Friday officially marks the beginning of ‘Tis the Season merriment with super sales, twinkling lights, kids with sugar plum visions and—atheist recruitment billboards. But this year’s campaign to attract the godless is fraught with twists.
The Mid Ohio Atheist group planned to put up three billboards in Mansfield next week, including one with a message it stole from a church. In August, brethren from the McElroy Church of Christ advertised its existence to potential lost souls by erecting a billboard saying: There is no God. Don’t believe everything you hear. The message was followed by the church’s website address. Perhaps church officials should have consulted PR specialists for help with what they were trying to say.
“My son was driving through town and called me and said, ‘you’ve got to come see this!’” says Mid Ohio Atheists president, Ron Stephens. “We supported their message-that’s for sure!”
The billboard was a colossal failure for the church, but not for the atheist group which says that their website was so jammed with people looking for the advertised local atheist group that their server crashed repeatedly.
Based on the wild success the atheists experienced with the Church of Christ message, the atheist group decided one of its holiday billboards would also say: There is no God. Don’t believe everything you hear.
It turns out, though, that the group won’t have to go to the trouble of beefing up their IT to handle the resulting onslaught of heathens upon its server. The billboard company it contracted with, and which had been designing the atheist signs for months, now refuses to put them up.
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2011.
Inflammatory to state a FACT?
If we can except a law of thrermal dynamics which states energy can not be created or destroyed it is not all that hard to understand that our very thought process is the most incrediable energy conversion which we have seen while here.
The most common reason I have heard for preaching the idea that God is not real, is because of the interference which religion has pushed and then told people that the pushes were God’s doing. I do not care if people believe that there is no god, in one way they are right–there is ceratainly not a god who hates life and would be blamed for the torture of the human spirit..that god is generally considered idol worship to many religions. Our current gods in America are made of tax dollars and the judging of who gets them; or the accumulation of assets as being our primary purpose here; and working and fighting for one Caesar or another, and doing anything which is asked, even as wild as falling upon our sword for Caesar.
Big bucks pushes us around in America as though they were slave traders. All of us, black or white and anything in between, are, as consumers, targets of the idol oriented gods which the giant retail industry has produced. We have become zombies trainned by lawyers, MBA’s and bean-counters galore to buy into the insane world of material greed.
We have now become net worths and contracts representing deals and signed agreements which can hold up in court and decide how the money flows. Iron clad mechanisms to retain and grow wealth for a small group of closely held assets. Made up of intellectual property negotiated for by our all too abundant lawyer population.
I have one more question on this ranting session: Why is it that those who need a lawyer the most can not afford one, and those who should not need lawyers to decide guilt use them most? We have become a lawyer run world which needs no ethics which contrast with the need of greed.