The ad above is slated to start appearing in New York City subway cars beginning next week, according to this blogger. The group that is sponsoring the ads, the New York Coalition of Reason is a collection of a few small groups ranging from the Secular Humanist Society of New York to the Flying Spaghetti Monster Meetup of Brooklyn, so it’s pretty impressive that they were able to raise the $25K it costs to run a subway ad.
Since the original success of the “Atheist Bus” campaign in Britain at the beginning of 2009, many communities in the U.S. and Canada have seen similar public service announcements. In that post about the Canadian bus ads, I opined that it didn’t seem too likely that such campaigns would ever take off in this country, but ads similar to the British ones ran on CTA buses in Chicago this summer as well as in Bloomington, IN, and the national group United Coalition of Reason has been able to put up billboards in a number of American cities. Unsurprisingly, wherever there have been such campaigns, Christian groups of all sorts fight tooth-and-nail to prevent them, but it’s a very encouraging development that the billboards and bus ads are getting seen in so many places.
That group is also helping to promote a book called Good Without God by Greg Epstein, who is the Humanist Chaplain (!) at Harvard. For my money, Humanism is skirting awfully close to being just another religious belief system without the superstitious trappings of conventional religion, but I think it’s helpful to the extent that it puts non-theism into a framework that people can understand.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
Those ads are also showing up in Boston.
I like it. I’m fantastically good without God. I only worry: How’s God doing without me? I give to the other church. We’ll compare bank statements at the End Days jambouree.