X-NEWS: ids alt.atheism.moderated: 777 Path: paperboy.ids.net!uunet!pipex!mantis!mantis!not-for-mail From: mathew Newsgroups: alt.atheism,alt.atheism.moderated,news.answers,alt.answers Subject: Alt.Atheism FAQ: Overview for New Readers Supersedes: Followup-To: alt.atheism Date: 4 Nov 1993 10:00:07 -0000 Organization: Mantis Consultants, Cambridge. UK. Lines: 181 Approved: news-answers-request@mit.edu Distribution: world Expires: 25 Nov 1993 10:00:02 GMT Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: sunforest.mantis.co.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Summary: Hi. Please read this before you post. Keywords: FAQ, atheism Xref: paperboy.ids.net alt.atheism:10501 alt.atheism.moderated:777 news.answers:3278 alt.answers:510 Archive-name: atheism/overview Alt-atheism-archive-name: overview Last-modified: 14 October 1993 Version: 1.8 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Overview Welcome to alt.atheism and alt.atheism.moderated. This is the first in a series of regular postings aimed at new readers of the newsgroups. Many groups of a 'controversial' nature have noticed that new readers often come up with the same questions, mis-statements or misconceptions and post them to the net. In addition, people often request information which has been posted time and time again. In order to try and cut down on this, the alt.atheism groups have a series of five regular postings under the following titles: 1. Alt.Atheism FAQ: Overview for New Readers 2. Alt.Atheism FAQ: Introduction to Atheism 3. Alt.Atheism FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 4. Alt.Atheism FAQ: Constructing a Logical Argument 5. Alt.Atheism FAQ: Atheist Resources This is article number 1. Please read numbers 2 and 3 before posting. The others are entirely optional. If you are new to Usenet, you may also find it helpful to read the newsgroup news.announce.newusers. The articles titled "A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community", "Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Usenet" and "Hints on writing style for Usenet" are particularly relevant. Questions concerning how news works are best asked in news.newusers.questions. If you are unable to find any of the articles listed above, see the "Finding Stuff" section below. Credits These articles are free. Truly free. You may copy them and distribute them to anyone you wish. However, please send any changes or corrections to mathew@mantis.co.uk, and please do not re-post copies of the articles to alt.atheism; it does nobody any good to have multiple versions of the same document floating around the network. People sometimes ask whether these FAQ files are original, and if so, who wrote them. It's not an easy question to answer. Some parts I wrote myself; many others were contributed by the readers of alt.atheism and of other Usenet newsgroups. The articles are therefore a massive collaborative effort, of a sort which would not have been possible without electronic networking. I have written, rewritten and edited a great deal of material, but these FAQ files would not have been possible without the efforts of hundreds of people. In particular, I'd like to thank the following people for their contributions (in no particular order): kck+@cs.cmu.edu (Karl Kluge) perry@dsinc.com (Jim Perry) NETOPRWA@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu (Wayne Aiken) chpetk@gdr.bath.ac.uk (Toby Kelsey) jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala) geoff.arnold@East.Sun.COM (Geoff Arnold) torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen) kmldorf@utdallas.edu (George Kimeldorf) roe2@quads.uchicago.edu (Greg Roelofs) arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu (Ken Arromdee) madhaus@netcom.com (Maddi Hausmann) J5J@psuvm.psu.edu (John A. Johnson) dgraham@bmers30.bnr.ca (Douglas Graham) mayne@open.cs.fsu.edu (William Mayne) ajr@bigbird.hri.com (Andy Rosen) stoesser@ira.uka.de (Achim Stoesser) bosullvn@unix1.tcd.ie (Bryan O'Sullivan) lippard@ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard) s1b3832@rigel.tamu.edu (S. Baum) ydobyns@phoenix.princeton.edu (York H. Dobyns) schroede@sdsc.edu (Wayne Schroeder) baldwin@csservera.usna.navy.mil (J.D. Baldwin) D_NIBBY@unhh.unh.edu (Dana Nibby) dempsey@Kodak.COM (Richard C. Dempsey) jmunch@hertz,elee.calpoly.edu (John David Munch) pdc@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Paul Crowley) rz@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Richard Zach) tycchow@math.mit.edu (Tim Chow) simon@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Simon Clippingdale) PHIMANEN@cc.helsinki.fi (Pekka Himanen) MINER@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Ken Miner) mayoff@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Rob Mayoff) hhallika@tuba.calpoly.edu (Harold Hallikainen) mmwang@mv.us.adobe.com (Michael Wang) ...and countless others I've forgotten. I use PGP to sign all the articles. This means you can be sure that you have received the entire article, exactly as I posted it. You can also check the date of each article, even if the header information has been lost. (This should help the people who find copies of the files re-posted to systems outside Usenet.) For information about PGP, send a blank mail message to pgpinfo@mantis.co.uk. Disclaimer The editor of these FAQ documents has attempted to verify the accuracy and correctness of the information contained in them, as far as is metaphysically possible. Mistakes can and do happen, and so far it seems no omnipotent beings have intervened to correct them. If you use the information in these FAQ documents, you do so at your own risk. However, the editor hereby guarantees that reading these documents will not cause your soul to perish in eternal damnation. Offer void where prohibited by natural law. Finding Stuff If you are on Usenet, all of the FAQ files *should* be somewhere on your news system. Here are some suggestions on what to do if you can't find them: 1. Check the newsgroup alt.atheism. Look for subject lines starting with "Alt.Atheism FAQ:". 2. Check the newsgroup news.answers for the same subject lines. If you don't find anything in steps 1 or 2, your news system isn't set up correctly, and you may wish to tell your system administrator about the problem. 3. If you have anonymous FTP access, connect to rtfm.mit.edu [18.70.0.209]. Go to the directory /pub/usenet/alt.atheism, and you'll find the latest versions of the FAQ files there. FTP is a a way of copying files between networked computers. If you need help in using or getting started with FTP, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with send usenet/news.answers/ftp-list/faq in the body. 4. There are other sites which also carry news.answers postings. The article "Introduction to the news.answers newsgroup" carries a list of these sites; the article is posted regularly to news.answers. 5. If you don't have FTP, send mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu consisting of the following lines: send usenet/news.answers/finding-sources send usenet/alt.atheism/faq send usenet/alt.atheism/introduction send usenet/alt.atheism/logic send usenet/alt.atheism/resources 5. (Last resort) Mail mathew@mantis.co.uk, or post an article to the newsgroup asking how you can get the FAQ files. You should only do this if you've tried the above methods and they've failed; it's not nice to clutter the newsgroup or people's mailboxes with requests for files. It's better than posting without reading the FAQ, though! For instance, people whose email addresses get mangled in transit and who don't have FTP will probably need assistance obtaining the FAQ files. mathew -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.2 iQCVAgUBLL0xF3zXN+VrOblFAQHrRQQAmQgwV6tNHFVWr8cL4mAH6JO+yMybG72+ WPUcB87edVbRb5J62om99CVbbe+Qu87+q7b5w/zGbbG3cEVUIF651hQQjyEJnH2A KZKnMUeS9cmBS4lJuGbvpzc8z0kZArwMxVVOzCG+EsuIPrDQ2XfW3TCT3k1jcPkO jzAnApXunWM= =xkcP -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- For information about PGP, send a blank mail message to pgpinfo@mantis.co.uk. -- /X-Attribution:/h:j -- just say no to SuperCite