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.
