Tuesday, January 6, 2009

The Agnostic Bus

For my first post I'd like to talk about the Atheist Bus campaign. I submitted a comment today. Let see if they publish it. This is what I wrote :

I was very happy to learn about the atheist bus initiative. But then I read the slogan and was pretty disappointed. The simple addition of "possibly", which may have been made to satisfy the ASA, makes the message not atheist but agnostic. An atheist by definition doesn't have any doubt about the non existence of god. The remaining of the slogan makes also in my opinion two wrong assumptions. The first one is that believers cannot enjoy life. The second that someone believes because he's worried. Most atheist may think that the reasons to believe are rooted in fear but this remains debatable. I guess the aim of this slogan was to be as general as possible, trying to speak to as many believers as possible but unfortunately it fails to convey any strong message for all the aforementioned reasons. I would have preferred something like "There is no god. Now stop fighting for it and be free." If the word possibly was really added because of the ASA, what about using the money to lobby for the right to freely express the real atheist views ?