Atheist Republic sucks

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I recently joined the Atheist Republic forum. I haven't been there a whole week yet. But all it took was one mention that I'm autistic for a whole thread to devolve into a bunch of ablist bigotry. And I don't want to judge an entire community by the conduct of a handful of members. But so far nobody has spoken up to counter all the rampant ablism.

Some forums function by uniting their members with an exclusivity that can be hostile to outsiders. This may be why the ratio of lurkers to posters may run about 100:1.

I'll head over there and see what there problem is. Yup, that's what I need, another time consuming forum .

I was unable to find the posts you are talking about. Can you direct me to them.

To me "atheist republic" sounds like the type of forum that's likely full of ideologically petrified activist types. Activism is useful but being an activist typically means being deeply emotionally involved which is the antithesis of being rational.

You can always get revenge by claiming that the competition is better, and that you will "take your business elsewhere".

If folks on GOP site dumped on you for being autistic you could just tell them "that you just turned me into a Liberal Democrat" ( or vice versa... if Dems descriminate against you just say "Trump/Reagan thanks you").

You could just make up a story that you "got more love and acceptance on that Pentacostal Christian site I was on". And then say "I thank you all for your great work in promoting faith in God by...showing how intolerant Atheists are".

Just to piss em off.

Am not particularly against atheists. I am just saying that you could get back against any group of folks who advocate any creed by claiming that a rival creed is "more tolerant and charitable than you guys". You could do the same with a religious group that treated you bad.

Sounds kid of childish. Besides, atheists don't have a creed or any unifying attribute aside from not belonging to any religion.

I'm atheist but I don't like the way they treated you.

I have heard enough horror stories about the world of organised atheism to put me off getting involved. It has a reputation for being dominated by an arrogant clique who believe that all their opinions are objective fact because they have personally proven the non-existence of God with their mighty brains. In my book, this is not being a free-thinker.

Someone disagrees with you about agnosticism, group selection in evolution, the need for feminism in the modern West, or the best flavour of crisps? Respond by calling them a moron, and keep on calling them a moron. Richard Dawkins, who I used to quite admire, is the bad example they're all aping. A friend who used to moderate a Church of England forum said she'd actually seen a huge influx of atheists at one point. It wasn't that they'd converted, they just found it a more welcoming place to discuss atheism without the Dawkinite thought-police crushing them for deviating from the party line.

(I was genuinely shocked about 10 years ago by how Dawkins behaved when invited by New Scientist magazine to debate with some biologists who'd been working on group selection. He went straight for the ad-hominem, made no effort to address their points beyond calling them self-evidently stupid. Suddenly, my Hero of the Unfaith looked like a tarnished tinpot thunder-god to me.)

I tend to end up posting on a lot of Atheist FaceBook sites, not because I am an Atheist, but because I tend to agree with them more frequently than not. I am in a really strange and unique place in the theology department...

Atheist Republic tends to have people who are very politically minded, and in my experience that means they are going to be more abrasive in their discourse. Sadly, the vast majority of people (anywhere, but especially on social media platforms) are not sensitive to disability unless it impacts them in a major way. Saying, "I have a friend who..." or "I know somebody that is..." is a bad indication of being sensitive to these issues anyway, but Autism is in a class on it's own because of the way it presents, so people tend to be very bad at misconceptions.

And Atheist pages are not known to be kind to strangers. I get a lot of flak for my views on religion on these sites, but I also tend to ignore the insults and stick to the facts. I learned throughout my life that people find it harder to argue against facts, and so keeping my focus on what is relevant to the facts tends to get me by in discourse. It does tend to make me seem a bit bookish, nerdy, or stilted in encyclopedic info dump, but I have been called worse.

We Freakin Love Atheism seems to be a bit more mellow, but if you are looking for a page of likeminded Atheists to follow, David G. McAfee is one of the more approachable pages to follow on FaceBook. The Plus side is he claims to be on the spectrum himself, so there is some sensitivity there. Doesn't mean every Atheist you'll find there is sensitive to mental disability, but you are more likely to find people who are.

The person making the bigoted posts is the moderator.

Man, that sucks to hear… but I’m not that surprised. Internet atheist culture often isn’t as progressive as one would expect. Like a few years ago, I believe, there was this whole movement of anti-feminist atheist/skeptic YouTubers (e.g. Sh0eOnHead).

I personally don't see the meaning of connecting to other atheists, I by the way call myself agnostic rather than atheist but that doesn't matter too much in this context.
Atheists come in all flavours, some share my political views, some don't. And so on.
It's like just becuse I'm a heterosexual male, I'd go on a forum for heterosexual males. It makes no sense to me.

/Mats