An article on the BBC site yesterday concerned the British Humanist Association's plans to run a poster campaign on London buses: the posters would read "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life". The BHA apparently feels that the generally unchallenged presence of religiously-motivated public statements needs some kind of counterbalance. The same article quotes the response from a spokesman for Christian Voice - described as a 'pressure group' - whose reaction is a rather strange one... 'axe the buses, they - and atheism - are a danger to the public'.
On the face of it, that sounded like such a dog-in-the-cradle attitude that I had to go and check Christian Voice's website to see if the BBC had been mischievously quoting him out of context to make him look like an idiot. I found that he had, indeed, been incorrectly quoted, but not necessarily in the way you might expect, and not by the BBC. Christian Voice's webpage on the story includes a most unfortunate typo:
Genital misprints aside, what of the facts? After all, there are indeed people who have been unfortunate enough to lose their lives in collisions with bendy-buses, so is it the sort of thing of which one ought to be making light? Well, on one aspect, at least, the Christian Voice piece is at odds with the BBC article. According to the latter, the Humanists have indeed volunteered to fund the campaign, and to the tune of 5 times what Prof. Dawkins was prepared to contribute personally.
As for the buses themselves - the statistics are inconclusive. This Channel 4 News page seems to have a fairly comprehensive analysis, and it concludes that while bendy-buses have undoubtedly been involved in fatal accidents, they themselves do not appear to be significantly more dangerous (per mile of usage) than other buses. On a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 meaning cast-iron true and 5 meaning utter bunkum, the bendy-bus fatality allegation comes out at 2.5. Presumably Prof. Dawkins will argue that that's 2.5 points more substantiated than God...
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probably?
Posted by Paul Madsen on October 22, 2008 at 01:53 PM GMT+00:00 #
Personally I get bored of the so called 'Humanists' focus on Christianity.
Dawkins' own, almost religious, attacks on Christianity have become boring in the extreme. When are we going to hear, and read, his detailed deconstruction of Islam?
Oh, that's right, never.
Posted by Wayne Horkan on October 22, 2008 at 03:11 PM GMT+00:00 #
@Paul: Yes, probably must be in the statement. Try to logically prove that there is no gods is as easy as prove that there is no teapot in orbit somwhere out there...
@Wayne: Think you have missed much of what humanists debate about. Islam is very much in focus of criticism.
Posted by Thommy M. Malmström on October 22, 2008 at 03:48 PM GMT+00:00 #
Wayne... probably when Dawkins comes under as much direct criticism from Muslims as he does from Christians on the topic of evolution. However, you're right, ultimately I think a lot of his more recent vituperation on the subject has been counter-productive.
Thommy, I have to confess I don't follow the humanist debate closely, but isn't one factor that there are fewer evangelising Muslims than evangelising Christians? The latter therefore tend to give something more concrete to push back against...
However, all this is distracting us from the important question, which is what to do about the imminent threat to pubic [sic] safety... ;^)
Posted by Robin Wilton on October 22, 2008 at 04:01 PM GMT+00:00 #
Thommy, I concede the theoretical possibility, but 'probably not' is bending over a tad much - I suggest 'almost certainly not' is more representative of the actual probabilities ....
paul
Posted by Paul Madsen on October 22, 2008 at 05:57 PM GMT+00:00 #
Well, I myself is so absolutely sure about that the are no gods that nothing else comes close to it. But I cannot prove it. Hence there is a minor probability. Like 1 divided by the number of bits you can store on a ZFS file system ;-)
Posted by Thommy M. Malmström on October 22, 2008 at 06:10 PM GMT+00:00 #
"Personally I get bored of the so called 'Humanists' focus on Christianity. "
Read Hitchen's and Harris. They are... more proportionate.
It is worth noting that Dawkin's attacks the God of the bible... which covers Islam as well.
As for disproving God... some you can. Of course, since the word has no exact meaing, you could stretch it enough to get something that does exist. It is an empty word anyways.
Posted by Samuel Skinner on October 22, 2008 at 08:55 PM GMT+00:00 #
Stephen Green, the self-appointed "Christian Voice", obsessed as he is with right-wing secular issues like Europe and bendy buses, and keen to attack everyone from Andrew Lloyd Webber to the Boy Scout movement, is hardly representative of all Christians.
Nor is Dawkins representative of humanists at large. When Bernard Williams, then the most prominent atheist in the country, was Provost of Kings College, Cambridge, he happily read the opening of St John's Gospel in the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.
Posted by Richard Veryard on October 22, 2008 at 10:46 PM GMT+00:00 #
For me the comments against this blog post just prove my point(s).
1) It's become dull and boring, because:
2) The atheists have become more 'religious' than those they purport to expose; just look at the responses here, it's not that I'm agnostic, I simply don't care, I have a right to not intellectualise this by giving my opinion a fancy title. So 1 comment from me and 6 comments from atheists (not including yourself as I have no knowledge of your religious leanings).
3) I don't need a pseudo-intellectual, wanna-be egg-head to tell me how to think and how I should feel, just like I don't need a preacher or evangelist to do that for me either. I won't be hunting out "Hitchen's and Harris" for their "more proportionate" view, because frankly I have more interesting things I'd like to do and books I'd like to read, plus I'm not going to force feed anyone a religious nor anti-religious point of view.
4) I get the impression that you don't live in a very multi-ethnic, nor multi-faith, area. I've certainly experienced evangelical Muslims; proportionate in number and passion to their Christian counterparts, not that I've found this to be a problem. We also used to have a healthy (i.e. enthusiastic and seemingly numerous) hari-krishna population, although that really has reduced in the last ten to fifteen years or so, equally the numbers of 'Jesus Army' members appears to have gone down too. The most bothersome now are the Scientologists who pose as 'self-help' type people before springing a copy of Big Ron's Dianetics book on you (that they then want a tenner for, whilst also trying desperately to 'harvest' your name and address).
5) Dawkins has set himself up as the big cheese of the atheism movement by capitalising on his personal brand and exploiting that through book sales. But he then refrains from attacking any religion that has not gone through a secular transformation. I personally don't see that as much of a balanced argument. But then again, I'm not religious about it and I'm certainly not part of Dawkins anti-religious 'religious' meme.
6) Bendy buses are a nightmare, so much so that we decommissioned them in the West Midlands a good few years ago. Our inner city roads are just not built nor designed for such vehicles, and I'm very glad they've been replaced with good old single and double decker buses.
7) That's all folks...
Posted by Wayne Horkan on October 22, 2008 at 11:54 PM GMT+00:00 #