[Philly.com]

With its image of blue sky and fluffy clouds, the rectangle floating lately over I-95 near Allegheny Avenue suggests something dreamy, almost heavenly. At least from a distance. Drivers headed north toward the giant billboard might first discern the words God and Believe and suppose this to be the work of a fundamentalist church. But this is the work of no church.

“Don’t believe in God?” it asks. “You are not alone.”

Think of it as a sign of the times. Mounted by a consortium of local atheists, it is an invitation to the area’s atheists, agnostics, skeptics, rationalists and religious freethinkers (no one label fits them all) to overcome their differences and form a coalition.

“Hundreds of thousands of your neighbors in the Delaware Valley feel the same as you do,” according to the Web site www.phillyCOR.org, to which the billboard directs passing motorists.

“Our mission is not to convince fundamentalists to change their position,” Steve Rade, a Huntingdon Valley businessman, said last week. He donated the $22,500 needed to mount the billboard, which appeared May 1 and is to remain until the end of August.

“What we want to do is give people questioning their beliefs a place to go for more information and to meet like-minded people.”

“I’d like everyone to believe what I do,” he said, referring to his “absolute certainty” that there is no divine being running the universe and no life after death. “I think it would be a better world if they did.”

The 20-by-60-foot sign has generated 7,000 hits for the Web site, which offers links to such member organizations as the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia, the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, Philadelphia Atheists Meetup, and the Secular Society of Temple University.

The sign’s original, geographically limited toll-free phone number generated only about 300 calls, however. The new number, 1-877-99HUMANIST, is reachable from any area code.

No one knows how many American adults identify themselves as being in the atheist spectrum, but surveys suggest between 4 percent and 9 percent, the lowest of any industrialized nation.

Read more here.

[From me]

What is sad to me is that the atheists are becoming more evangelistic than many of our churches.  I wonder why someone would spend that much money to put a sign up to convince people not to believe in God.  

What do you think?

[Telegraph]

The Christian think tank Theos has attacked a report from Ulster University that claims that the “intellectual elite” of Britain is atheist.

Professor Richard Lynn, Ulster University’s emeritus professor of psychology, said that more members of the “intellectual elite” considered themselves to be atheists than the national average.

But Paul Woolley, director of the think-tank Theos, said: “Religion is a complex phenomenon and Professor Lynn’s explanation is simplistic. He has recycled the long-disproven thesis of inevitable secularisation.

“Academia had a religious origin - the first universities were originally established by the Church, and some of the finest academics in the world today, not to mention some of the greatest minds in history, are deeply religious.

“The research fails to take account of a variety of cultural factors that would affect the outcome of opinion polls and surveys, and makes a series of unproven assumptions, not least that a high level of education is synonymous to a high IQ.”

Professor Lynn is well known for controversial statements on eugenics, particularly the links between IQ and race.

Dr David King, co-ordinator of watchdog group, Human Genetics Alert, said: “We find Richard Lynn’s claims that some human beings are inherently superior to others repugnant.”

According to the report the decline in religious observance over the past century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence.

[Source]

[From me]

Humm.. I may be stupid but I’m smart enough to ask God to control my life.  I examined the evidence and realized it takes more faith to not believe in God then to accept He exists. 

What do you think?

[Blog Wired]

A University of Virginia graduate student is hard at work on a game that gives players a chance to “stop the spread of Christianity and Islam by murdering Abraham and the authors of the Bible, before beheading Muhammad,” reports Virginia’s WSLS television news.

Read more here.

[From me]

What is in the water at the University of Virginia?  Remember the editorial in the school paper that mocked Jesus?  Sounds like a good place to start a new church.

What do you think?

[USA Today]

[Guardian]

The strident secularism of Dawkins and Hitchens misses a bigger point. God doesn’t have to be great for religion to be worthwhile. Albert Einstein’s letter, containing a short rant about God and the Bible, sold recently for 25 times its expected price - thanks, in part, to professional atheist Richard Dawkins being one of the unsuccessful bidders. It’s long been said that religion is a racket. Sales figures of other anti-God rants - much longer than Einstein’s letter to Eric Gutkind - suggest that atheism may be catching up. But is it good for the atheists?

As we know, it helps to have a book in circulation. Dawkins’ recent work The God Delusion is nowhere near as big as the Bible, but shifting 1.5m copies is more than respectable. Book sales have a legitimizing effect. It’s not just the growing number of readers who may be converted by a polemic. Monetary success confers an impressive, almost magical, aura.

If atheism’s a commercial success, associated with a certain kind of high-flying, worldly proselytizer, we may yet see the advent of an atheist sect - reclusive ascetics who wish to distance themselves from the more ostentatious non-believers. Atheist sects? Not as crazy a concept as you might think. In New York, there has even been talk of a “church” - a physical house of non-worship - for atheists. Start a church and, even if you remove all mention of God, a schism seems inevitable.

Christopher Hitchens, declaring that “god is not great,” seems to have designed this phrase expressly to piss off the worshipful. Religion may be childish but so is a show of disrespect. If we’re so comfortable in our non-belief, do we need to go around nettling the believers?

While finishing my third novel, I faced a dilemma: whether to capitalise the G in God when referring to the Christian deity. God is more of a concept than a being to me, but the lower case “god” suggested by Hitchens just didn’t look right. If Nancy, Allison, and Jasmine (fictional prostitutes in my novel) require the upper case treatment, it seems democratic to do likewise for God, who is also a product of the imagination.

As a central character in so many other stories, God has legs, but I am not here to defend God’s greatness. Or legs. I prefer to say that God … is just OK.

Read the whole story here.

[From me]

I like what Ms. Quan has to say.  I guess an Atheist can say what I’ve been asking for years better than me.  If a person wants to be an atheist, agnostic, Mormon, Muslim, or whatever that is up to them.  I will still pray and share my faith but I will respect their rights to believe what they want.  A3 reminds me of Ms. Quan.  

What do you think?