Please lets have more snow to keep these off the roads, say for a week from Feb 9th (and see Peter Kirk for links to other people's efforts on the DIY agnostibus. This one is particularly good).
Simon Barrow talks sense: "Many people will feel this has little to do with anything Christianly or humanly edifying. One has to wonder whether the purveyors of pro- and anti-God slogans really think they will persuade people? It feels more like a war of position between groups who cannot resist 'having a go back'."
Sadly predictable no.2: Mark and Phil Brewer have failed to get their paperwork in to the courts, resulting in a delay in the employee tribunals for former SPCK workers (ht Phil Groom). Hearings will now take place in May, to 'decide who the employer was at the time' (!!) This follows on from them
- failing to get their accounts in to the Charities Commission on time
Fear not, brave credit crunch commuters. As you sit in never-ending traffic queues at the rush hour, wondering if you'll have a job to go back to next week, a message of hope will pass you in the bus lane. That's right, stop worrying and enjoy life, because you'll probabably have no job.
No, sorry, I misread that, 'there probably is no God'. Well that's all your problems sorted then.
The agnostibus, or Atheist Bus Campaign to use the official title, was launched this week to great fanfare. £140,000, 800 buses and hundreds of ad spaces on the Tube are declaring the joyous news that there is probably no God. Responses have been many and varied, including Christian groups supporting the ads, arguimg that anything which gets people thinking about their beliefs is a good thing (I guess that's the 'no such thing as bad publicity' line). Meanwhile some atheists have lamented the 'probably', and there are worrying signs that the debate is being sidetracked by other matters.
Complaints have already been made to the Advertising Standards Authority, predictably from Christian Voice but from more serious quarters too - see this submission by Clifford Longley, covered by Andrew Brown in the Guardian. Longley argues that the probability actually points towards the existence of God, and cites a number of prominent scientists, including Stephen Hawking, to back up his argument.
As yet, nobody has picked up on the other dubious claim in the advert, that faith causes you to worry and enjoy life less. For example, Richard Layard argues in his book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science that there are 6 major factors in human happiness which apply worldwide, one of which is belief in God. He writes about:
one of the most robust findings of happiness research: that people who believe in God are happier. At the individual level one cannot be sure whether belief causes happiness or happiness causes belief. But since the relation also exists at the national level, we can be sure that to some extent belief causes happiness” (p72)
It's a finding backed up by other research including this presented to the Royal Economic Society. In response to the latter, Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society, claimed "Happiness is an elusive concept, anyway - I find listening to classical music blissful and watching football repulsive.
"Other people feel exactly the opposite. In the end, it comes down to the individual and, to an extent, their genetic predispositions."
So according to the NSS your level of happiness, or enjoyment of life, is nothing much to do with whether you believe in God or not. This is
a) despite research suggesting otherwise (but when was the last time the NSS paid attention to anything which didn't support their agenda?)
and
b) a high-profile national advertising campaign saying exactly the opposite.
Whoops.
So why are the adverts claiming that faith causes you to worry and stop enjoying life? Ariane Sherine, who thought up the campaign, argues: a new advertising campaign for Alpha Courses is running on London buses. If you attend an Alpha Course, you will again be told that failing to believe in Jesus will condemn you to hell. There's no doubt that advertising can be effective, and religious advertising works particularly well on those who are vulnerable, frightening them into believing. Religious organisations' jobs are made easier because there's no publicly visible counter-view to refute their threats of eternal damnation.
Anyone who's done the Alpha Course will wonder if they missed something - yes the course is designed to present the Christian faith and persuade people to try it out, but at no stage are people told 'believe this or go to hell'. And the adverts themselves are far from frightening: 'if God did exist, what would you ask?' runs the tagline, featuring very generalised questions like 'What am I doing here?' There's even a story doing the rounds of someone sitting in a very dull church who saw that poster, asked himself what he was doing there, and got up and left.
Any religion worth its salt will deal with questions of eternal destiny. Criticising religions for having an alternative scenario to spending the next life with God is like criticising water for being liquid. I very much doubt that Richard Dawkins would take kindly to spending eternity with the God he's spent his whole life trying to disprove. So if he's going to hate 'heaven', there has to be an alternative.
To be fair there are some crass religious adverts, such as those peculiar Authorised Version quotes which occasionally pop up at railway stations. But most religious advertising is aimed at raising money for charity (e.g. Christian Aid), and if anyone has been left quaking in fear by the Alpha ads then please leave a comment below.
The 'stop worrying' tagline, conceived in those heady summer days of 2008 before the credit crunch, now looks woefully out of step with reality. There's even a photo at the official website which looks like two of the agnostibuses crashing into one another. This is going to be an interesting ride.
This is a cross-post from Touching Base, a column at the Wardman Wire.
Blessed if you do, blessed if you don't.
Someone must have got to work on this picture in Photoshop by now......
Meanwhile, check this:
Even more jaw-droppingly, Dawkins told me that, rather than believing in God, he was more receptive to the theory that life on earth had indeed been created by a governing intelligence – but one which had resided on another planet. Leave aside the question of where that extra-terrestrial intelligence had itself come from, is it not remarkable that the arch-apostle of reason finds the concept of God more unlikely as an explanation of the universe than the existence and plenipotentiary power of extra-terrestrial little green men?
Melanie Phillips, on a debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox in Oxford this week. (Ht Mark Meynell). Lennox's book, 'Gods Undertaker' is a systematic, detailed, scientific (sometimes too technically scientific for this layman) demolition of Dawkins atheism - I'm most of the way through it at the moment, and it really is worth reading if you're interested in what Dawkins is saying. Reviewed here. You can watch a different Dawkins/Lennox debate here.
Update: a couple of links:
a bullet point summary of the Dawkins-Lennox debate at Thinking Matters
link to the full-length audio of a previous debate between the two at Critical Mass.
No sign of a video or audio of the Oxford debate yet.
Update Updated: Richard Dawkins has told More4 news that he's going to spend his retirement writing a book on whether fairy tales damage children. (also reported in the Telegraph, where he's identified as 'Prof Hawkins'.)
"I plan to look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical account that I look at will be several different myths."Of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many. And the scientific one will be substantiated, but appeal to children to think for themselves; to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence."
So the scientific account will be 'substantiated' but the Judeo-Christian account presented as 'myth'. Well, with such a fair and unbiased starting point, the little dears will clearly be persuaded of the merits of objective study. That's before they go home and burn all their Disney stuff (no bad thing in itself), fairy stories, poems, in fact, anything which involves the use of the imagination. But I hope Dawkins looks at the evidence, and if he finds that kids who are taught the Christian story are happier, healthier, more fulfilled and better citizens, then he'll come out in favour of it.
