Atheists say “Screw Myspace!”

I stumbled across Oz Atheist’s blog and found a post about The Man holding out on Atheists. Apparently, Myspace has been deleting groups from their website due to alleged complaints from religious zealots.

Oz has the following recommendations to those who find Atheist 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.

While I’m not one for condoning discrimination, ultimately Myspace has the right to refuse or delete anything they want. Remember that little check box no one reads when signing up for an account called “Terms and Conditions”? Smart money is on something being in the terms and conditions stating that Myspace has the right to have the ultimate say on anything posted on their pages, but in more elegant wording. Also, their must have been a reason for the complaints. They just don’t come out of nowhere. If for some reason others found the content to be offensive and Myspace looked into it and concluded the content to be offensive, then by all means the group should have been deleted. I am a firm believer in the right of free speech and if you want to gather similar minded individuals, then I suppose Myspace isn’t the the place to do it and their are other venues. Myspace never claimed they had to uphold your rights, they were just trying to have a social networking interface. You do have the right to free speech, but also remember that your rights end where others begin. Now I will digress before launching into this whole “don’t tread on me” diatribe.

I’ll end with this quotation from a lesser known philosopher:

Ism’s in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, “I don’t believe in the The Beatles, I just believe in me.” Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be a walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off people.