h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How It All Got Started

It was only a few short years before coming to H2G2 that I'd discovered what was, to me, some rather earth-shaking new information about life, the universe, and everything. I found it compelling and convincing, and I read more, absorbed more, and understood better. When I came to H2G2, one of the benefits I saw was that it provided me with a perfect forum for challenging that new information. After all, perfectly reasonable and well-educated people have beliefs completely different from mine, and perhaps I'm the one who is missing something.

So, I sprang into every facet of religious debate I could find. Along the way, I got to know several others whose beliefs were more or less similar to mine. Most of us had written an article of some sort on the subject. We had some very amicable and sometimes fascinating conversations relating to all sorts of topics relating to belief, and human behavior. But since this was always attached to some debate or controversial article, so someone always came in and told us we were going to hell, or some nonsense. So I suggested it might be a nice idea to carve out a corner of the ether we could call our own, and have our amicable conversations without being bothered by fundamentalists. We'd have fundamentalists over if they wanted, but it would be apart from where we could just relax and talk about stuff.

Everyone thought this was a great idea, but nobody wanted to do the work. So I sighed and did it myself, creating the first page for the Antichrist's Support Network. I thought the name was funny. Some of the other initial members thought so, too, but others thought that it was too offensive, and that it communicated the wrong idea of what we were about.

The rest of the original page was as silly as the name. I thought humor was necessary to avoid portraying an overly surly and confrontational environment to casual onlookers. Darwin the Ferret, a veteran comic character from my Atheism article, put in an appearance. Twophlag Gargleblap provided another character, Scopes the Monkey. I made fun of myself in my bio, then invited the members to be chairpersons at our virtual board meeting, and give their chairs whatever silly or not-silly names they preferred.

What should we be called, and what, exactly are we about? Continuing in the silliness, "Jehovah's Victims" and "Satan's Corner," before Anonymouse provided the answer to the first question. She quoted George Orwell as saying, "Freedom of religion must include freedom *from* religion," and suggested the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I've got a penchant for alliteration, so I modified that to Freedom From Faith Foundation. It's a good thing, too... a few months later, my internet travels brought me to the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a very real non-profit organization in Wisconsin who happens to occupy that trademark.

All of this took place just before my Atheism article was published on the front page. In those halcyon days everyone looked at the front page to see if anything interesting has shown up, so I used the impending publishing as the first opportunity to advertise the FFFF. We had a respectable population in pretty short order, so I'd have to say with no modesty whatsoever that we were an instant success.