The Atheist Blogger

I’ve just got back from America; the flight was long, and I’ve been awake for most of the past 30 hours. I’m about to try and get some sleep but I thought I’d share with you some interesting sutff on Nate Phelps, the estranged atheist son of fundamentalist “God Hates Fags” pastor Fred Phelps. Nate was “discovered” by a journalist late last year, and was invited to speak at the American Atheists Convention a few weeks ago.

A full transcript of his speech is available online at Atheist Nexus, and Brother Richard has an article written by Nate about his experiences before and after the convention. Brother Richard and Nate have also set up a support group at Atheist Nexus called “Life After Christian Fundamentalism“, aimed at helping people who have escaped from Christian fundamentalism.

Check it out, I’m off to sleep :D

It was a dark and stormy night…well, not really. It was actually a rather lovely (albeit windy) day in Georgia. The night before had seen torrential rain, although nothing on par with the tornado that hit the north of the state only a few days earlier. For a couple of weeks, Brother Richard (of Life Without Faith and Atheist Nexus) and I had been planning on meeting up, as we were only an hour’s drive apart. So we chose a meeting point about halfway between our two locations, at a shady bar called “Chip’s Bar & Grill”. We arrived and proceeded to enter, only to get promptly asked to leave because the US has backwards drinking laws, I wasn’t 21 yet (14 days dammit), and this bar didn’t even let 20 year olds set foot inside.

Heading down the road, we found a Fatz Cafe that would be suitable for lunch. Our small group of heathens (comprised of myself, Brother Richard, and my girlfriend Amanda) had only just been seated when our waitress asked us if we would like some complimentary bread rolls, saying “They are the ultimate spiritual experience in a basket, and they will bring you closer to God“. I hastily looked around; it seemed as though our godless meeting had been rumbled by the faith squad, but they were nowhere to be seen. A coincidence perhaps? Maybe, but just to be sure we decided to de-convert some of the bread rolls before eating them. You can never be too careful:

The ultimate Godless experience in a basket!

Brother Richard also insisted on praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for protection:

RAmen!

And he was quickly filled with the presence of His Noodliness (I’m assured this wasn’t just me turning the camera flash on):

Book of Noodles 7:1-3 "And he glowed with the power of the spaghedeity, and all was well amongst the midgets"

After the prayer we turned to business, and discussed the progression of several projects like Atheist Nexus and NoGodTube. I am very grateful to Brother Richard for inviting me onto the board of directors for Atheist Nexus, and I hope that we can work closely together to see the site grow and expand outside the realms of the Ning interface. NoGodTube is also going very well, and will hopefully continue to collect atheist videos from around the web. As a result of some recent backlash against the name, Brother Richard has secured a “freethoughttube” domain (not entirely sure on the exact wording of it) in order to have a more “open” name to the site as opposed to the jab at GodTube.

Brother Richard also encouraged my girlfriend to start a UGA atheist group if one does not already exist. So if you attend the University of Georgia and are interested, you’ll have both my support and the support of Brother Richard behind you! Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Conversation veered onto marriage, with Brother Richard making not-so-subtle suggestions about my relationship with my girlfriend, and whether we were “serious”. I guess the answer lies in the fact that I fly out to America to come see her (which isn’t cheap) so often. I told Brother Richard that if we ever tied the knot, I would get him to perform the ceremony in the most secular way possible.

At the end of our meeting we decided to take some fun pictures, all of which are available here (you shouldn’t need a facebook account as the album is public). Below are some of my favourites:

I choose reason!

Deep in thought, Brother Richard gets a sign from above...well, not really.

My girlfriend Amanda (on the right...duh) and Brother Richard

All in all it was a very nice meeting, and Brother Richard is the first person from the atheist blogosphere I have actually met offline. Hopefully I’ll meet a few others at the London “The Amaz!ng Meeting” later this year, or at some conventions I’m hoping to attend in the future. Obviously I couldn’t attend the American Atheists convention this year (it was too expensive for my budget) but I might be able to make it to some others. Given the recession, it is becoming more expensive for me to travel across the pond, which is a shame. If I get a good enough summer job things may change though!

The popular social networking site for atheists has been experimenting with new chat systems. The first has the ability for chat participants to post urls to videos on video sharing sites like YouTube, and everyone in the chat can view them with a built-in player. The only problem with this chat is that the area for chatting is made tiny by the video player, and there is no way of resizing it.

The second chat was released today, and has a much better interface. Firstly, it has the ability for users to use video/audio to chat. You can choose who you want to listen to, adding multiple people to a special “dock” which holds a maximum of 4. All of the interface is collapsible, so getting a larger area for chatting takes only a few clicks. The chat has already made some big impressions on Atheist Nexus users:

I think it’s a very interactive way to talk to Austrians about how they aren’t British. I also think it’s a great way for Adrian to say things that he doesn’t realise can be taken out of context to make him sound like a child molester on Twitter. It’s great fun, and if Adrian one day runs for British government, I will be able to blackmail him and I’ll be that much closer to becoming the Queen of England. – Splendid Elles

A female user named Cassie said the interface was like:

Fist-fucking.

Patch had this to say:

Incest – Patch has been banned.

Finally, Edwin the Drummer admitted of the interface:

It’s pretty cool.

So with all those rave reviews in mind, head over to Atheist Nexus to register and come chat!

So a few people are talking about this new website “Atheist Nexus“. I was invited yesterday by the managing director Thor and I signed up to take a look. Although the site is a very good idea, it is currently very poorly designed. I’d love to comment on all the great things it could do for the community, but before it even tries to connect people it needs to address a load of issues:

• There is far too much code on every page. This bloats the website out which leads to slower loading times as well as slower actual scrolling of the website.
• There is a stupid amount of CSS for the site layout. I’ve been designing websites for years and the site could be made easily with a fraction of the CSS they use.
• The JavaScript is bloated and used way too much. AJAX is great in moderation, but using it for everything only works when you have very tidy and small scripts working together, not a load of large scripts dotted all over the place.
• What is up with the theme? Since when did cityscapes have something to do with atheism? I’m afraid that light blue on white doesn’t go very well for the main links, and they could have saved resources in a load of areas by using color attributes instead of images.

Now I know everyone is getting all excited about a new social networking site, but it’s not new at all, and it certainly isn’t original. A quick look at the source code tells you that the entire site is just linking into ning.com, a “make your own” social networking site. Put simply, this entire project isn’t original, and it hasn’t got a team of devs behind it. It will be updated when ning.com wants to update their entire system.

Read more…