>I am curious about something.  Why do "atheists" have to prove
>anything at all to "theists"?
>Isn't the burden of proof on them?
>I'd be interested to hear what you think.

We don't have to prove anything. It's our board, to discuss the problems
that we face in a predominantly theist society, and to swap stories etc.

Unfortunately the god squad arrives here with monotonous regularity and
demands that we justify our dogmatic beliefs that their particular deity
doesn't exist.

Like Bill Conner's original inflammatory posting:

----------------BILL'S ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS---------------------

Message-ID: 
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 06:38:38 GMT

   I've had the experience of discussing atheism with atheists before
and in every case the atheists avoids the questions, "Why are you an
atheist?" ...
   I think there are really only two possibilities here: one is that
the atheist can't explain his position, the other is, if he did he'd
look like a fool.
   Other than sarcasm, ridicule and hyperbole, I've yet to hear an
atheist's defense of atheism; are you up to it?

Bill

----------------END OF BILL'S ORIGINAL POST----------------------

Or they preach at us, using the kind of circular argument that presupposes
their own beliefs, and only convinces those who already believe......

We've had a large crop of christian extremists who pop up here to harangue
us. Conner and Rawlins are just the latest. We've also had islamic and
hare krishna fundies attacking us. None of them seem to realise that all
an atheist is, is somebody who doesn't believe in ANY god, for whatever
reason. We've been attacked over evolution (Rawlins, Cote), scientific
research in general (Mozumder the moslem fundie), abortion (Mark Barry)
etc, none of which has anything to do with atheism. We've been accused of
rejecting allah, krishna, "God", etc because of pride, stupidity, evil,
sinfulness, laziness etc because if we would only read the koran,
bhagavad-gita, bible etc with an open mind we would instantly be
believers in the one true faith.

We get p*ssed of with this and this gets reflected in the noise to signal
ratio of the group. Occasionally something actually useful to atheists
gets discussed, which is why I still follow this group.

Chris