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dark_christian
MySpace: No place for Atheists?
Submitted by august on Wed, 2008-01-30 18:09.
Contact: Bryan J. Pesta, Ph.D., b.pesta@csuohio.edu
MySpace Deletes Largest Atheist Group in the World.
Cleveland, OH.— Social networking site, MySpace.com, panders to religious intolerants by deleting atheist users, groups and content.
Early this month, MySpace again deleted the Atheist and Agnostic Group (35,000 members). This deletion, due largely to complaints from people who find atheism offensive, marks the second time MySpace has cancelled the group since November 2007.
What’s unique in this case is that the Atheist and Agnostic Group was the largest collection of organized atheists in the world. The group had its own Wikipedia entry, and in April won the Excellence in Humanist Communication Award (2007) from the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University and the Secular Student Alliance.
“MySpace refuses to undelete the group, although it never violated any terms of service,” said Bryan Pesta, Ph.D., the group’s moderator. “When the largest Christian group was hacked, MySpace’s Founder, Tom Anderson, personally restored the group, and promised to protect it from future deletions.”
“It is an outrage if Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the world’s largest social networking site tolerate discrimination against atheists and agnostics-- and if this situation goes unresolved I’ll have little choice but to believe they do,” said Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain of Harvard University. News Corporation, Murdoch’s global media corporation which also includes Fox News, purchased MySpace in 2005.
“My personal profile was deleted as well, and despite weeks of emails to customer service, plus a petition signed by 500 group members, MySpace won’t budge. I think these actions send a clear message to the 30 million godless people in America (and to businesses whose money was spent displaying ads on our group) that we are not welcome on MySpace,” said Pesta.
For a Wikipedia article on the now defunct atheist and agnostic group, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_and_Agnostic_Group.
For links to Pesta’s defunct group and profile, visit http://www.MySpace.com/aiffb.
###
Well, hello Myspace. Fuck you very much, you intolerant extremist-pandering piece of shit. So, atheists annoy you all, do they? And therefore our voices need to be deleted, don't they? So much for tolerance. Apparently what that means is let the religionists rule our lives and fuck anyone who says differently.
Jane Smiley hit it on the head a year ago here on The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/tolerance-or-social-con_b_16005.html:
When Christians talk about secular Americans being “tolerant” of Christian beliefs, they are misusing the word. What conservative Christians want is not toleration, but social control. Toleration takes place between two people who know one another, and is a feature of personal relationships. Social control is about who gets the power to dictate policy and law. Christians like Mark Joseph sometimes play the “tolerance” card as a way to present themselves as a disempowered group, but what it is about them that is disempowered is their ability to tell the rest of us what to do. And most of the rules they want us to follow are abstract–rules about how men and women should relate, rules about what families should look like, rules about what people should learn. The program, for Christian conservatives, is not essentially about faith or morality–those are elements in a larger program. The larger program is enforcing conformity. What’s the real goal? Well, no doubt it is money and power–have you seen how wealthy the Pope is? Of Pat Robertson? Or the pastors of some of those other mega-churches?
Secularists are sometimes called “fundamentalist” because they hold their beliefs–say pro-choice, separation of church and state–quite passionately. They vehemently do not want to be dictated to by religious groups, and they do not want their children to be forced to go to religious schools (school where creationism is taught as science). They are alleged to be “intolerant” of Christians. But the secularists are rarely if ever saying “Do as I do”, they are saying “Leave me alone”. The Christians quite often are not only saying, “Do as I do”, but also “My right is to make you live by my beliefs, and if you resist me, then you are ‘intolerant’.”
Lord, please save me from your followers!!!
Via
dark_christian MySpace: No place for Atheists?
Submitted by august on Wed, 2008-01-30 18:09.
Contact: Bryan J. Pesta, Ph.D., b.pesta@csuohio.edu
MySpace Deletes Largest Atheist Group in the World.
Cleveland, OH.— Social networking site, MySpace.com, panders to religious intolerants by deleting atheist users, groups and content.
Early this month, MySpace again deleted the Atheist and Agnostic Group (35,000 members). This deletion, due largely to complaints from people who find atheism offensive, marks the second time MySpace has cancelled the group since November 2007.
What’s unique in this case is that the Atheist and Agnostic Group was the largest collection of organized atheists in the world. The group had its own Wikipedia entry, and in April won the Excellence in Humanist Communication Award (2007) from the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University and the Secular Student Alliance.
“MySpace refuses to undelete the group, although it never violated any terms of service,” said Bryan Pesta, Ph.D., the group’s moderator. “When the largest Christian group was hacked, MySpace’s Founder, Tom Anderson, personally restored the group, and promised to protect it from future deletions.”
“It is an outrage if Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the world’s largest social networking site tolerate discrimination against atheists and agnostics-- and if this situation goes unresolved I’ll have little choice but to believe they do,” said Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain of Harvard University. News Corporation, Murdoch’s global media corporation which also includes Fox News, purchased MySpace in 2005.
“My personal profile was deleted as well, and despite weeks of emails to customer service, plus a petition signed by 500 group members, MySpace won’t budge. I think these actions send a clear message to the 30 million godless people in America (and to businesses whose money was spent displaying ads on our group) that we are not welcome on MySpace,” said Pesta.
For a Wikipedia article on the now defunct atheist and agnostic group, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_and_Agnostic_Group.
For links to Pesta’s defunct group and profile, visit http://www.MySpace.com/aiffb.
###
Well, hello Myspace. Fuck you very much, you intolerant extremist-pandering piece of shit. So, atheists annoy you all, do they? And therefore our voices need to be deleted, don't they? So much for tolerance. Apparently what that means is let the religionists rule our lives and fuck anyone who says differently.
Jane Smiley hit it on the head a year ago here on The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/tolerance-or-social-con_b_16005.html:
When Christians talk about secular Americans being “tolerant” of Christian beliefs, they are misusing the word. What conservative Christians want is not toleration, but social control. Toleration takes place between two people who know one another, and is a feature of personal relationships. Social control is about who gets the power to dictate policy and law. Christians like Mark Joseph sometimes play the “tolerance” card as a way to present themselves as a disempowered group, but what it is about them that is disempowered is their ability to tell the rest of us what to do. And most of the rules they want us to follow are abstract–rules about how men and women should relate, rules about what families should look like, rules about what people should learn. The program, for Christian conservatives, is not essentially about faith or morality–those are elements in a larger program. The larger program is enforcing conformity. What’s the real goal? Well, no doubt it is money and power–have you seen how wealthy the Pope is? Of Pat Robertson? Or the pastors of some of those other mega-churches?
Secularists are sometimes called “fundamentalist” because they hold their beliefs–say pro-choice, separation of church and state–quite passionately. They vehemently do not want to be dictated to by religious groups, and they do not want their children to be forced to go to religious schools (school where creationism is taught as science). They are alleged to be “intolerant” of Christians. But the secularists are rarely if ever saying “Do as I do”, they are saying “Leave me alone”. The Christians quite often are not only saying, “Do as I do”, but also “My right is to make you live by my beliefs, and if you resist me, then you are ‘intolerant’.”
Lord, please save me from your followers!!!
