Rational Response Squad

Description

The Rational Response Squad (RRS) is a community of atheist activists, which maintains a website at http://www.rationalresponders.com/.

Website

The home page is at http://www.rationalresponders.com/

Slogan

"A place for activist atheists to unite"

Forum

A major part of the Rational Response Squad presence is its active online forum at http://www.rationalresponders.com/forums (Recent Posts)

See Also

See Wikipedia:Rational Response Squad for more documentary information about this group.

Controversy

Representation and membership

The RRS online forum is open to a wide variety of people, including theists, fundamentalists, angry atheists, polite atheists, rude atheists, people with fringe political positions, etc. The forum rules are quite open, and limited largely to dealing with trolling, spamming, illegal behaviour, unethical behaviour, etc.

As such, there are many people who are members of the RRS forum, and even the RRS community, but who are not necessarily representative of the RRS mission as a whole. These distinctions have been the source of some controversy in the past, as some people unfamiliar with the overall mission have taken the impolite behaviour of some forum or community members as reasons to criticize the RRS as a whole.

Rumours

Largely instigated by slighted theists, and partly due to confusion over #representation and membership, as well as conflicting standards of impoliteness and rudeness, some people, including atheists, have repeated rumours about various RRS members and the RRS community overall. This rumour mongering resulted in serious damage to the RRS' reputation, which is described at length in a blog post by RRS member natural, Still Unapologetic: Thanks for asking., which discusses not only the RRS rumours, but also the similar instances of the gnu vs. accommodationist debate and the controversial Elevator Gate.

Activism

Several members of the RRS are atheist activists of various kinds including both online activism and social activism.

Collaborations

The RRS mission endorses a many approaches are better than one approach to atheist activism, and so attempts to collaborate with a wide array of fellow activists. (Examples here)

Atheism United

RRS co-founder Brian Sapient (User:Brian) decided to collaborate with atheist activist Lance Sievert, and is a major contributor to the Atheism United mission, including hosting of http://atheismunited.com/, and this wiki.

Several atheist members of the RRS have also decided to support the project, including User:Mrxc, User:Wonderist, (etc. here)