Word: atheist
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...Larlham dismisses the atheist's effort as futile: "As if people losing sleep over God will suddenly be fine. If you're worried about something, you need something more powerful than a phrase like that to stop it. You need a change of heart and a change of life that God's words can offer...
...Similar atheist campaigns have run in Barcelona, Madrid and Washington, D.C. But since its Jan. 6 launch, the London scheme has been credited with inspiring atheist bus campaigns in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany and Italy, where next month posters in Genoa will read, "The bad news is that God does not exist. The good news is that we do not need him." The Genoa campaign prompted Father Gianfranco Calabrese, a spokesman for the Archbishop of Genoa, to speak out against what many opponents of the campaign call blasphemy. "There are some methods which promote dialogue and others which feed intolerance...
...Backers of the atheist bus campaign find the response flattering. "It just proves that we've had an impact," says Hanne Stinson, CEO of the British Humanist Association, which helped comedian Sherine raise money for the campaign. When Sherine approached the group with her idea last October, the initial aim was to raise $8,000 over several weeks. But $74,000 flooded in on the very first day, with more than $220,000 raised by the end of January. (See pictures of a charity campaign...
...anyway, say the London atheists, it's actually the Christian adverts that may be offensive to some. While the Humanist Association defends the right of Christians to air their views, many of its members object to the Christians' choice of words. Richard Dawkins, the eminent Oxford biologist and author of the best-selling book The God Delusion, takes issue with a slogan that calls nonbelievers fools. "That's a particularly obnoxious quote from one of the Psalms," he says. "Ours was extremely gentle and respectful by comparison." The use of the word probably in the atheist slogan, he says, does...
...Even so, the Advertising Standards Authority, the British advertising authority responsible for screening ads, received more than 150 complaints about the atheist campaign in January, and at least one bus driver walked off the job. "This is a public attack on people's faiths," said Ron Heather, a 62-year-old bus driver and Evangelical Christian. "I have a lot of passengers who are over 90 or are seriously ill, and to tell them there is no God seems a bit insensitive when God is probably all they have left in the world." Dawkins believes that's neither here...