Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Atheist Bus Campaign



So I did some research on the Atheist Bus Campaign and low and behold our friend Richard Dawkins is on board.

Excerpted from The LA TImes:
Earlier this month, 800 buses rolled out of depots across Britain plastered with advertisements cheerfully informing people that "there's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Sponsored by the British Humanist Assn., the ad campaign is the brainchild of a comedian who had seen Christian messages on buses, looked up the websites of the organizations behind them and found warnings that, as a nonbeliever, she was destined to go to hell.

The new ads have attracted little controversy in Britain, a secular country that finds religious fervor a tad awkward. Perhaps the biggest kerfuffle has been over the word "probably" in the slogan, which the British advertising authority said should be thrown in to keep the ad from being potentially misleading, on the grounds that no one can say with 100% certainty that God does not exist.

The campaign's highest-profile backer is Richard Dawkins, a biology professor at Oxford University and the author of "The God Delusion," a defense of scientifically based atheism that became a bestseller in Britain and the U.S. Dawkins pledged to match donations to the campaign up to $8,250 -- a figure that was quickly reached.

The sad part is that this would never fly in my country, with all our religious freedom and all.

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