All aboard!

This week sees the launch of the most extensive Humanist advertising campaign in our history. Polly Toynbee and Richard Dawkins, respectively president and vice-president of the British Humanist Association, are pictured above with Ariane Sherine who came up with the idea. The advertising campaign is country wide with some posters appearing on buses in York today. A friend from the North Yorkshire Humanist Group was interviewed by the local press this morning about the atheist bus campaign - his comments can be read here: http://www.thepress.co.uk/news/4035013.Controversial_campaign_launched_on_side_of_York_buses/

The posters say “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. When the fundraising campaign for the adverts started last year, some of my humanist friends were completely against the adverts, calling them anti-human and suggesting that the slogan merely reinforces precisely the religious presumption that people who don’t believe in God have no morality and are only interested in enjoying themselves. I don’t think that is a fair assessment. To some extent all publicity is good and this is easily the most successful Humanist marketing campaign in the BHA's entire 50 year history. The slogan does not suggest, to me at least, that "if God does not exist, everything is permitted" to use a phrase attributed to Dostoevsky in the Brothers Karamazov - though I have reason to doubt that he ever wrote it (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/features/2000/cortesi1.html).

I suppose Robert Ingersoll's famous remark that "Happiness is the only good" is also open to being misinterpreted, though this has graced BHA promotional material for a long time. We live in a media, sound bite age and in my opinion, the slogan is a stroke of genius, attracting £140,000 in donations to date (see http://www.justgiving.com/atheistbus). I hope that people will look at the web site links that accompany the slogans.