AS reported at Secular Student Alliance, MySpace has deleted a major atheist group from their site, apparently after complaints from religious groups:

Social networking site, MySpace.com, panders to religious intolerants by deleting atheist users, groups and content.

Early this month, MySpace again deleted the Atheist and Agnostic Group (35,000 members). This deletion, due largely to complaints from people who find atheism offensive, marks the second time MySpace has cancelled the group since November 2007.

Hey, if you find atheism offensive:

a. don’t read it
b. don’t be so uptight
c. get a life
d. if your faith is so fragile that seeing an atheist symbol upsets you, perhaps you should just give up and join us.

I see this as blatant discrimination, this could be a rallying cry for all the atheists out there.

Personally I don’t have a MySpace account, don’t see any need for one, but the idea that a few religious people can cause MySpace to delete accounts just because they are atheist seems wrong on so many levels.

Here’s something for the religious to ponder; if you are Christian do you try and delete all the Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish sites? If Catholic do you try and delete all the Protestant accounts? If Anglican do you try and delete the Baptist accounts? Where does it end? What ever happened to live and let live?

There are several things that could be done;

  1. Do NOT delete your existing My Space account, that’s what they want, instead:
    1. add more atheist comments into your existing profile.
    2. Send the post by Secular Students, and any other good sites discussing this, to all your MySpace friends.
    3. Send a complaint about a religious group or user.
  2. If you don’t have a MySpace account, start one up and ‘atheist it up big time’.
  3. Send an email to them, there is a contact link at the bottom of the home page, this only sends an email (form mail) to the Customer Service desk, but if suddenly 30 million people sent the same message, surely someone will take notice.
    1. It seems that you can put in any old name and email address and it accepts it.
  4. Write a letter to your local newspaper, particularly any Murdoch owned paper.
  5. Post on your blog, about this, make sure you include a link to the Secular Students original post.
  6. Comment on others blogs about this, we all have different readers so this will help spread the message (reciprocity)

There is a also a petition Save Myspace Groups you can sign (mainly aimed at MySpace account holders) but you can just add your name if you don’t have a MySpace account. Every little bit helps.

Lots of blogs have started commenting about this including Friendly Atheist, on the earlier attack and again on the recent happenings, Richard Dawkins, and many others.

Thanks to Sean for the heads up.