Clarification in big letters for the slow learners:

Have a nice day.

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From our blogger Marcus. In temporary place of an FAQ about our modus operandi re: commenting, here is a summation of one of our drive-by theists’ comments:

Standard greeting… Statement of personal history or spiritual quest. Admission of trial and discovery of something called “atheists.” Oddly placed cliché. Statement of belief in deistic infallibility. Another cliché… Grammatically unsound, comprehension-confused, unintelligible statement… Statement of personal worth. Backhanded statement about atheist “faith” and affirmation of personal deity.

Generic closing thanks, end of witnessing.

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If the above sounds like Greek to you, maybe you should find another playground for now. Big kids play here. And they hit hard.

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Look, we’re happy to have comments. But after a long time of having an effectively open comments area, the hammering with moronic (mostly Xian) trolls who want to do a drive-by testify, a threat to our eternal souls, or offer the same lame-ass shit “argument” that we’ve all heard and refuted a thousand times before, we’ve decided that this stuff is just dragging the comments down.

So, look. Read the blog tag-line on the front page:

Commentary, news, and rants on the evils and stupidity of belief in the big invisible daddy in the sky.
Illuminating and watchdogging the widespread attempts to institutionalize the theocratic rule of the United States.
Making fun of believers everywhere.

This is an atheist site. It’s an atheist site that rants about encroaching theocracy, evil done from religion, and religious hypocrisy, stupidity, and irrationality. That doesn’t mean Xians or other religious folks can’t or don’t make worthwhile contributions to our discussion (we have some regular theistic commenters who make real positive contributions to the discussions); but it does mean that stopping in to witness for Jeebus, telling us how sorry you are for us, offering us another lame-ass attempt at Pascal’s Wager or a Free Will theodicy, or threatening us with the burning fires of hell is the moral equivalent of spam, and will be treated as such. If you have a profound need to post such things, get your own soapbox and bandwidth. It’s free at, e.g., Blogger.com, and you can link to us to your heart’s content.

So, we’re now phasing in a new comment policy: We’ll still welcome thoughtful disagreement, but we’ll delete and filter anything we see as effectively comment spam, as described above. And if you’re really egregious about it, we’ll just edit it rather than deleting it and make you look like even more of an idiot than your original message did. (Admittedly, in some cases, this seems near-impossible.)

And finally: All first-time commenters’ entries are moderated. So be patient; the moderation queue is typically cleared several times a day.