About 60 people have complained to the ASA about the new Atheist Bus Campaign which tells you: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Some Christians and other monotheists find this statement offensive if only because it's misleading: there's more evidence for God - whichever one we're talking about - through personal experience than not, they say.
Arcatistes will know that I am always amused by the certainties of atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens and so many others (including close friends), but I'm certainly not offended by this campaign's wishful-thinking message. Before Christmas, a humanist on the radio explained that the campaign was designed to reassure people that atheism was respectable now: she claimed that not-believing was still taboo. Really? I should say being religious is taboo in some circles, especially those where literary and philosophical fashion predominates.
What's really happening is that Atheism is itself slowly turning into a religion, as I have explained before. The mistake is to suppose that atheists are unbelievers: but a faith in something need not be of a mystical or supernatural nature. Atheists often believe wholeheartedly in science, in education, money, materialism, intellectualism: they would rather place their faith in empiricism, or what's testable, than in the essential subjectivity of a spiritual belief. The vogue is for a claimed objectivity because personal experience (or testimony) is seen as suspect.
That science is forever correcting itself, and turning theories into faux-facts, is neither here nor there: the altar is ready for service, be worshipful in the presence of Fact. As I have said before, the current cathedral of Atheism is the Large Hadron Collider, presently a little under the weather. But let's wish it well.
If the Bus Campaign comforts a few atheists, then what's the problem? Like the God-lovers, they too need the pastoral care of their priests. Probably.
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