Athesit Activism

It's interesting looking at the graph of donations for the Atheist Bus Ads. For something that kicked off it's fund raising effort today for a now modest looking £5,500 it seems to have caught the zeitgeist. Perhaps it's because their is a silent majority* that feels left out of the regular debates about religion that the take up is so high?

I wouldn't describe the campaign as militant atheism just another ad in a sea of adverts competing for peoples attention. The "probably" language is mainly there to skirt around the ASA guidelines** which would prevent the flat out assertion (although curiously other groups can make such assertions). However the use of "probably" does make the advert softer and less prone to sounding like preachy hectoring which would kind of defeat the point.

I'm fairly fluffy and certainly wouldn't want to prevent anyone from practising their sincerely held beliefs. It's hard to predict what this campaign will achieve than pointing out there is a chunk of the population that don't subscribe to any religious viewpoint. Certainly there are other organisations devoted to the more weighty issues of campaigning for removing religion from it's protected and privileged status in public life.