Mailbag: Atheism & Religion, Part 2

Is it a general practice of About.Com to include sections critical of a given subject within that subject header?

As far as I know, most channels on About.com don't have sites specifically dedicated to presenting a dissenting viewpoint from the rest of the channel, but it is common to have varying viewpoints on the same topics within a subject matter. Within "politics," for example, there is a general "U.S. Government Info" site as well as Liberalism and Conservatism sites (among others, obviously). All of the sites in this Religion Channel obviously disagree with each other on what qualifies as the "right" religion and are thus implicitly critical of each other.

So what's the problem with my site here, being critical of all of them at the same time?

I only found your Atheism & Agnosticism because I was doing a web search of "persecution of Christians" with a qualifier "Roman" and for some reason Google decided there was something in your area that met the search parameters.

Well, I have written on that subject -- Google didn't "decide" that there was something on my site, it simply indexed my pages and could tell that I had relevant material. For some reason, though, it doesn't seem like Lin looked very hard or paid attention to what I had written.

Perhaps the best bet would be to ask About.com to put in a heading called: Philosophies and Life-styles, under which Agnosticism / Atheism would have a heading equal to that of Religion & Spirituality? This would also allow you to concentrate on the more positive aspects of Agnosticism / Atheism, rather than having to spend so much time and energy distancing yourself from Religion as a heading.

I doubt it. For one thing, atheism is no more a "philosophy" or a "lifestyle" than it is a religion. Second, Agnosticism/Atheism is a single site while "Religion & Spirituality" is a "channel" -- a collection of sites on the same topic. A single site can't "have a heading equal to that" of an entire channel. Third, even if atheism fit under a "Philosophies and Lifestyles" channel, there aren't any other sites to put there. Why go to the trouble of creating a new channel for just a single site?

The truth is, I don't spend a lot of time and energy distancing atheism from religion. It comes up every so often, usually when an ignorant person writes in trying to claim that atheism is a religion or a philosophy, but I write about other things more often.

More selections from the Agnosticism / Atheism Mailbag...