilty of this mans death.
Thanks for making my point for me. Yep. That's one thing that could make things better for American Muslims. If they'd just change their behavior, just a little bit.
American Muslims are a minority, who can hardly be expected to change the public perception of 'Islam', which depends on what millions of foreign Muslims say or do. Those foreign Muslims have a hard time being moderate and because of that my appeal to Christians does not equally apply to them. The American Christian majority has both power and freedom of speech. They're just not using it efficiently to shut down the blowhards that keep hijacking 'Christianity'.
I admit it's a fine line between what I'm trying to argue and the 'guilt by association' fallacy, but the difference is the answer to the question: how responsible is a powerful majority subgroup for taking action against the minority leading the group, when the majority subgroup is suffering from that leadership, because members of the majority subgroup are being held accountable for opinions and decisions of the leadership that they don't even agree with? Humans use fallacious reasoning and pointing that out doesn't change a thing about that. Taking away the origin of the fallacy does change a thing and makes the world a bit better. I'm not committting the fallacy in my argument: I'm just pointing out that others will commit the fallacy, which is an unchangeable fact of human nature the majority subgroup should better acknowledge.
"If there is anyone in the position to get fundamentalist Christians to change their ways, it's the moderate Christians. But I don't hear them speak out against, on religious grounds, against the extreme ..."
Believe me, we try and if you came to my church you'd probably our pastor speak out against Mr. Zeller's type
I'm not sure what public debate you're referring to
> "I don't hear them speak out against, on religious grounds, against the extreme, religiously inspired, stuff that gets shouted around by national celebrities"
Moderate Christians pretty routinely criticize Christian extremists, just like moderate agnostic/atheists routinely criticize their extremists. Last time Pat Robertson made a stupid comment that I heard about, about a third of my Christian friends on facebook used direct quotes of the Bible to contradict him, and nobody said anything in support of him.
If you live in a bubble, you only see the other side's extremists, and therefore come to the mistaken belief that their moderates are silent or nonexistent. The solution is not to criticize the moderates for being insufficiently loud; it's to spend more time actually listening to the moderates.
about a third of my Christian friends on facebook used
direct quotes of the Bible to contradict him
Yes. In the meantime, Fox news is still claiming the position of national spokeschannel for Christianity.
it's to spend more time actually listening to the moderates.
The problem is that I'm not the one that needs to be convinced by the moderates. The moderates need to take action to reach those, such as the parents of Bill Zeller, that actually need convincing.
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 abuser used to present themselves as good people and rationalise their inner demons.
It's likely that many commenters on sites like Gizmodo or Huff Post read the summary and skimmed the note, and left a "generic suicide consolation". That's my guess anyway.
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.
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, which he didn't do, or even remotely hint at, they still would. It's just the common way of addressing death. Most people are religious.