Sigh.
One of a collection of billboards just put up in the Sacramento area supporting atheist beliefs has been vandalized.
Before being defaced, the billboard along the causeway between Sacramento and Davis read "Are you good without God? Millions are." But someone has spray painted the words "also lost?" to the end.
I'm guessing this vandal would never read a socially tolerant blog like Daily Kos willingly, but nevertheless, I direct this to the vandal: thank you for demonstrating why these billboards are necessary.
You can see the full result here:
Here's what else I've diaried about relating to bigotry against atheists:
- A similar billboard in Cincinnati was forced to move after threats.
"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."
- Iowa governor Chet Culver, a Democrat, stated he was disturbed by a similar billboard (different organization) and said there had to be a debate as to whether the atheistic organization deserved the same free speech rights as Christians ones (seriously).
“I was disturbed, personally, by the advertisement and I can understand why other Iowans were also disturbed by the message that it sent,” Culver said.
The question will likely become a legal battle, Culver said. He deferred questions of whether the group deserves the same free speech rights as Christian organizations to advertise on the buses to the Iowa Attorney General.
[...]
It read, “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone,” and was sponsored by the Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers group.
- A billboard put up by the Christianist group, Answers in Genesis basically claimed that if you don't believe in God, you're on a slippery slope heading toward a life of immorality and violence.
As you can see, there's a trend happening here. It's important to note though that all the Sacramento, Cincinnati, and Iowa billboards did was 1.) acknowledge that there are people living among us who are atheists and 2.) gave them a place to meet and organize online via a URL. These billboards aren't starting a theological debate like the UK bus campaign is with its agnostic atheist claim, "there's probably no god."
They merely acknowledge the existence of other atheists and the only social cause really espoused by them is to get an atheist to meet other atheists.
Seriously, think about that. Think about people vandalizing posters or making threats over the public acknowledgement that you exist. Even if you're not an atheist, this should bother you, because the bigotry against us is very real. I'm sure you've seen 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. Why are we so distrusted in the U.S., mostly by Christian fundamentalists?
I gave a reasonable take in my last diary about this subject:
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.
I view the billboards as necessary to show the reality: that atheism is a proposition on the question of God's existence held by many and that atheists themselves are normal people who live among you and are not, by definition, nihilists or morally unsound.