This is the billboard:
That's right. My city has people so fucking insecure in their own beliefs that they're willing to threaten a landlord over allowing a billboard that acknowledges the existence of atheists, on top of advertising a website such that atheists can communicate with each other.
In the wake of multiple, significant threats, the downtown billboard that says “Don’t Believe In God? You are not alone” came down early Thursday morning.
The billboard had gone up Tuesday afternoon at Reading Road and 12th Street, one block south of Liberty Street and it is being moved to a new site Thursday at the Sixth Street Viaduct.
The group that funded the billboard, the United Coalition of Reason, was contacted by Lamar Advertising of Cincinnati. Lamar reported that the landowner of the site had been threatened over the billboard's message and wanted it taken down.
"We weren't given the landowner's identity or precise details," reported Fred Edwords, national director of the United Coalition of Reason. "Nor did we pursue them. It was sufficient to learn that multiple, significant threats had been received and that Lamar would act quickly to alleviate the problem. Lamar was most apologetic to us regarding the situation. It was a development they hadn't expected. Nor had we. Nothing like this has ever happened to us before."
First, we had Governor Chet Culver of Iowa who stated he was "offended" by a billboard that acknowledged the existence of atheists and advertised a place for them to communicate. That was stupid enough. Now, we have threats over allowing the same billboard to be displayed in Cincinnati.
Threats.
Say what you want about these billboards, but the sheer hypocrisy that they bring out of people who have no problem with a country saturated with pro-God billboards is amazing. These billboards have been a great way of eliciting irrational behaviour from Christianists. Make no mistake, the bigotry against atheists (and non-religious people in general) in the U.S. is very real. I'm sure plenty of Kossacks have cited the University of Minnesota's study that showed how we're the most distrusted minority in America and the Gallup Poll about how Americans are very reluctant to vote for an atheist presidential candidate, who is otherwise qualified for office. This bigotry is pretty real in Cincinnati, which is pretty much creationist territory, being that our city is next to one of the most notorious creation museums in the country.
There is something about atheists that makes Christianists pretty uncomfortable. Christian fundamentalism itself is a liberation from doubt and a surrendering of one's conscience to an external source of moral authority that automatically spells out right from wrong, truth from untruth. In a sense, there is something attractive about Christian fundamentalism to average Americans. It offers them a sense of consistency in a world that's constantly evolving and changing around them. It offers them a sense of control, in that they do not have to discern right from wrong on their own, as they already know it. It satisfies an inner need to feel significant in the grand scheme of the universe's workings.
Non-religious atheists technically represent everything they seek to avoid. A lot of us embrace skepticism, where doubt is a powerful undercurrent. We argue that we are the result of a process that results in speciation and diversity, not the workings of a deity who created this universe just for us. We don't derive our morality from some external source and treat it as absolute, but rather, we evaluate issues concerning morality with our own personal cosncience. We wade through shades of gray, whereas the fundamentalist demands a black-and-white outlook to avoid any moral ambiguities. We are viewed as cultural and moral nihilists because fundamentalists cannot conceive of a working morality without God at its core.
But seriously though, how weak is your belief system that you feel threatened by not only people who completely reject your belief system, who are otherwise decent people in general, but also by anything that acknowledges their existence? Truly fucking pathetic.