Contacting Your Guide, Austin Cline

Questions about atheism, agnosticism, or this site

I'm a real person, just like all the other Guides at about.com, but I can't promise that I will be able provide a personal response to every email I receive. I'd like to and I try, but I receive too much to do so. Some of the most common questions may be addressed in the links below, so you should check there first:

• What is atheism?
• What is agnosticism?
• What is religion?
• Arguments against God
• Arguments for God

Finding Information

There are three ways to find information on the Agnosticism / Atheism site:
1. Use the categories to the left on each page and browse.
2. Type a query or keywords into the search box at the top of each page.
3. Ask in the forum.

Agnosticism / Atheism Community

The Agnosticism / Atheism forum is an important and interactive part of this site. In the forum you will find atheists, agnostics, skeptics, humanists, theists, deists, and more, all of whom are talking about religion, politics, philosophy, culture, art, and so forth. There are many different perspectives here and people from many countries around the world. More about the forum...

Having Problems?

If you are having technical problems (pages aren't displaying or printing, you can't log in to the forum, etc.) or if you have comments about advertising, contact Customer Service. If you have comments or questions about links, you can contact me — but be sure to include the title of the page and the URL.

Advertisements on the Agnosticism / Atheism Site

I have nothing whatsoever to do with any of the advertisements on this site. I can no more influence the advertising on this site than the advertisers can influence the content of my articles. These advertisers do, however, make it possible for you to use this site free of charge. Comments or questions about the ads should be sent to Customer Care.

Arguments and Debates

There are naturally a lot of debates surrounding atheism, agnosticism, and religion. I don't hesitate to express my views on the various controversies and offer what I consider to be solid arguments for those positions. However, no one should imagine that I somehow represent all atheists. The only thing all atheists have in common is that they lack belief in the existence of gods; as a consequence, atheists can disagree on any political, social, religious, or philosophical topic. The opinions I express here may be relatively common among atheists, but if you try you can probably find an atheist who disagrees with me — and there are certainly plenty of theists who disagree with me as well. Email, however, is not my preferred format for debates or arguments. If you wish express disagreement or debate some point, you'll be more likely to get a response if you post in the forum — that's why it's there.

E-mail Your Guide

If none of the above helps you or already answers your question, you are welcome to email me. You should keep the following points in mind, though:

• Polite requests are more likely to be answered; impolite demands are more likely to be ignored.
• Emails with attachments will probably be deleted unopened.
• Plain text e-mail will be easier for me to read
• An identifying subject line helps me; subject lines that are blank may be deleted as spam.
• I reserve the right to publish any emails I receive. Ultimately, few emails I receive are published, and when I do publish something I don't include the authors' name or contact information for the sake of their privacy.
• Because of the quantity of spam I receive, I use aggressive spam filters which may at times catch genuine emails. If you send me a question and don't hear back after a couple of days, try sending again with an altered subject line and using plain text — it's possible that your message had words or HTML that the filters perceived as spam and I never saw it.