After discussing the idea of a new website off and on for a couple of years now, we finally decided amongst ourselves that it was time to retire the old God is for Suckers! and start anew with a new name. The name of the new website is Atheist Oasis – A Rational Refuge. Thanks to ChuckA and Ray for having their entries chosen from a list of suggestions from other regulars and moderators. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. Thanks to Ron for all of his help in this transition, and for providing us a place to hang out and rant all these years while managing all what had to be done behind the scenes at God is for Suckers! We will never forget all the good times we have had here, all the laughs, all the heated debates, all the funny fundie trolls we encountered, the Lion Feeds, the Mailbag, and so much more. We will never forget our friend Sean whose site this really was for a few years before his untimely passing. Sláinte Sean! May you rest in peace. Thank you for the good times. And now we also lay GifS to rest and start anew (although the old posts will still be up at the old gods4suckers.net address for the foreseeable future, for old times’ sake).

God is for Suckers! has often been called by some of our regulars as an “oasis”, a place where we can come together with fellow atheists and agnostics and discuss politics, separation of church and state, the attempts by the religious to force their superstitious beliefs into our secular government, or to simply discuss how experiences with religious family members, friends and co-workers have affected our lives in general.

While our name has changed, and we have a new website, Atheist Oasis will continue to be a place where we all can come and hang out, and rant, vent, discuss and have our usual good time. We look forward to many more years of good discussion at our new home with our old friends, and hope to make many more new friends, as well.

Those of you who follow us, please remember to change your links accordingly! See you all at the new place!

In case all you GifS peeps haven’t noticed the link in the sidebar, Ron has put a twitter account up for GifS. It’s “@gods4suckers”, located at twitter.com/gods4suckers, and automatically posts a “tweet” of every post made at GifS. So check it out! You can now keep up with GifS everywhere you go. Thanks Ron!

Major maintenance essentially completed. Obviously things look a little different right now, and will probably get tweaked more (especially appearance) in the next few days or even weeks, but we’re the same old blasphemers under the surface, where it counts. Please resume the petty bickering. (UPDATE: I expect to have a non-minimalist theme back up by tomorrow.)

The site is going down tomorrow (Sat 6/28) for some long-overdue maintenance. If all goes well, it’ll be back up by Sunday (6/29).

If things seem a little slow around here lately, fear not! Two of our most prolific posters, Stardust and Naomi, are currently off on non-GifS-related jaunts, and I myself can only pop in once and a while from work, that’s all (damn spam–!).

Gawd has been keeping himself busy, though:

Flooding the Midwest;

Throwing Hurricane Dean at Mexico;

And cutting the Peruvian people no slack in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Regretfully, The Old Git has resigned from GifS and has requested that all of his posts be taken down. I thank him for his time and written contributions, though we may no longer have the pleasure of reading them. I would have liked him to leave his posts behind, but we had to respect his wishes to remove them. Please do not ask further questions concerning details which led to his decision as it is not proper to gossip about old friends.

Peace be with you and wishes for the best, Old Git

Stardust and I have instituted a new policy on fundie trolls: We are no long “flaming” them. It takes too much time to do the alterations and the insulting is getting so fucking booooring…

We now alter their screennames, email addys and URLs–they are frequently porn-ish, by the time we’re done. Then we delete the body of their tiresome posts and replace it with this:

This post has broken a GifS Commandment: Thou shall not proselytize. Read Comment Policy Guidelines, for reference. Mods

It’s expedient, humane (even if they don’t deserve it!) and soothing to Mod-nerves.

If we were the sort who would invade their territory and smear feces on their walls, it would be only fair for them to come here and do the same. WE don’t–so THEY can’t, either! Honestly, now why should Star and I have to be the “bad guys” to the bullies?

(Usually, the little cowards lurk in the catacombs, leaving their dog turds out of sight of everyone but the Mods. However, one courageous little troll left a comment on Jesus Found, Alive & Well!; you can check out comment #10. The screenname indicated it was a female, and she was pimping her cheap-ass xian bumper stickers!)

As ChuckA would say: Of all da noive!

UPDATE from Stardust: It is easier for us just to copy and paste a standard warning and delete the objectionable content and not feed the trolls anymore–they seemed to love being flamed. I think that’s why they came, in the first place.

I want to make the point that Christians who wish to comment here in current discussions and participate in current debates, and are willing to abide by the comment policy they are more than welcome to…however…they should see by our banner what they are getting themselves into when they come here to proseltyze, warn us about hell, or tell us that gawd and jeebus love us. We can delete their “message of Jeebus’ luv” just as easily in the daylight as we can in the dark catacombs!

Just wanted to let everyone know that GIFS will be hosting the Carnival of the Godless Xmas Eve Edition…

You can find out more here, as well as at the top left of the main GIFS page…

Happy Hunting, Heathens…

And we can all thank RDZ for the awesome pic…

Thanks, dude…