Those Offensive Atheist Billboards

I like the first billboard the best. Like they say you can’t please all the people all the time. Of course that doesn’t really apply to the more extreme fundies, since they only know how to hate anything not in agreement with themselves.

Some people are bound and determined to be offended at just about anything. The billboards are directed to atheists, not the traditionally religious. They are welcome to ignore them. But for us godless heathens, we are happy to have them reach out to like-minded people in our areas. It’s a good thing, even if some people insist on being offended that someone might have an opinion different than their narrow worldview.

I agree with Kate. It’s not all christians that have problems with signs like that. Though, I’d argue that a very loud majority would.

I agree with Hemant that it wouldn’t take very much to upset that loud majority. I’ve thought of putting up signs that just say,

Some people don’t believe in God.
-url-

I’d guaranty some people would get their hanes all knotted up over it.

Basically, anything that communicates the fact that you can be a good, kind, caring moral person without believing that some Hitler-esque dictator is going to burn you forever if you do not believe in him. I would love to see more atheists stand up and be heard so that we can communicate the fact that it is okay to believe in reality. You do not need to believe something that makes you look like you robbed a drug dealer and took all his shit at once.

I’m interested in the theological aspect of this. What is the religious problem with people being good without god ? Isn’t it a point of principle with Christians that salvation is a matter of faith ? So whether you are good or not is of much less concern than whether you are saved or not. If I was a Christian I can’t see that I’d be bothered if atheists were being good, in fact I would probably be pleased since they would at least be behaving morally in this life even if the poor sods were going to fry for all eternity. Fortunately I don’t have to wrestle with these sort of problems as I will be one of the deep fried ones.

So what do more liberal christians think of these signs? All I hear about is what the fundies think, but there reaction is not a surprise.

I go to a small liberal arts college where there are a lot more liberal christians than deeply conservative, and I’m interested in what their response would be if my secular student association wore shirts with the message “you can be good without god.”

IvanS there isn’t a theological problem with people being good without God. The Bible recognises that everyone has a conscience and a moral sense. From here in the UK, I don’t really recognise this as an issue, is it a US thing?

“As if it wasn’t plainly obvious already, controversy over signs as innocuous and positive as this makes it clear as day that nonbelievers can do no right in the eyes of some believers.” and vice versa. As Neece says, some people are determined to be offended by anything, and that seems to cut across all groups.

I’m most offended by those posters which declare ‘the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God’, or something else in 17th century English at a train station.

Unfortunately, in the UK our media know exactly who to go to for an ‘as Christians we’re really offended by this’ quote. Christian Voice and the National Secular Society, despite both being pretty small organisations, get more airtime because they can be banked on to give trenchant opinions. That gives the impression that Christians are queueing up to be offended by things, which isn’t remotely true.

I remember the little laughing guys from an office humor comic entitled “You want it when???”

Ca. late 1970s.

Yes, I first saw them with that text in 1977 (sometimes I am a fount of spectacularly useless knowledge – but it was on my first job, which is how I remember.) I saw them pinned on a wall, but they may well have come from a comic. I’d be interested to know if they were new then.

And yes, I’d like to see them in that billboard form too.

We should save our passion for specific issues (church-in-state, faith healing, gay marriage)
not an outreach campaign.

An attempt at a non-offensive atheist billboard:

Pssst! It’syay okayay ifyay ooyay on’tday elievebay inyay odgay. Eithernay ooday eway. Isitvay usyay. shhh. (url)

Even if the billboards just said the word “ATHEISM,” religious nuts would get upset.

We really ought to try this at least once to see what happens!

IMHO, part of the usefulness of the billboards is that they offend certain Christians while not being all that offensive in and of themselves. Any damn fool can offend theists by saying some variant of “TEH THIESTS IZ STOOPID,” and theists who are offended by that look justified. To offend one’s opposition by saying something innocuous, on the other hand, highlights the irrationality of the opposition.

We should save our passion for specific issues (church-in-state, faith healing, gay marriage) not an outreach campaign.

Personally, I agree with passion about church-in-state and gay marriage whole-heartedly.

But I also feel we should attempt to take the moral high ground away from the theists.

That definitely includes “spreading the good news” that Millions of us are Good without God. I personally pondered how I was going to raise my children to be good ethical human beings without the benefit of the church I grew up with (a good liberal Roman Catholic Church) After much pondering, I arrived at the following conclusion:
Equating morality to religion is equivalent to equating law to monarchy.

Without a source of morality outside of man, there can be no moral distinction between Mother Theresa and Adolph Hitler. Both followed their convictions. Think about it.

Defender: that is a ridiculous and absurd statement. There is no requirement for anything ‘outside man’. You might as well say “Without the Easter Bunny there can be no morality.”

Without a source of morality outside of man…

How about one inside man, just for a change?

How about an intellectual morality that would end all discussions about morality being the province of religion, about each man being a moral island.

If it is at all possible to objectify any part of morality, and I’m not sure it is, then it will come from the intellect, not from the paranormal.

If I am right and morality is purely subjective, different for each person then you are completely wrong to equate Mother Theresa and Hitler. They may well both have been following their internal moral principles, but they most certainly weren’t following mine. Thus I can say which one I consider more moral as can you and everyone else on the planet. Why is that so hard for the religious to get? And why is it when their own morality collides with Church morality most are happy to ignore Church teachings? If they truly believe their Church is right then how is it possible that the two moralities are not aligned?

Incidentally Mother Theresa may have contributed indirectly to more deaths than Hitler thanks to her work in not allowing the promotion of birth control of any form in India as per current Catholic doctrine.