I think what people are objecting to is the "rise in its place" narrative.
It's one thing to say "I'd like to move away to another place with more like-minded people" or even "I'd like to influence my country to align better with my own values". Great. Those are both pretty uncontroversial, non-extremist opinions. It's a whole other kettle of fish to believe "My country/city should be replaced by one composed of exclusively like-minded people." Particularly problematic if by like-minded people, you mean followers of a particular religion.
There's really nothing in the guidelines about that. The closest is: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." In the comment you replied to, I wasn't doing battle, I was correcting a misconception. That should help curiosity and discourage flamebait.
I have been very careful to not personally attack anyone that attacked me in this thread so as to not create a battle. And it worked; I received valid criticisms, did something about them, and did my best to cool the thread down by myself because I didn't see you doing anything about it. (Which I get; you're busy.)
Dan, do you really want me to sit by while people attack me and you do nothing for nigh on a day? If so, I reserve the right to defend myself if I do it carefully, and I did.
But it seems that controversy just seems to follow me even if I never allude to anything controversial, so my very existence on this website seems to "feed this." Because of that, you and Hacker News may be better off banning me. If you do, please ban me fully; there's no reason to do a shadowban because I'll accept your decision gracefull and won't come back with different accounts.
This thread turned into a miserable religious flamewar. Absolutely you should not be feeding that.
I scolded the people who attacked you worse than I scolded you, but you're also responsible for taking this thread way offtopic and into flamewar hell.
There are other relevant guidelines, including "Eschew flamebait" and "Avoid generic tangents."
I don't want to ban you, I just want you to follow HN's rules the same way we want everyone else to. It's nothing personal.
Your comment broke the site guidelines either way. If it helps all, I can rephrase the moderation reply like this: Please stop calling names and/or posting flamewar comments to HN, regardless of how nuts something is or you feel it is.
I don't think this distinction makes much difference in this case. It's clear which person people thought was the "religious zealot" and were ganging up on. He also broke the site guidelines badly, of course.
