I'm an active FB user and Atheist Republic has been one of the initial Atheist Community I've been part of. There are basically 2 parts of their community on FB. A Facebook page and a Facebook public group. I'm an admirer of the contents they post up on there page. Also I've been part of the group for 1½ year and made a decent amount of good friends. The only thing I've not liked about the group is the moderation part. Whenever a political discussion pops up people who disagrees with Admins get a ban. I wasn't banned for that however the kind of atmosphere that got created due to the moderation made me to leave the community. I still follow their page which i find is more acceptable and diverse! https://100001.onl/ https://1921681254.mx/ https://acc.onl/hotmail
How was your experience if you ever were a part of that Community?
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I don''t follow the political BS. The world is a fucked up place. I did not join AR to become part of a political movement. I'm completely fine with helping to shed light on the ignorance of religion. I confront the stupidity of faith in religion whenever I can. I am not part of a political agenda. If you are being banned for disagreeing, that would be juvenile. I don't actually believe that would be the reason for a ban. More likely, like the Christians that come to this site and get banned, you may have been preachy, unwilling to even look at the arguments presented, and simply kept repeating your talking points without ever acknowledging they had been countered. (I'm not saying your assessment is incorrect, but. sharing my assessment of the reasons I see for people getting banned from the site who have different opinions.
People who argue from fallacious presuppositions and then continue repeating their nonsense, do not seem to last long. Once a fault in the argument has been pointed out, you either acknowledge it or fall back and try again with a new argument. Repeating the same old shit just does not work.
@Baisel
I don't do FB. Never have. I don't even have a FB account. I have no use for it. And I despise politics and avoid political discussions like the plague. If I WERE interested in politics, however, I would have joined a political discussion site, NOT an atheist site. But - hey - that's just me... *shurgging shoulders*...
@Baisel... uhhhh, after reading the two posts above, I hate to say it but I’m not a “political” type person, aside from a comment or two in threads, which is more political commentary.
I keep a fb page for fluffy stuff.
The amount of delusional theists on the AR facebook page, is immense. FB AR is a perfect environment for proselytizing and zero true discussion. It is useful for calling theists idiots, but that's about it. JMHO.
Pretty good forum. Far better than average moderating in my opinion.
I have zero interest in any organisation/political party with the word 'atheist' in the title. I also don't bother with any an individual described as '"an atheist leader or spokesperson". For me there ain't no such animals.
I come here because I've found some more-or-less like minded people. Here I can discuss topics, views which interest me without having various flavours of believers getting in my face**.
I would be fascinated to learn the dominant age group here. It is my perception that it's at least over 60. I realise I may be simply filtering through my own bias.
**although not necessarily causally connected, one tends to find humanists, skeptics , and realists among atheists. Here there also seems to be a goodly number of folks politically left of centre . Atheists I've met here are also capable of reasoned discussion and have grasped the basics of the scientific method. At the deeper end of our pool we have some very erudite people with quite brilliant minds, imo. I sometimes struggle to keep up. Fortunately, such people here are patient and generous and will help if you ask.
I'm 47; and in most of my social situations, I'm the old geezer; but sometimes here I feel like a spring chicken!
But as far as I know, we don't have any data on the average age.
@Nyarlathotep
"I'm 47; and in most of my social situations, I'm the old geezer; but sometimes here I feel like a spring chicken!"
Until a couple of month ago it had been years sinceI'd felt like a spring chicken . Then I joined a discussion group at the University of The Third Age. There are nine of us, 4 women 5 men. At 72, I'm the youngest. The oldest is 86. I have been learning to hone two skills which are not among my stronger qualities ; patience and tolerance. Closed due to the virus. I suggested video conferencing, but the concept is beyond most of them.
-Me? I love new tech and shiny things. I use four computer Os is a given week. Since the current crisis started, I've installed and learned to use 'Discord',a free Skype-like app, to keep in touch with my mate. who has already been isolating for over a month. He has some severe health issues, and will probably die if he contracts the virus. --I'm also vulnerable; over 70 and not in robust health .
The community on the AR fb site has a very different ‘personality’ than the (much, much smaller) one here.
This AR site is the only debate/chat site of which I have ever been a member. And I found this site literally from a random Google search just a few weeks after I finally broke away from my religious indoctrination. (I kid you not.) As such, I have no direct personal experience with any other chat/debate sites, especially of the atheist variety. However, I have heard others on here describing other such sites, and my wife has even been a mod on a couple of different debate sites. And based on descriptions from others here along with the many exchanges my wife read to me from several other sites, I have to say I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have found this AR site when and how I did.
In real life, I am not a very social creature. Granted, because of my background in law enforcement and with the military, I can be quite relaxed and comfortable in pretty much any social setting within most any culture. And I am very adaptable and can quickly adjust to unexpected changes within a social environment. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, I usually just prefer to be left alone. As a result, I have very few actual friends. Plus, I can be considerably picky about who I allow to get close to me. In other words, I'm something of a "self-isolating hermit."... *chuckle*... And that is why the AR has become so very important and valuable to me.
In the beginning, I was very disoriented due to the change of direction my life had taken. The only thing I knew about atheism then was based on what I was taught as a kid. (And it was NOT very flattering, to say the least.) But I was welcomed here with open arms by some amazing people who were more than happy to answer my questions and give me honest no-bullshit advice/opinions about the ideas/thoughts I expressed. Even the mods went well out of their way and had supreme patience with me during a brief period when I was venting some pent up rage in a very... ummm... well, in a very less-than-appropriate manner. In a nutshell, I have been on this site just a little over two years. Within that short time, however, I have learned more and grown stronger and more confident/comfortable with myself to a point I never imagined I could reach. I have made some good friends here, and I feel like I am part of a small family. That is my opinion of this AR.
Your background sounds similar to mine. Retired military/law enforcement, 70 years old, pretty asocial. I joined the Catholic Church a few years ago for family/ancestral reasons, certainly never had any "road to Damascus" moments. Didn't last, the questions and doubts began sprinkling soon and became a hurricane, which my thin veneer of Faith was unable to surmount. Sigh
Monkey tears are falling on the banana leaves. ??? Or is that urine? :-)
The problem with FB, is that it was never set up to be a forum for the diligent exchange of diligent ideas. It was intended originally to be, at bottom, an online version of a frat party. FB has been in operation since 2004, and its development team still hasn't come up with a way of allowing basic text formatting in posts, such as italic and boldface, that would be of immense benefit to those who learned how to express themselves in a literary manner.
Though they've found all manner of arcane ways of circumventing ad blockers, including methods that would make a normal web developer barf, which is one of the reasons it takes far longer to load than it should - even if you took out all the ads and the other, more conventional bloat, the wackiness involved in breaking up words and reformatting them inside surplus DIV tags to hide key words from ad blockers, really demonstrates the actual purpose of the site - it's become a giant clickbait honeypot, with the membership pressed into service as free clickbaiters.
The AR FB page unfortunately attracts the truly sub-planktonic specimens among the mythology fanboys - the people who were kicked out of better moderated forums for various combinations of idiocy and duplicity. Most of the specimens trolling the AR FB page would last about 15 nanoseconds if they turned up here, before they ended up either flouncing out of their own accord to try and hide the way their butt cheeks were napalmed by the veteran combateers, or would invite the ban hammer from the mods here quicker than you could say "lying sack of shit".
However, there is one BIG deficiency here that is LONG overdue to be remedied, and that's the absence of a post preview function. Other forums have one, so what's so hard about implementing one here? It should take about 30 lines of JavaScript tops to implement in prototype form, and about 3 weeks of debugging to polish it to production status.
i'm showing my age and lack of tech savvy but I just cant stand Facebook. Like others here I find it offends my desire for privacy or maybe its another sign of my aging disgracefully. Anywho I dont mind the challenge of using the AR forum. I got the protocols on standby on the desktop for ready use. I mostly like the community here, the diverse range of opinion and knowledge, history science and religion which I just cant share anywhere else in my life, and the idiot humour.
@Grinseed: YEP!
I think we all prefer the more in depth lengthy (and dare I say more cerebral) discourse here compared to facebook.
To me facebook is all 3-30 second "sound bites" and geared towards people that attention span mostly does not exceed 30 seconds. Maybe I am also showing my age, (and I am supposedly a young one for the regulars around here.)
And yes, as a cyber security analyst by trade, commenting sensitive subjects like this through facebook is... lets just say a bad idea.
That said; the security on these forums makes me cringe. The software should be updated even if it means the loss of old threads just for security reasons alone.
100 agrees!
I never go near FB any more. Mine was one of millions of email addresses/passwords leaked by them. Now I get daily emails from some jerk trying to blackmail me for online indiscretions. I know it's FB's fault because the swine quotes the exact password I was using for that site.