The groups that brought you the “classlc” atheist bus ads are back with a billboard message that is sure to spark some great discussions:
Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.
How awesome is that?
It takes a page from Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion where he makes a similar point:
At Christmas-time one year my daily newspaper, the Independent, was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharraf (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four. Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque…
…
Imagine an identical photograph, with the caption changed as follows: “Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four.” Wouldn’t this be a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be.
Dawkins felt that prematurely labeling children like that was a form of child abuse. Call it extreme, but he had a point. Yet, parents do this all the time without thinking about it. This billboard campaign is all about consciousness-raising, and it accomplishes just that.
Notice the words featured prominently on the billboard, by the way.
Not only do they call out parents who use the term “Protestant Child” or “Catholic Child,” they also point the finger at anyone who would use the terms “Agnostic Child” or “Humanist Child.”
The point is that, by all means, you should educate your child with your morals and values. But there’s a difference between doing that and forcing an entire belief system on a child who doesn’t even have the capability to understand what that entails.
The purpose of this campaign — which, at its core, is not specifically atheistic — is to challenge state-funded faith schools, which by nature label children with a religious label and get taxpayer money to do it.
Help the British Humanist Association (BHA) in its effort to phase out state funded ‘faith’ schools and reform our education system by ensuring we can employ our dedicated campaigns officer against faith schools for another year.
The BHA campaigns for inclusive schools with no religious admissions policies, balanced teaching about different beliefs and values, and no compulsory ‘collective worship’. The BHA also campaigns to combat the growing threat to education from creationism and pseudoscience, as well as for wider improvements to values and moral education across the school curriculum and supports improved Sex and Relationships Education, Citizenship Education and inclusion of Philosophy.
Good for them. As I write this, they’ve raised nearly £9,000 toward their £30,000 fundraising goal.
These words are part of a coordinated multi-organizational advertising campaign designed to raise awareness about people who don’t believe in a god. The King Size ad appears on ten buses traveling throughout the city. Their appearance will continue for at least a month.
San Diego is the latest city to put up an atheist billboard, courtesy of the United Coalition of Reason:
They’re already getting some great publicity for it and local CoR coordinator Debbie Allen Skomer is doing a terrific job of explaining the group’s reason for putting up the sign.
Also in that video is a guy who says he doesn’t like the ad because it’s “attacking somebody’s belief.”
One of the wonderful parts of this campaign is that it shows how ridiculous some religious people are — people who can’t even read a couple short statements on the billboard, but who are quick to come to a judgment about what the message says.
They’re wrong.
The San Diego Coalition of Reason is just calling out to other atheists in the area and letting them know they’re not alone.
You know how I know that?
Because I know how to read and that’s what the billboard says.
They crossed out the “out” in “without” — that’s been done before — but why bother putting the words “Are you” in front? That’s just redundant. (Anyway, the answer is no.)
And nice job crossing out the group’s website. Now, no one will know where to go…
Who wrote “kill for” in the bottom background? That doesn’t even make sense.
Seriously, vandals. This is weak. You can do better than that. All you have to do is put a period in the URL and everyone will be confused.
When reporting on the threats that resulted in Lamar advertising moving the Cincinnati Coalition of Reason billboard, the article first quotes the CinCoR coordinator:
“Everything that has happened shows just how vital our message is,” Shawn Jeffers, co-coordinator for the Cincinnati Coalition of Reason, said. “It proves our point, that bigotry against people who don’t believe in a god is still very real in America.”
The article then quotes some random voice from the opposition… to keep it fair and balanced, I presume. Maybe they couldn’t find anyone who had a good reason to oppose the billboard’s message, because they ended up using this guy:
Jack Jones of Downtown told the TV station he thinks the sign should not be put up.
“It’s atheist,” he said.
That’s it. End of quotation, end of story, end of debate.
Eloquent, reasonable atheist. Followed by a wingnut.
Also, I didn’t know billboards could adopt a faith, but I learned something new today.
As we know, all billboards need to be converted lest they burn in hell.
The pics, courtesy of nancydukereporting.com, are part of an article about the billboard by Nancy Duke. I like the part when she gets reactions about the message of being “good without God”:
… definitely don’t tell that to homeless man Anthony Martin, who has been a Christian since miraculously living through a two-year coma induced by five bullets to the head in 1979. He was shot in the head five times after being chased down in an alley for $16 three decades ago and was in a coma from 1979 to 1981, he said.
“Was it luck that I lived or was it the grace of God?” Martin said.
A member of the Best* Church of God, Pastor Dave Shepherd, countered.
“Was it God’s grace that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust?” Shepherd said.
Around 2:00 PM yesterday, the United Coalition of Reason, which paid $3,875.00 for a one-month run of the billboard, was contacted byLamar Advertising of Cincinnati. Lamar reported that the landowner of the site had been threatened over the billboard’s message and wanted it taken down. Lamar only leases the land the billboard stands on.
No word on who made the threat or what the threat was, but Lamar handled this exactly as they should have. They took down the message and moved it to another location — seemingly, a better location — at no extra charge.
There is some good to come from all this: More publicity for the atheist groups in Cincinnati and the fact that no one was harmed.
Every person of faith in the city should be on the Coalition’s side in this matter — that is, they should be saying that there’s nothing offensive in the message itself, which simply says people who don’t beleive in God are not alone. Furthermore, they should condemn the anonymous person who made this threat. They should tell their churchgoers that they support our right to free speech even if they may not agree with what we believe.
There’s no reason they should be distancing themselves from this matter.
All those atheist bus ads and billboards have been going up for just over a year since the British one took the country by storm. (Edit: The British one wasn’t the first atheist billboard to ever go up, but it was the one that got the most publicity and started the worldwide trend.)
Why not compile them all?
If you see one that I forgot, leave a comment with a link to the pic or email me, and I’ll update the list!
In the complaint, the passenger told MARTA officials the bus was traveling northbound when it stopped at the corner of Northlake Parkway and Lavista Road.
As the passenger, whose name was not released, approached the front of the bus, Matthews stood from his seat and asked everyone to hold hands for a brief word of prayer.
Maybe Matthews and Angela Shiel should form some sort of Christian bus driver union…
It’ll be tough for Matthews to spin his way out of this one and who knows if he’ll learn his lesson in the five days during which he’s suspended. It’s bad enough that he’s wasting his own time by praying, but he has no right to waste the time of others or, even worse, not give them the option of getting off the bus.
Secular Student Alliance Member Todd Stiefel has agreed to match all donations to us by 12/21/2009 up to a total of $50,000. Double the value of your support and help us get the whole match by donating now.
