Archive-name: atheism/overview Alt-atheism-archive-name: overview Last-modified: 5 April 1993 Version: 1.2                                     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 files could not have been written without the assistance of the many readers of alt.atheism and alt.atheism.moderated.  In particular, I'd like to thank the following people:  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)  ...and countless others I've forgotten.  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 the author, 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.                                   Finding Stuff  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 [18.172.1.27].    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. (Penultimate resort)  Send mail to mail-server@mantis.co.uk consisting of    the following lines:        send atheism/faq/faq.txt       send atheism/faq/logic.txt       send atheism/faq/intro.txt       send atheism/faq/resource.txt     and our poor overworked modems will try and send you a copy of the files.    There's other stuff, too; interesting commands to try are "help" and    "send atheism/index".  6. (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.