The atheist evangelism campaign

Melanie Phillips writes:

The bus to Planet Hedonism
Sunday, 26th October 2008


Stories mocking the absurd evangelical atheism bus, the stunt dreamed up by the fundamentalist missionaries at the British Humanist Association and the Guardian, prompt another vignette from the Richard Dawkins/John Lennox debate last week reported here.

The bus (pictured above on the BHA website) trumpets on its side the message:

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life

which has provoked a measure of ridicule that supposed atheists don’t even have the courage of their negative convictions. (I’ll wager that Pascal might have agreed). The bus is also being financially backed by Richard Dawkins. But when Lennox asked him about its message, he became visibly uncomfortable. He had wanted it to say

There’s almost certainly no God, so live your life to the full

but he had been overruled by ‘the woman on the Guardian’. Apart from the ‘probably’, it was also the ‘Now stop worrying’ bit that he hadn’t liked. Although he did not share with us why he didn’t like it, it seems to me that the bus message is effectively saying: ‘do whatever you fancy and to hell with the effect on anyone else because Biblical morality is a fairy story’. Which is not terribly good PR for even wobbly atheists.


In the debate, Dawkins got shirty at the suggestion that, without the Bible there could be no justice and no morality. But when it was put to him that atheism leads directly to the brutal anti-humanity of Professor Peter Singer, who has written that

the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee

Dawkins declared:

Peter Singer is the most moral person I know, and that is an entirely rational point of view.

All aboard!

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