The Atheist Bus Campaign is cruising towards £100,000 in donations, when the original target was £5,500. Donations are coming in from across the world, even from religious groups, as well as religious individuals, and from atheists. Religious people may have donated as they see this as being a healthy thing, an opportunity to open up a debate, and good for them, let’s have it. They may alternatively have donated because they are understandably pissed off at threats of eternal torture being cast about in the name of the same god they believe in, a god they may just believe is kind, gentle, and couldn’t give a dingo’s kidney who believes in him. Or her. Or it.
This campaign may originally have been about offering a response to the threats of eternal damnation plastered across buses by Christian groups, but donations have evidently surpassed anyone’s expectations and a discussion has started.
The ‘probably’ in ‘there’s probably no god’ was included so as to reduce the risk of offence to the religious, which is amusing when you consider that it’s highly unlikely that a Christian message would read ‘non-believers will probably burn in hell for all eternity’, as indeed the one that went on the buses that precipitated this whole campaign didn’t. The presence of that probably means that religious people, including one on a recent ‘Thought for the Day’, suggest that this leaves us open to the possibility that there is a god. Yes, it does, and yes, there is. But I don’t start from the position that there is a god, I start from the position that there is not, and await proof. I remain utterly convinced that there is no god.
Our society is, I hope, moving slowly towards the point where religiosity is not the default starting point, where atheists are not regarded as ‘outside’ the moral arena, where lack of a belief in a god of any kind isn’t interpreted as a character flaw or symptom of some kind of nihilist abandonment of all ideas of truth and beauty. Nevertheless we are still in a situation where public events are marked by some kind of religious activity, where Thought for the Day on Radio 4 is still a religious broadcast, where priests and rabbis are still sought and consulted on matters of ethics often to the exclusion of anyone with a reasonable opinion, and where insulting and threatening language issued forth from religious fundamentalists is still seen as tolerable where direct criticism of religion is intolerable.
Unlike some people, I don’t believe in a society free of religion, simply because it is a completely unrealistic idea. If you believe in god, good for you. But we are human beings first, and it is quite alright to lead a good and happy life without invoking the supernatural. A lot of people have evidently decided that the idea of expressing that sentiment on the side of a bus is a good start.
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