Who are your favorite current Atheists?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Like I said, I don't follow any atheists or any atheist channels anywhere on the Internet. I've never felt the need to.

I'm an egalitarian, so the 'ideas' behind A+, especially its pro-feminism, are not something I necessarily disagreed with in their entirety (that said, I find a lot of debates on feminism are often destroyed by people on both sides of the divide who have no understanding of liberation based politics). However I found A+ to be the complete opposite of what they professed to be (inclusive, pro-equality and fairness etc). There are theist forums more welcoming than the A+ forums. Thus I am against any group that censors people simply for believing in something different (which demonstrably happened over and over again on A+ - blockbot). By all means, start a group for like minded individuals, invite and ban whoever you want. But don't expect people to like it when they're silenced for simply disagreeing. Censorship doesn't get an organisation very far in the long run, and my experiences of A+ directly and indirectly were almost entirely negative from this standpoint.

Indeed, the entire notion that there can be an organised group with an MO within atheism seems absurd to me. Heards of cats come to mind. A lot of atheists may share a common ground (political, economic, social), but their atheism is irrelevent. A lack of belief in a deity doesn't inform any of my political or social beliefs. This forum is a good example. A diverse membership, mostly atheist naturally, and many agreeing and disagreeing on various points (the owner is a libertarian for example), but you'd be hard pushed to find people saying they're [x] within atheism.

Overall, to be short, I found A+ to be completely counter productive to the cause they were trying to promote (and to which I agree with).

From the little I know I think people from A+ believe religions helps ensuring discrimination and oppression, and since they don't feel welcomed to religious forums and are atheists they decided to create a group for atheists worried about social justice... I don't see it as invalid, it's just as valid as atheists creating a group called "Atheists + liberalism" or "Atheists + conservatism" or "Atheists + socialism"

Can't disagree with you. If folks want to start their own association based on some core principles that may or may not stem from their lack of belief, more power to them. If they can get feet through the door so to speak, then there's obviously a good reason to set it up.

But as above, if you start something like that and are trying to convince people to follow it, you have to open it up to critique and dissent. Otherwise what's the point? Sure a lot of people who criticised Myers and A+ in general were people whose constribution was 'LUL, women deserve to get raped LOLOLOL' etc, but there were a lot of people who wanted to examine their stance in more detail and in a rational manner but who were denied that chance simply for not towing the party line. If my time on the internets in atheism 'communities' has taught me anything it's that the online atheist 'community' in general doesn't like censorship.

Anyway, I want to apologise to the OP for derailing. If you want to start a thread on A+ (oh god no!) then feel free ^_^