Prof Dawkins,** the renowned evolutionary biologist and author of The GodDelusion, said: “I wanted something stronger but with hindsight I thinkit’s probably a good thing because it makes people think.
Organisers originally hoped to put the message on just a handful ofLondon buses, as an antidote to posters put up by religious groupswhich they claimed were “threatening eternal damnation” tonon-believers.
But after the campaign received high-profilesupport from the prominent atheist Prof Richard Dawkins and the BritishHumanist Association, the modest £5,500 target was met within minutesand more than £140,000 has now been donated since the launch in October.
Enoughmoney has now been raised to place the message – “There’s probably noGod. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” – on 200 bendy buses in thecapital for a month, with the first ones taking to the streets .
Afurther 600 buses carrying the adverts will be seen by passengers andpassers-by in cities across England, Wales and Scotland, from Aberdeenand Dundee to York, Coventry, Swansea and Bristol.
In addition, two large LCD screens bearing the atheist message havebeen placed in Oxford Street, central London, while 1,000 posterscontaining quotes from well-known non-believers will be placed onUnderground trains for two weeks starting on Monday.
They featurelines doubting the existence of God, and celebrating the natural world,written by Albert Einstein, Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Adams and EmilyDickinson.
It is the first ever atheist advertising campaign totake place in Britain, and similar adverts are now also running onpublic transport in America and Spain.
Ariane Sherine, a writerwho first thought of the atheist bus adverts, said: “You wait ages foran atheist bus, then 800 come along at once. I hope they will brightenpeople’s days and make them smile on their way to work.”
**’Jewish lobby’ model for atheist
JTA, Published: 10/02/2007
A renowned atheist cited the “Jewish lobby” as a model for his campaign to promote atheism in the United States.
Richard Dawkins said he wanted to gain the same kind of influence asthe Jewish lobby, saying it “monopolizes” U.S. foreign policy.
“When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby hasbeen, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told — religiousJews anyway — than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolizeAmerican foreign policy as far as many people can see,” Dawkins, aBritish evolutionary biologist who advocates atheism, told the Guardiannewspaper. “So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of thatinfluence, the world would be a better place.”
Dawkins, an Oxford professor who wrote the best-seller “The GodDelusion,” told the Guardian that he wants to organize Americanatheists to counter the influence of religious groups.
“I think some sort of political organization is what they need,” he said.
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