Christian Site Hacked

it’s already back up. I tried to watch the youtube vid, but you’re right, he’s a douchebag. Although that may be demeaning to other douchebags

It’s one thing to be “up in your face” like RRS, and being an asshole. This is the latter.

Just what did he do to that site?

The painfully inarticulate young man in the YouTube video is apparently denying that he had anything to do with hacking any website. It may have been done by a third party who linked the kid’s video from the hacked site for whatever purpose of disruption or discrediting or sadism they could cause. As one person commenting below the YouTube video pointed out, it wouldn’t make much sense for a hacker to post his name and face after committing the crime.

Is he trying to stop Christians from getting their point of view out there? If he is then he is an enemy of friendly discourse.

Actions like this do nothing but temporarily disrupt the dialog. A rational person should understand that the way to persuade somebody to believe what you believe is to give them all the evidence and let them decide for themselves (while offering your perspective), because if you truly think that your belief is the rational conclusion to make from the evidence, then you will think that if other people look at it rationally, there is a good chance they will make the same conclusions. Only people with irrationally held beliefs need to resort to book burning and website hacking. Censors fear what they hide.

Just like abstinence-only sex education teachers, this person may actually fear what he disagrees with, and therefore tries to suppress it, all the while yelling his ideas as loudly as he can — falling upon deaf ears. Abstinence-only teaching suppresses information, and leads to irrational decisions. And just as a raving nonbeliever could turn theists away from the arguments, and make them identify even more with their religion, thus defeating his cause, kids who aren’t taught about sex have sex anyways, and do so uninformed. It is not the pragmatic way of doing things, and it is irrational and harmful. It is immoral.

At the risk of judging him too much from a single action, I say that this person should be a disgrace to atheists everywhere, because in doing this he represented one of the main things that atheism is counter to: suppression of dissent and debate. He should be ashamed.

(Of course, pretty much all thoughtful atheists know this already. I’m talking to curious believers here. Atheism is very misunderstood by many, and hopefully this little piece will, on a very small scale, help to correct some misunderstandings. In short: most atheists do not support “Fad atheism”, where people become atheists because it’s in vogue, as this came may have, instead of because they made a conclusion based on the arguments; we do not support the suppression of any point of view; and we do not support others if the only reason for doing so is that they belong to the same ultimately meaningless category as we do. We think that is a tribal, ganglike kind of massive ad hominem-y thing to do. We care about what individual people actually think, and this means that we could still disagree with everything some guy says, even if we agree that there is no god. It is the arguments that we follow, and we will go wherever they take us, even if that means leaving our “group” and becoming something else, including, of course, believers, if that is what we feel is rational.)

Is it extremely cynical of me to consider the notion that it might be a christian or other religious person CLAIMING to be an atheist doing this to further mar our reputation? Because, let’s be honest, very few atheists ever attack other people’s property or persons in anything other than words…

If this post and/or the previous one makes hardly any sense at all, sorry – I’m having problems with the edit facility. It reports that the save failed but then after a few minutes shows the new version after all.

Update: seems to be working now.

What can you really say bad about the Finns? That their Saunas are too hot?

The kid seems immature, but just because there was a video by the kid in the hacked site it doesn’t mean that he is the hacker!

Would he be so ignorant that he hacked a site and tell everyone he did it? How stupid you’d have to be to think you’d achieve anything but make fool of yourself and other atheists with that kind of mischief?

Weird.

I keep coming across discussion boards that say that crosswalk is working. But it isn’t. Not for me. Try it. Check it out. I still get that blank page that you get when there are connectivity issues…

Anyone else gettin the same? Or am I hallucinating? 🙂