A BILLBOARD which claims that all religions are scams has been erected in Huntsville, Alabama – and is likely “make a lot of people mad”.
But Blair Scott, communications director for American Atheists, which created the ad, explained:
Our target is not the Christians, but all the atheists and agnostics still in the closet who are still pretending, still playing the game, still putting up a facade.
The billboard claims that the group American Atheists has been “telling the truth since 1963″.
The organisation defines “scam” as a ploy to raise money, a fraudulent business scheme or an attempt to intentionally mislead a person usually with the goal of financial or other gain.
It claims that the truth is that:
All religions make money … [and] all religions make lots of promises about an afterlife that doesn’t exist.
AA, which is holding a regional conference in Huntsville later this month, states:
Let’s face it: religion tells a good story. All you need to do is follow the preacher and good things will happen. You will never really die, and due to your involvement in (insert religion here) you will benefit for eternity. Yes, it pleases the invisible man-in-the-sky that you follow your preacher – just ask your preacher and he will tell you.
American Atheists go on to contend:
Billions of adherents, many of whom are preachers themselves, are all victims of this Great Scam. Some know it’s a scam, yet defend religion because they like the lies. They like the fraud. They like the false sense of security. Unfortunately, no matter how much you like a lie, it doesn’t make it truth. It DOES make religion a great scam if victims are willing to defend it, even in the face of truth.
The ad follows an earlier AA ad campaign that pointed out that Christmas was based purely on myth.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
January 6th, 2011 at 1:45 pm
The O’Rielly Factor on US TV illustrates this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2SCBkWhZ8o
If only the arse would shut up and let Blair Scott answer he may even learn something.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Thanks for the link Kev.
There is no hope if wankers like this O’Rielly have centre stage.
January 6th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
This isn’t going to be pretty. Unfortunately, given how defensive and aggressive the faithful became over the last billboard, demanding a reason why atheists should dare think themselves allowed to display one when they could just keep their heathen thoughts to themselves, it’s pretty obvious that playing nice is not going to do an ounce of good. This one is pretty bold and offensive, but too bad, because unlike its religious counterparts, this billboard isn’t trying to take people’s money or their rights away from them. Yet I am pretty sure I know which one will face the most hand-wringing and moralising.
January 6th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
JohnMWhite. It isn’t going to be pretty but at last the cat is hauling itself out of the bag for real. I just love some of the faltering, wary and plain nonsensical christian responses. For example:
The atheists are quoting the bible out of context.
The atheists are effective because of the theological illiteracy of so many christians. (I like this one particularly as they accept the effectiveness of the atheists and and are blaming christians. They have relied on illiteracy of christians, theological and general, for decades. How else could they get away with the scam.)
There cannot be good without god. (Don’t say what kind of good or which of the scores of gods. Not too much good coming from the paedophile priests or the muslims abusing women.)
7 out of 10 Americans, according to Gallup think religion in fading. (A nudge from the current campaign and it will fade a lot faster.)
Congratulations American Atheists. One UK atheist on this side of the pond is filled with admiration at what you are acheiving. I know USA atheists who pretend to be christian because they know their careers and children will suffer if they do not. This is the kind of campaign that will give them the confidence to get together and speak out.)
January 6th, 2011 at 5:09 pm
Amercan Atheists was founded, as you probably know, by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, American Badass.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LS5xYq8zI
…
I saw this hilarious comment on one of the local articles – I think it might just be a leftover from 1957 -
January 6th, 2011 at 5:14 pm
WOW! It must have taken a lot of courage to produce such a poster. Lynch mobs from all religions will be at the proposed meeting and fighting to see who is the most holy and can set the building on fire first in their god’s name. Police will look the other way or assist the rioters. Should be a fun evening.
January 6th, 2011 at 5:36 pm
There seems to be no really reliable research showing the true number of atheists in The USA. I watched an American news clip the other day where the presenter seriously suggested that the proportion was between 1% and 3% of the population! Some surveys have used answers to other questons (eg: “Is god male or female?”) to deduce how many atheists there are – viz the people who don’t answer the question!! My question would be this: If there are so few atheists in the country, then how come that The USA has a multi-billion dollar porn industry? Are the customers all pastors playing for the other side?
January 6th, 2011 at 6:10 pm
barriejohn: I suppose an example from a relative of mine in small town USA is not untypical. He and his wife are both professionals – an engineer and a lawyer. The have three children. Here in the UK they were all atheists and we loved batting ideas, discussion about books etc around. One of his sons, aged around, 12 at the time said, “My folks don’t believe in god and I don’t either.”
Back in the USA another relative, on holiday from UK, stayed with them. When he returned he described them as christians. “Don’t think so,” I said. And explained why.
“Well he takes his turn in parking cars for the church, his wife helps with the flowers and cleaning the church and the kids all attend church.” The explanation given to me by the atheist father was that if he didn’t take part in the religious activities in the small town he would not have a business, his wife wouldn’t have a client and his kids would have a hard time.
OK, I don’t know if I could do what they do but then I don’t have to. I wonder should how huge is the atheist mass disguised by vindictive christians. As my relative pointed out, “The politicians, the governor, the President (Bush at the time), the schools, the television, the radio all behave as if an atheist was an aberration and virtually non existent.”
This seems to me to be the importance of Atheist America’s initiative. Open up the routes to freethought and the growth could be exponential.
January 6th, 2011 at 6:23 pm
@ barriejohn – “The USA has a multi-billion dollar porn industry” I thought it was Pakistan that used most porn. Maybe it was just animal porn.
January 6th, 2011 at 6:27 pm
Am I correct in saying that these posters are due to the original London bendy bus poster campaign? An article in the Daily Telegraph mocked the attempt to raise funds for that campaign and prematurely wrote it off as a flop. Since then similar poster ads. have sprung up all over the world and I presume that this is a continuation of this, although it may have nothing to do with it, I’m not sure.
I think that this one is excellent, even if the sheep don’t know that it’s a scam the shepherds certainly do and will be pretty unhappy about being rumbled. Hopefully there will be an Emporer’s New Clothes effect.
January 6th, 2011 at 7:02 pm
The O’Reilly Factor link in the first post was great to watch but one curious point stood out for me. O’Reilly drew upon a curious notion that the tide coming in and going out somehow lent credence to the existence of God and was inexplicable but true and whatnot.
Um… I learnt in primary school that the tides are the result of the Moon’s gravitational pull on the water sloshing around on the surface of the Earth’s crust. I realise it’s a tad more complex than that as there are other gravitational forces beyond the planet, albeit much less powerful and that the planets rotation interacts with all of this but…. you know… Is this not general knowledge everywhere in the developed world?
I suspect the atheist guy probably knows what causes tides but was too busy trying to get a word in edgeways to counteract that point. What sort of interview was that anyway – the guest could barely get a word in and the interviewer is determined to be a victim, imagines proof of the non-existent ‘insult’ and then retaliates in kind. Beatiful example of projection – the insulter feels himself to be the insulted in the face of zero evidence.
The repeated nonsensical stuff about 1% atheists versus 80% religious types was pure passive-aggression, a thinly veiled “We will fuck you up” dressed up as a supposed question.
You can get this crap in any pub but to see a TV presenter doing this – wow, thank fuck and buggery I’m not in the USA.
January 6th, 2011 at 7:20 pm
On the my Holy Father is bigger than your Dad, our gangs bigger than your gang train of thought:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mMZy05ooFY
What cretins. Why would scale have any meaning to an omnipotent being who is contiguous with the infinite Universe he/she/it created?
These twats just don’t get it do they? It’s pure old testament thinking – God is this big guy who scoops you up and keeps you safe from the baddies. He’s bigger than a skyscraper. That big eh? Well that’s big if you can’t grasp how far a mile is or that the sun is 93 million miles away, or that the next nearest stars are so fantastically far away that, you know, a submarine might not be so big after all. But hey, their God is bigger than a skyscraper and the Universe so problem solved. What kind of cocks make such comparisons?
…and this isn’t an echo of their infantile experience of parenting? A wish to return to a time when everything was taken care of and dangers were kept secret to protect their innocence?
The guy in the purple hat is just……
Word fail me. I hope he’s got some kind of disorder, that’s all. I know this is a lot like a children’s propoganda song but I have actually seen this performed on stage in the Birmingham Town Hall at an arts festival by a full gospel choir with an audience of bemused onlookers waiting for the next show peppered with some fist pumping eye-bulging Jesus Junkies getting great big hard-ons over their great big God.
Pathetic. Funny and sinister in equal measure.
January 6th, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Whilst I applaud this campaign, I have, sadly, my reservations as to how successful it may be.
Like all on this site, I (for want of a better word) pray that religion, in all it’s poisonous forms, dies out.
However this will never happen. And the irony is, religion will not die out because we are athiests. Let me expand. Almost every atheist I have met believes passionately in freedom of expression, sexuality, religion and politics. I will debate endlessly with a fundamentalist but, and this is where we atheists lose out, I would never force them to convert under pain of death. We do not force people to agree with us either through fear, such as the muslims, or the subtle brain washing techniques employed by the RCC. None of us would throw a relative out because they were of a different faith. None of us would treat a female relative as a possession or treat a homosexual male son as a disease.
Against this tide of fear we cannot win. Both science and common sense have managed to ridicule all the major religions, but what use is fact when a priest/imam can declare that someone will burn for eternity/live forever and the poor uneducated fool has no recourse to argue?
I hope I am eventually proven wrong on this.
January 6th, 2011 at 8:38 pm
What I really like about this poster is that it dares speak the unspoken truth which most viewers will, I suspect, find very uneasy.
Like the vast majority of ‘believers’ I know and have had discussions with about the subject, I suspect most church/mosque/synagogue-goers actually do know deep down that what they are being sold is a load of crap. But for whatever reason (peer and/or family pressure, the emperor’s new clothes syndrome, ‘better be safe than sorry’, etc) they just go along with it.
Hopefully this ad will stir some of them into acknowledging what they really think about religion and the people who perpetuate its lies. If so, it will have been a success. And well done to the AA for having the balls to put it out there.
January 6th, 2011 at 11:05 pm
It would make a nice bumper-sticker, but I think the car will be damaged in no time by people who want to leave a mark of their disapproval.
And Tony E, we may hope any campaign will have some effect. Not too long ago, it was hard to be adhering to a different flavour of religion or be non-religious in Western Europe. In some countries there have been big improvements in a short time, but it’s like drops of water on a very big rock in other places. Secularists do touch a nerve, the way the religious bleat whenever we manifest ourselves, so we may have a point and some of them may be aware of it.
January 6th, 2011 at 11:53 pm
I agree with Marcus. Apart from the sects, a great many of the attendees at various services don’t believe what is preached at all. Can you imagine that they would continue to lead the type of life that they do if that were the case? They just think that as long as their leaders are exhorting people to be good and help others then no harm is being done, and possibly a lot of good, so they go along with the charade. There is an almost overwhelming belief that “faith” is “a good thing”, whatever the evidence might be.
January 7th, 2011 at 2:50 am
Quoting the threadhead:
“But Blair Scott, communications director for American Atheists, which created the ad, explained:
Our target is not the Christians, but all the atheists and AGNOSTICS still in the closet who are still pretending, still playing the game, still putting up a facade.”
I don’t know who Blair Scott is, probably Krystaline Apostate, but I want to call BULLSHIT!! on AA acceptance of agnostics. I have David Silverman’s email address, and he and I have had several private e-conversations. Their attitude toward agnostics is much like BJohn’s, that I should take my crazy logic and make my own website and spare him the irritation. Not so much Silverman, but his attack dog, KA. He googled me and followed me here and heckled me here too.
Silverman’s appearance on the O’Reilly show was not an interview, it was a fundie ass chewing. He should have booked the Daily Show, where he would get some respect.
Silverman is a tenacious man, very bold, very active, and I have donated a substantial (to me) amount of money to AA. I don’t go there any more because I am sick of antisemitists and other bigots who think that if they don’t believe in god, that makes them a freethinker, and more sick of people who think that if you are not an atheist, you are not a freethinker. (yeah, Silverman is a jew, go figure).
Testimony to set the record straight.
NeoWolfe
January 7th, 2011 at 7:55 am
Why would my comments bother you, NeoWolfe? As you have said yourself, I am a “total fool”, so why get so worked up over them?
January 7th, 2011 at 10:42 am
@tony e: “… I … pray that religion … dies out. However this will never happen.”
I agree it will never happen. I was musing on this the other day wrt Islam and comparing it to Communism. Communism – the USSR – was not “defeated.” It fell apart itself because it could not compete, ultimately, with Capitalism. But there was never a showdown, and it is not illegal in most countries to belong to the Communist Party. It has just been moved to the fringes. “Das Kapital” is still with us. Communist leaders in remaining bastion, China, are hoping to hang on to power, but somehow to have a free-ish market. China has moved a long way since the ideological purity of Mao. (And to be fair, Communism moved huge populations from agricultural servitude to an advanced industrial state – just remember who was first in space.)
Apply this to Islam. It will never be defeated; there will always be the Koran, and there will always be some hotheads who will blow people up. I don’t minimise the tragedy for those directly affected but on a global scale terrorism just does not register. The whole point of terrorism is to provoke a reaction out of proportion to the injury. As you say, we believe in freedom, and will not impose. We will not make windows into men’s souls. If we want to see religions like Islam wither away, we will need to find a way to do it that is compatible with freedom, because otherwise we will simply replace Islam with something worse.
A recent Independent article, The Islamification of Britain, about converts to Islam (4000 – 5000 per year in the UK) is interesting. There is a common theme to these converts – they are turned off by excessive consumerism, for example. The title of the article implies a threat to the British way of life. There is a demographic trend. But the future is damnably hard to predict, and almost the only safe prediction is that it won’t be as predicted. For example, the article is all one-way change towards Islam. But an influx of that many people, brought up in the UK, year on year, will have an effect on Islam too. Islam may dominate the world by 2050 – but it may not be Islam as we know it, Jim.
The question is how to defeat a meme. The answer is, I think, with a better meme.
January 7th, 2011 at 10:50 am
For anyone who believes that religion can be completely defeated by reason I have one word – Scientology.
January 7th, 2011 at 11:03 am
@Kev
Haha, “you can’t explain the tides”.
Brilliant.
January 7th, 2011 at 11:49 am
From the BBC:
Q. How are tides predicted?
First the behaviour of the tide has to be recorded by a tidegauge at each particular location and the observations subsequently analysed. The results of these analyses, known as tidal constants, are then used in a computer program to predict the behaviour of the tide for any period required.
That’s the answer – “a computer program.” The modern version of “God did it.”
January 8th, 2011 at 2:05 am
Bjohn said:
“Why would my comments bother you, NeoWolfe? As you have said yourself, I am a “total foolâ€, so why get so worked up over them?
To answer that, it was just another example of atheists thinking that they have cornered the market on freethought. It didn’t make me depressed or feel rejected. Nor “worked up”.
I can’t remember what the subject of the conflict was, and I am too lazy to go searching for it. But, it is the nature of humans who feel disrespected to trade disrespect in return. So, that being said let me tell you the truth of my opinion of you. I assume that the threadheads that end: Hat Tip: BarrieJohn are written by you. They are very professionally written, and while some seem rather mundane, every journalist encounters slow news days. But, though I am no journalist, I am prepared to print a retraction, you are no fool.
But, neither am I. I don’t come here to harass atheists like some fundies do, occasionally. I come here because atheists are the closest thing to a peer group that I have.
And the only difference between me and an atheist is that I am not willing to “believe” that the universe is an accident until science explains how it occurred. Until then, I DON’T KNOW!!!!!! And neither do you. To believe it to be truth, you have made a leap of FAITH, and I don’t do that, my bout with religion has taught me that is a mistake, and I will never make it again.
I promise you, that if you respect me as a freethinker, such conflicts will not reoccur. For now, I apologize.
NeoWolfe
January 8th, 2011 at 8:28 am
NeoWolfe: I do not write any of the material on this site. The author’s name appears just beneath the title, and is normally Barry Duke. Hat Tip merely indicates the source of information, when relevant. Whether that has any bearing on your opinion of my intelligence level I have no idea! I have no problem with most of what you say, and some of it is insightful and well put, but I do object to you bringing your spat with American Atheists to this site – which has happened before. Like others, I shall remain an atheist until such time as there is evidence that a “spiritual realm” even exists, but if it did I would expect that evidence to have been forthcoming by now!
January 9th, 2011 at 12:01 am
Bjohn said,
“until such time as there is evidence that a “spiritual realm†even exists”
Well, the pope could make the same point, that until you prove it doesn’t exist he will believe. “until such time” (your words) you are both guilty of the same sin, religion.
And you said:
“I do object to you bringing your spat with American Atheists to this site”
I gather that there are some human institutions that are above criticism. While Dave Silverman seems to be a genuine well intentioned dedicated individual, he’s not sitting at the side of the king. I will expose his bullshit when he claims to embrace agnostics. If that bothers you, I’m afraid this is one of those incidents where you will need to go fuck yourself.
NeoWolfe
January 9th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
You’re a foulmouthed bully, NeoWolfe, and I consider it beneath my dignity to respond to such puerile remarks. What sort of a “freethinker” believes that his views should not be challenged?
January 9th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Yes, I am one of those individuals, because I reject social standards and ideas (a freethinker), I am a potty mouth. But, actually, I come here to have my views challenged. To share points of view. We are divided only on minor points. And humanists, when will they be welcomed into the fold? The belief that our fate is in our own hands, and that no god interferes in the affairs of men. Where do they fit in?
I have been accused of professing intellectual superiority, but that is just an atheist looking himself in the mirror. Buddhist’s say, what you hate about the people you know is what you hate about yourself. My recommendation is that atheists fix the contradictions in their own belief system, then we will understand each other, and then other freethinkers, agnostics and humanists can feel comfortable in the brotherhood, and who knows, we might win this battle. Only your arrogance stands in the way.
Neo Wolfe
January 9th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
“Go fuck yourself” NeoWolfe.
January 9th, 2011 at 9:26 pm
Sorry to railroad posts, but I wrote Silverman an email today as follows:
Dave,
I saw your interview with O’Reilly. Ill advised. You should have booked the Daily Show, where you would get a word in edgeways and receive some degree of respect. You just got your ass chewed by a fundie. That’s all that was.
But, the reason why I wrote is to accuse you of total hypocrisy. You really claim you want to embrace agnostics? While the only thing that keeps me from being an atheist is my skepticism, I was treated like shit on your website. Especially by your own staff. The arrogance of atheists is what keeps the freethinkers fractured.
Have you rethought your policies, or are you simply luring agnostics into the open where you hope to convert them? You are a bold crusader, and I admire your campaign, but, you have surrounded yourself with assholes. As much intellectual bigots as any of the antisemitists that haunted your website. Put your own house in order, then the rest will happen as a course of nature.
NeoWolfe
I will relay how big his balls are when and if he responds.
January 9th, 2011 at 9:38 pm
BJohn said:
““Go fuck yourself†NeoWolfe.”
Potty mouth.
NeoWolfe
January 10th, 2011 at 1:53 pm
“The Feeethinker” – The voice of atheism since 1881″
What an advert you are. I’ve had enough of this bitching. So long, guys.