Atheists announce a denial of God and a denial of service

by Steve Ragan - Oct 21 2009, 16:00

The Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention suffered a different type of denial on Tuesday as both sites were knocked offline by a denial of service attack (DoS).

On Tuesday afternoon, at about 5:30 p.m. local time, both the official Atheist Foundation of Australia site and the one for the Global Atheist Convention were simply pushed offline by a massive DoS attack. Early on in the attack, the sites were slow, but a short time later they were completely down.

The attack lasted well into the early morning hours EST on Wednesday, but even after the sites came back online, there were memory exhaustion errors on atheistconvention.org.au, and atheistfoundation.org.au had switched to a temporary message.

“Recently the Global Atheist Convention website suffered a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which caused the Global Atheist Convention and the Atheist Foundation of Australia websites to be taken offline. This was a network attack and we have been informed it was specifically aimed at our websites,” the temporary message said.

“While we do not have enough information to confirm the source or reason for the attacks, they came in the wake of news that The Rise of Atheism Global Atheist Convention has already sold 1,000 tickets and will be the largest gathering of atheists and other freethinkers in Australia’s history. This may have been not just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech.”

There is speculation that the attacks are the direct result of the convention itself. David Nicholls, president of the AFA told The Age that it wasn’t clear if the attacks were motivated by religion or anger by conservative Christians over the AFA’s lobbying efforts for a more secular society.

"The Atheist Foundation of Australia supports freedom of thought, and that includes freedom of religion. Our aim is to keep the Australian government, education, and welfare systems secular," Nicholls said. "Unfortunately, some people in our society find that very confronting."

Surveys show that only 7.5-percent of Australians attend church regularly. While the official Census figures show Australia’s ‘non-religious’ make up 20-percent of the population, several major international studies reveal that this figure is vastly underestimated. Nicholls estimates that non-believers in Australia are probably closer to 50-percent.

“Non-religious Australians are fed-up with an unrepresentative Christian minority influencing important civil rights issues like abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research and gay marriage – all issues which the majority of Australians support. They’re also concerned about the amount of tax-payers’ money being pumped into religious schools at the expense of the public education system,” Nicholls remarked.

The Rise of Atheism Convention will be at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on March 12-14, 2010.

“Make no mistake. This is not just going to be a talk-fest. The incredible level of interest should be a huge wake-up call to politicians and Christian lobbyists, alike, that non-religious Australians are preparing to stand-up and be counted, ” says Nicholls.

“Atheism is on the rise, and the non-religious will no longer sit quietly on the sidelines while good policies are derailed by religious dogma and prejudice.”

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