I’m the one who created the cards, and I’ve sold more than 1.25 million of them, including to various non-theist/free-thinking/etc. groups. And I’m happy to say they work; not one customer has gone to hell and then complained the card didn’t get them out. So I’m quite confident in their power. Hence my secondary slogan, “Don’t leave this earthly plane without one.” (The primary slogan is “Sin all you want — we’ll print more.”)

My GOOHF web site (linked under my name, above) has the story of why I created the card, and what happened next….

The President of the Boise State group, Lloyd Lowe, was being transparently ridiculous and disingenuous in his comments on the group’s banner statement “Outgrown Your Imaginary Friend?”, where he said that this was not meant to be controversial and merely intended to draw attention to the fact that there are non-religious people on campus. If you’re going to make a big statement that religious people’s deities are delusions, and are going to phrase the assertion in a clearly pejorative fashion, at the very least, don’t lie to everyone and say that there was no intention to be controversial. When you say that people’s and communities’ and societies’ most cherished beliefs are on par with the the imaginary friends of young children, you are knowingly being offensive. How about being honest enough to admit it? Maybe this group’s primary intention was not to speak derisively to the religious, but to speak to rationalists in a way that says “yes, you and I are reasonable and honest enough to acknowledge that certain ideas of our peers are patently irrational – but the religious clearly are not”. But this intention is still clearly offensive.

If your intention is to simply draw attention to the existence of the nonreligious on your campus, I have a suggestion that is both incredibly simple and incredibly effective: Have a sign that simply says something like “Boise State Atheists and Agnostics”. If anything, this is more effective for drawing attention to the existence of nontheists than the slightly ambiguous imaginary friend statement, and it doesn’t involve slapping the religious in the face and then having to deny it because “you’re trying to create a positive image for nontheists”. And any people who didn’t sign up because your slogan wasn’t funny or witty enough weren’t going to be active members anyway, whereas some of those who were put-off by an offensive statement with an accompanying denial of intended offense might have been.

If you’re going to be a group that does not give religious beliefs and believers special treatment and shows the same derision for these beliefs and for the acts of irrationality that goes into holding them as you would for any number of other brands of irrationality, fine. Whether that is the best thing for whatever your goals is, whatever. But at least have the honesty to admit that you were knowingly making a statement that would be deemed controversial.

So far, we’ve got no complaints that these cards DON’T work, so we have to assume they work just fine.

Mark

photos here

Now I have a way to meet more people.