Dawkins' Atheist Bus

[poetix]

Funzor

http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/?s...2=Sorry+about+that&s3=Enjoy+your+repossession

http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/?s1=kiss+me&s2=you're+beautiful&s3=these+are+truly+the+last+days

http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/?s...&s2=now+get+off+your+knees&s3=and+go+shopping

http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/?s1=there's+no+objective+morality&s2=go+ahead&s3=knock+yourself+out

http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/?s...&s2=humanity+will+survive&s3=the+next+century

http://ruletheweb.co.uk/b3ta/bus/?s...eam+get+the+money&s3=Dollar+dollar+bill+y'all

 

[mixed_biscuits]

"The Sadist in the Sky has a bone to pick with you, little created subordinate. Apparently you've failed to be perfect. So in case this life wasn't bad enough, you get to suffer for the rest of eternity. Unless you show up at church regularly and act scared enough about all this.

Love in Christ,
Believers"

Needs to be snappier.

 

[IdleRich]

"I've seen plenty of ads for christianity on buses over the years, there was quite a controversial one a few years back that showed Jesus in the style of Che Guevara, iirc. Not to mention ones for specific christian organisations like the Omega course, etc... So I don't see how this is a "fight-back"."

Why was it controversial? 'cause it dared to suggest that Jesus was somehow up there with Che?
I think it's a fight-back in so much as at least two of these are clearly worded in such a way as to be a direct response to the atheist advert.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

'cause it dared to suggest that jesus was somehow up there with che?

rofl

 

[poetix]

What serious religious believer would insist that the existence of God was "probable"? Apart from creationist imbeciles, who have the theological subtlety of a 5-year-old.

"It's fantastically improbable that God exists; nevertheless he does. That's just the kind of God He Is".

I was saying the other day that people have the unfortunate impression that Christians are the sort of people who think that people rising from the dead is the kind of thing that can happen. They're not (again, excluding the imbeciles). It's not. People don't rise from the dead. The story of the resurrection is a story about a completely impossible event, not a story about something a bit spooky.

Dr David Jenkins, the once infamous bishop of Durham, got into hot water years ago for calling the resurrection "a conjuring trick with some bones". He was right that if you see it as a bit of magic performed by a Higher Power, the form of that belief is no different from the form of any other superstition.

 

[IdleRich]

What serious religious believer would insist that the existence of God was "probable"?

Not sure if that was directed at what I said but I wasn't surprised that the religious wanted the slogan to take that form, simply that it was legally allowed to as some reports at the time suggested that the atheists were forced to settle for "probably" on their advert. Presumably though this wasn't true.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'd like a bus with "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" on the side.

Heh, I was thinking something along these lines a few weeks ago: signs that say "That is not dead which can æternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die". Or a bit of Crowley: "Nothing is true; everything is permitted" and "Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the Law".

Edit:

 

[IdleRich]

"Not sure if that was directed at what I said but I wasn't surprised that the religious wanted the slogan to take that form, simply that it was legally allowed to as some reports at the time suggested that the atheists were forced to settle for "probably" on their advert. Presumably though this wasn't true."

Having said that, someone calling himself Steve Hill has posted the following on the Guardian website:

The ASA obliged us to include the word "probably" because we cannot prove there is no god.
It should oblige you to say there "probably" is a god because you have no proof either.
If your posters are going to claim "definitely", the ASA is guilty of appalling hypocrisy and double standards and will, I hope, receive a very large postbag of complaints.

 

[Agent]

God fucks everyone in the ass apparently. He sodomizes Lilith because "forces of evil are waiting in front of the vagina of the Shekina to kill the Messiah the minute he is born," at least according to Jewish folk tales. Zizek talks about this in an essay on Deleuze:

This Deleuzian procedure has an unexpected theological precedent - not the Christian immaculate conception, to which he himself refers, but the Jewish legend about the birth of the Messiah, reported by Joseph in a monoscript from the 13th century. God wants to give birth to the Messiah, but knows that all of the forces of evil are waiting in front of the vagina of Shekina to kill the Messiah the minute he is born. So God goes at night to his mistress, Lilith, the symbol of evil, and penetrates her anally (the expression used can also mean that he pees into her vagina). The Messiah will come from Lilith after anal sex: this is the way God tricks the forces of evil, by bringing the Messiah through evil. [3] If the founding move that establishes a symbolic universe is the empty gesture, how is a gesture emptied? How is its content neutralized? Through repetition. Giorgio Agamben tried to indicate this process with the notion of profanation: in the opposition between sacred and secular, profanation of the secular does not equal secularization; profanation puts the sacred text or practice into a different context, it subtracts it from its proper context and functioning. As such, profanation remains in the domain of the non-utility, merely enacting a "perverted" non-utility. To profanate a mass is to perform a black mass, not to study the mass as object of the psychology of religion.

http://www.lacan.com/zizrealac.htm

 

[nomadthethird]

God fucks everyone in the ass apparently. He sodomizes Lilith because "forces of evil are waiting in front of the vagina of the Shekina to kill the Messiah the minute he is born," at least according to Jewish folk tales. Zizek talks about this in an essay on Deleuze:



http://www.lacan.com/zizrealac.htm

I knew it.

Magicians are cool but was Jesus a magician? I don't know.

 

[nomadthethird]

With Christians in the U.S., I really love how they are insistent on all of these violent "rapture" fantasies.

God is going to kill all of you, in heinously violent ways, but first I'm getting a free ticket up through the clouds to Jeebus land. So

Magical thinking worked in childhood, why not now really?

 

[Chris]

Believing that everything came from nothing is just as much an example of faith or "magical thinking" as anything else.


this fucking thread. I'd love to see some of your reactions if someone came on and started dissing atheists or Muslims in the same way: "oh come on now, is this intolerance and close-mindedness really necessary?"

people and their memes.... they're like rabid animals when they confront other beliefs. Atheists prove that religion isn't the problem.

 

[nomadthethird]

Believing in evolution is not the same as believing everything came from nothing.

But even if I did believe "everything" came from "nothing" (which is not tantamount to atheism).

Why shouldn't I have a problem with Christianity? I think it's a mental illness along with all of the rest of them.

Besides, I've never heard an atheist even try to deny anyone their ability to practice their own religion in the privacy of their home or in their own community as they see fit. It's their insistence on legislating their own beliefs on everyone else that I dislike in American evangelicals.

Being open to challening religious dogma is not the same thing as having an Inquisition, no matter how much you may want to believe they are the same thing.

 

[nomadthethird]

I tolerate Christians everyday, all the time.

But I have a right, just as powerfully and singularly mine to wield as Christians do theirs, to believe they're lunatic morons.


"Tolerance, man" is the neo-liberals favorite ideological non-apparatus.

 

[nomadthethird]

Islam is a myth, too, btw.

 

[Chris]

Believing in evolution is not the same as believing everything came from nothing.

I wasn't talking about evolution, which I believe in, I was talking about the God/Atheism issue.

Besides, I've never heard an atheist even try to deny anyone their ability to practice their own religion in the privacy of their home or in their own community as they see fit. It's their insistence on legislating their own beliefs on everyone else that I dislike in American evangelicals.

Being open to challening religious dogma is not the same thing as having an Inquisition, no matter how much you may want to believe they are the same thing.

First of all, juvenile insults and disingenuously labeling believers "lunatic morons" isn't "challenging religious dogma" in any honest or effective way. It's just broadly and hatefully dehumanizing a lot of decent, intelligent, well meaning people (like my father and brother, who are both very intelligent, pro-science, liberal pastors) because of the more stupid, vocal assholes on TV and (typically) corrupt powers, who, quite needless to say, historically would have used any excuses to persecute their enemies, with or without religion. Do I even have to point that out?

Yeah, I know. Fuck evangelicals, fuck the Inquisition, fuck the Catholic Empire, totally agreed. But that's tribalism and greed and stupidity at it's worst, their crimes and hypocracy have nothing to do with teachings of Christ any more than Hitler's eugenics programs were the only inevitable consequence of atheism.

I really don't want to get into it though, it's useless debating this subject. Ugh, bear with me, I come from a background where I saw almost nothing but love and altruism result from Christianity and religion, so sorry, I just have to defend, if not preach it. You're dissing my dad here.*

*and btw, I know your beef is more with anti-Evolution/science and pentacostal/evangelical types, and that your reasoning is probably honest and fair enough. I just think some intangable values are actually MORE important than science, and that's where some atheists' positions come across as shallow and short-sighted to me.

 

[nomadthethird]

Chris, some of us spent most of our lives getting this evangelical shit shoved down our throats. My parents were nice, but I saw a lot of really hideous, ugly behavior get passed off as "Christianity" and I have a hard time thinking it's any less ridiculous than believing in Ceiling Cat...

What it comes down to more than anything is that I don't believe that religious belief has anything to do with teachings of anybody, and has everything to do with ideology. I know there are Christians who don't believe this (my parents), who will tell you that "no real Christian" would say or do x or y bad, judgmental, hateful thing. But at a certain point, you can judge a tree by its fruit, like the Good Book says--and look at what the Christian tree looks like in the U.S.

Individuals I almost never have a huge issue with, it's the groups, especially the politically mobilized ones, that become scary.

 

[nomadthethird]

And really, I do think that it's a perfectly legitimate criticism of Christian dogma to ask, why is God a "he"...? Why gender God at all? This seems to be part of a general trend in monotheistic religions/cultures toward paternalism, female sexual freedom suppression, and downright misogyny/homophobia/etc.

 

[Chris]

Chris, some of us spent most of our lives getting this evangelical shit shoved down our throats. My parents were nice, but I saw a lot of really hideous, ugly behavior get passed off as "Christianity" and I have a hard time thinking it's any less ridiculous than believing in Ceiling Cat...

understood. I figured you'd probably been raised around that evangelical sh*t. Believe me, I've had similarly bad experiences with them, and non-denominationals, as well. my condolences.

 

[nomadthethird]

Christianity is an institution above all else.