by Hemant Mehta
In anticipation of their upcoming conference in New Orleans, the American Humanist Association has put up this ad on local streetcars through June 28th:
In addition, the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association is putting up the following billboard near the Superdome from June 4th-10th:
Speakers at the conference (June 7th-10th) include Gloria Steinem, NPR’s Science Friday host Ira Flatow, and MSNBC/The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur.
After an online contest held in January to design their next billboard, the Mid Ohio Atheists selected two designs (both created by Elliot Fuller) and they went up yesterday in Mansfield!
In addition, they put up the following billboard as a response to a sign a local church put up last summer (which strangely used the same wording). They ran a similar billboard back in November:
How soon before the complaints begin? The crazies are already rearing their heads…
The Backyard Skeptics are sponsoring two billboards in California and I’m just waiting for the complaints to pour in from deeply religious types:
The first one was put up in conjunction with American Atheists and pays homage to the late Christopher Hitchens:
You can check it out in the American Legion parking lot in Midway City.
The second one, promoting the upcoming Freethought Alliance Conference at UC Irvine, pokes fun at the idea of Noah’s Flood:
Apparently, it’s in the same location… or maybe the two billboards are swapping out. I can’t figure it out. Maybe someone can tell us what’s going on…
(via OC Weekly)
Remember when the Freedom From Religion Foundation wanted to put an ad in the New York Times urging people that it’s time to quit the Catholic Church? The NYT ran it, but they changed the headline to take away a bit of the edge (“It’s time to consider quitting the Catholic Church”).
Today, the FFRF is running the same basic ad in the Washington Post — this time, without editorial changes made to it (Click to enlarge):
The same ad (this time, in color) is also running on the back of the today’s free Washington Express daily.
The San Antonio Coalition of Reason in Texas has put up a digital billboard on I-10, near the Wonderland of the Americas Mall, through the Memorial Day weekend:
Reaching out to the like-minded isn’t the only goal of the coalition: “We hope folks will realize that we are a part of their community,” said Jim Parker, coordinator of the San Antonio Coalition of Reason. “Atheists and agnostics like us live all over Texas. We’re your coworkers, your neighbors, your friends and your relatives. One of us might even be sitting in the pew next to you at church.”
The United Coalition of Reason put up $5,000 to fund the ad. They add that this is the 31st state to feature an atheist ad campaign:
The states are Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and West Virginia.
The presidential election is just under 200 days away and the Freedom From Religion Foundation is starting a billboard campaign aimed at preventing the “folly of theocracy”:
That “God Fixation Won’t Fix This Nation” billboard is going up in Denver (twice) and Colorado Springs (once). In other words, not far from the headquarters of Focus on the Family and Ted Haggard‘s former church…
“This is the launch of our election-year caveat,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor…
…
“God fixation is what is wrong with our nation, and we need to place our best energies, time and money in improving this world, and not worrying about an unknowable, unprovable afterlife, or expecting an imaginary god to swoop down to fix our very real problems,” Gaylor says.
All three billboards will be up through the first week of May, serving a dual purpose as opposition to the National Day of Prayer on May 3rd.
There’s another completely-inoffensive-but-sure-to-infuriate-certain-Christians billboard going up!
This one will be promoting Skepticon, the huge, free skeptic/atheist conference held in Springfield, Missouri (hi, Bible Belt!) each November.
It’ll go up on Monday. You’ve been warned.
How soon will it be before someone complains…?
(via WWJTD)
As that image made the rounds on r/atheism yesterday, I wanted to know the story behind it — When did the sign go up? What has the reaction been?
HJ Hornbeck, the leader of the University of Calgary Freethinkers, was kind enough to fill me in.
The idea sprang from a religious poster on campus reading, “Waiting for a sign?” Clearly, it demanded a response. So HJ (with the group’s approval) started creating signs like these:
The idea for the poster that ended up on Reddit came from a past president of the group, who found it on a page of atheist quotes. So the attribution isn’t quite clear. Still, the response has been very positive.
HJ writes:
We’ve pulled in a few members just due to those posters. I haven’t seen any graffiti covering them, and their lifespan has ranged from 1 hour to 8 months, depending on location. Yes, Alberta may have a rep as the Texas of the North, but we’re also the second-most secular province in the country, so a non-religious message on the campus of a large city doesn’t see much harassment.
There was one exception, though…
Back in January, every poster I stapled up in one location would reliably get torn down within two days, and sometimes within the hour! I automatically fired one back up in its place, and for nearly two months the mystery vandal and I settled into the same routine: tear down, put up, tear down, put up. Finally getting bored of the cycle, I decided to have some fun with them. I crafted a new poster, printed a single copy, cut it down so it was slightly smaller than our usual posters, then stapled it up extra-securely underneath one of our own.
Here’s that poster 
It seemed to work! Until the mystery vandal began *covering* that poster with a different one, only to have RJ uncover it… and so it goes.
Despite the setback, it’s good to see a clever poster getting the attention it deserves.
If you’d like more information about the group, feel free to follow them on Twitter or Facebook.
(Thanks, HJ!)
The Toronto Transit Commission has put up a lot of religious/non-religious ads over the past few years. They approved the Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign’s ad, reading “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
More recently, they approved an ad from a Christian group in which a child with drug-abusing parents was advised to pray instead of seeking useful help.
Now, they’ve allowed this ad from a Muslim group:
The proper response to that is to say, “Well, they were right up until the fifth word…”
And then you move on.
The wrong response is to listen to what the leader of the group Canadian Hindu Advocacy is saying:
Banerjee claimed the ads are hurtful to Hindus and his group will be handing out anti-Muslim flyers outside the TTC.
“This ad has to be pulled because it is offensive to Hindus,” he said. “The TTC must recognize all religious groups.”
Umm… yes, the TTC must recognize all religious groups. They must allow pro-religious and anti-religious ads to go up (within reason) as long as the groups pay the fees. That’s what their own rules say they must do. Just because you don’t like what an ad says doesn’t mean it has to be pulled.
Canadian Hindu Advocacy, whose website hasn’t been updated since (I presume) 1994, can pay for their own ads if they want. That’s what all the other groups did.
To their credit, the TTC isn’t budging. They’re not taking the Muslims’ ad down.
That’s not stopping the Christian groups from offering more dimwitted advice, though:
David Harrison, president of the Bus Stop Bible Group, also has a problem with the ad.
He said that a small edit to the Muslim ad, such as putting “We believe” at the beginning, would suffice, adding that he supports the fact that every group is entitled to its own opinion.
Right… because Christian ads *never* reek of absolute certainty…
The TTC has two choices — they can accept or reject all religious ads. They’ve chosen the first option and it looks like they’re sticking to it, even if that means some crazy ads get through the filter. As long as they keep that open door policy going, I doubt they’ll face any opposition from atheists. We’ll pay the money and get our own ads up. But the moment TTC censors one group’s views at the expense of all the others, we’ll be ready to challenge them.
(via Godless Poutine)
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