Talk:Alt.atheism

About the external links
alt-atheism.org is the "official" (as such goes on Usenet) website of the newsgroup. I host and maintain the site so it's technically "mine" but if anyone is worried about potential self-promotion, they can check with the regulars on the newsgroup to confirm alt-atheism.org is the recognized group site. It is, definitely, the location of the official FAQ maintained by Michelle Malkin.

--Mark K. Bilbo 15:04, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Minor corrections and changes
There was a semi-colon preceeding the list of alt.atheism sub-groups; I replaced it with a colon.

The line about Satanic child abuse was rewritten to point to the article on Satanic ritual abuse, as the "specific cases" section deals mostly with alleged abuse towards children. The word "children" in the edit now points to the "child abuse" article.

No mention is made that alt.atheism.moderated has been down for well over a year.

"Subgroups" and such
It's not really accurate to say alt.atheism (or any Usenet newsgroup) is "subdivided" into other groups. Even though they may be arranged heirarchically, they act as independent groups. Also added that alt.atheism.moderated has apparently been abandoned. It's discussed sporadically on alt.atheism but nobody seems overly concerned about having a moderated group again.

Finally, I'm not sure it's quite appropriate but I'm pleading special circumstances. I host the newsgroup's website and live just outside the Katrina disaster area. I took the site down for the evacuation (and pulled hard drives like crazy) and the machine has been flaky since. I doubt the site will be up this year. Things are, well, difficult since Katrina visited. Mark K. Bilbo 03:48, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

NPOV
I think that the first sentence in the last section is very POV, by claiming that only fundamentalists would protest alt.atheism. The sentence seems very loaded to make people think ill of thiests. Lord of Light 22:02, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. My experience with alt.atheism is many years out of date, but when I did read it regularly (around 1993), the most disruptive influence was in fact from Christian fundamentalists. If that continued, then their identification as such is simply factual. However, I wouldn't call what they did "trolling". It usually started as honest proselytizing, followed by heated argument and/or extended debate when they were not taken seriously. This was disruptive, and off-charter (though those debates were precisely what I liked about alt.atheism), but it wasn't trolling. 83.216.23.130 18:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the sentence lacks NPOV. It mentions that most of the people who've been trolling the site are fundamentalists. This is not an opinion, it's just a fact.--Orthologist 13:53, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm on alt.atheism now and it's true there's a lot of trolling by fundamentalists. Interestingly enough, the number of Muslim proselytizers is on the upswing in recent years. Mark K. Bilbo 01:25, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Looks pretty clear that there's no NPOV problem with that section, so I'm going to remove the NPOV tag. (If there are additional fundamentalists causing lots of trouble, they can be added separately.) CSWarren 01:17, 13 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually if the purpose of the group is to promote atheism then it should welcome those who disagree and debate with them, not make fun of them or call them names. It its purpose is to be a social club for atheists (nothing wrong with that) then outsiders are trolls. Steve Dufour (talk) 16:42, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

I finally tracked down my original announcement of the newsgroup
For those of you who have been hounding me for decades to document the date of creation and the identity of the creator. Here you go. 2/6/1990 was when I issued the newgroup command for alt.atheism, and I tracked down a copy of my announcement of same in alt.pagan using Google Groups. Enjoy. =brian Bhawthorne (talk) 05:23, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

And, yes, I have changed my last name since then. Actually, I changed it in August of 1990! Bhawthorne (talk) 05:24, 15 January 2016 (UTC)