Hello

I had an interesting convo with many of you last night in that stickam thingy. Just following up on it, I wanted to post a bit about the myspace AA group, which as many of you know has members who are less than your biggest fans.

This is a reply I wrote on another myspace group, wherein a poster complained about how much the AA group sucks.

Enjoy!

It's a fair observation M.

The internet has many outstanding skeptic and atheist sites where one can debate skeptical-only topics, together with heavy moderation to ensure people debate nicely and on topic.

My "vision" was to make the AA group a social networking site, where any topic (within the TOS) is fair game, and where people can say whatever they want.

I'm a strong believer in letting people speak; whether to expose their intellect or their ignorance.

I think it's free market atheism. We are a large group-- maybe the largest group of heathens in one place. I let the users drive the content as sort of an on-going social experiment.

If it turns out a large diverse group of heathens has nothing important to say, comes across as juvenile and mean, and focuses too much on boobage, so be it.

We are what we are; I guess I'm trying to see what exactly we are.

That said, despite our raunch, I'm confident I could assemble a core of regular posters who could hold their own intellectually with more scholarly boards like the jref.

If anyone's still reading, I think our mission statement summarizes my philosophy on why I run the group the way I do:

Vision: To become an Internet presence of atheists, agnostics, freethinkers and skeptics; a bingo hall for heathens (sans the blue hair and smoke); a church picnic for those who enjoy eating out of baskets, but would rather not bless their bologna first.

Our purpose is entertainment, networking and intellectual growth. We hope to show non-heathens that (1) We exist in large numbers. (2) We are people; most of us don't even eat babies. (3) We disbelieve for rational reasons; not because we're mad at (your) god. (4) We are moral and we don't need (your) god to be so. (5) We are sexual; yet we are still moral. (6) We are rational, yet we are happy (or at least no more depressed than the average non-heathen). (7) We function productively without hate, and ( We value human life just because.

Mission: The vision's best achieved by including all who want to join (except Ipod people and Web Cam ho's), and allowing topics beyond those that preach to the choir. We value free speech (except posting dead things, potty pics, old man porn, and obvious TOS violations). We allow members to speak, thereby exposing their ignorance or intellect, and we tolerate threads ranging from the invalidity of Kalam cosmology to the posting of (member only / pg-13 rated) boobies.