[Serious] Future of the Forums (Discussion)

[Prof.Lunaphiles]

I don't really come to the forums very often anymore. I want to say there are multiple reasons for that, and yeah, work has been keeping me busy, but the main reason is that the forum is just not very fun for me anymore. . .

So I guess I wanted to have a discussion to see where the community stands, and what they want to do. If you want the forum to continue, with the same staff team at the helm, we need funds to make that happen. Alternatively I might be open to selling the forum to someone who has more of an interest in it. Or, if people have a similar attitude to me, we could simply let the forum die and move on; we made it 11 years, maybe it's time to move on.

I'm not going to make any snap decisions like owners at other forums; you're not going to suddenly wake up one day and find that everything is closed and have to scramble to find somewhere else. However something has to change, and I want the community to decide what that should be.

- Tibs

I apologize for being new to the Atheist Forum - I have been at the other atheist forums that have decommissioned over the past 18 years of my participation and monitoring.

I believe that the 'atheist' forums decommission, because of the memberships' progressive lack of interest - nothing is accomplished. Nobody learns anything new, or trustworthy to accept as leading toward a better path of society. Some forums have tried setting up discussion areas designed to deliberate issues to their just conclusion, but it does not work.

In 2002 when I first entered an atheist forum, Atheist Network, my immediate ambition was to find enlightenment to understanding why society is so chaotic. to my surprise, I found atheists to be in a state of chaos, and I had to research it all on my own.

It is a contradiction for atheists to claim that they are the guardians of reason and critical thinking, and then claim that atheists are all very much different in opinions about things. The usual euphemism is that "gathering atheists is like herding cats." And then atheists will charge theists to review their dogma, or whatever. The point is that there are only a handful of reasonable opinions about any particular issue, and it only appears to be too numerous to list, because atheists are not willing to accept the possibility that they are wrong about some things (definitions to words significant to atheists), that were established in a less sophisticated society. And of course, in the situation of forums, such reversals will offend and possibly alienate members to discontinue their memberships.

Don't get me wrong - I do not believe in the existence of gods - I am an atheist.

I believe that there is a way of deliberating issues in forums like this, and that developing the system to achieve such a goal is what atheists should be working on before the theists do it first . . .

Atheists suggest that Galileo was wronged by the Church, but how does one convince people who have long believed the world to be flat without being able to prove otherwise with visual proof, or actually sailing around the world??? For some reason atheists think it should have been easily reasoned by the Church officials and that it was their responsibility to announce the new ideas to the peasants.