Friday, January 23, 2009

Jeez, should have known!

Good Day Readers:

Can you imagine if Winnipeg's Transit System, or any other for that matter, were approached to place a no God sign on one of their buses followed by a there is a God. Then what?

Sincerely,
Clare L. Pieuk
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An advertisement reading, "God does exist, enjoy your life with Christ" is seen on a metropolitan bus in Madrid January 14, 2009. The campaign is a response to an atheist advertising campaign whose advertisement read, "There's probably no God. Don't worry, and enjoy your life." (Reuters)
National Post Editorial Board: If an atheist bus crashes, do the passengers go to heaven?
January 23, 2009 by National Post Editor
If what the great monotheistic creeds say about God is true, it must have been His choice to have a few atheists hanging around. After all, if it were self-evident that He existed, there would be no exercise of free will involved in believing in Him, and no moral credit could possibly redound to the believer.
People of faith should, therefore, consider rejoicing at the news that Canadian atheists intend to follow in the footsteps of their old London brethren and buy provocative bus advertisements, some of them carrying the same jolly slogan used in England: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
Of course, rejoicing won’t be their first instinct in many cases. For that matter, neither are they likely to “stop worrying” just because a bus told them to. Yet it is hard to take the advertisements too seriously: One gets the sense that the ads are as much about spreading around a little atheist fellow-feeling as they are intended to encourage conversion. Freethinkers don’t, after all, have a venue where they meet up once a week to glad-hand one another and provide mutual support.
At least one evangelical bus driver in Hampshire, England, couldn’t bring himself to pilot one of the “atheist buses;” upon seeing the ad, he asked his employer to give him another bus, and they did so immediately. (In Canada, one can only imagine the furor that would ensue if, say, a devout Muslim were asked to drive an atheist bus — his company would be slapped with a human rights complain just for asking.). If anything, this goes to show that the non-believer still enjoys a marginal position in Western civilization: An atheist driver who demanded a similar sort of purity, and refused to pilot a bus that featured advertising implicitly promoting or endorsing religion, would be a great deal harder to accommodate.
Canada is not formally a very Christian place anymore, but that doesn’t mean the atheists have yet captured the commanding heights of our culture. Religious establishments, far from being anathema to our constitution, remain part of its foundation. And on a deeper political level, our society is characterized by features that stem directly from its Christian origins: our esteem for the individual as the essential social unit, the place we give to forgiveness, mercy and repentance in our system of justice and, indeed, the very freedom of religious understanding we aim to extend to all. If history is capable of teaching us anything about God, it is that our treatment of atheists is likely to be something that He keeps a very close eye on indeed.
Perhaps He put them here to test us — to be, by their very existence, signposts of tolerance and passive defenders of privity of conscience. In any case, our society should take it as a badge of pride that buses can drive around preaching atheism. In many parts of the world — say, Gaza City or Karachi — such an advertisement would be akin to painting the words “Bomb me — I’m an infidel” in large block letters. In England, atheist buses created a backlash, with some folks calling for the ads to be banned. But such militant theists should be mindful of how such a phenomenon progresses. One day, the authorities are content to censor the most outrageous, insolent, and satirical of unbelievers, but before long, you wake up and find that Protestants and Catholics are brawling in the streets; or the Sunnis and Shiites are driving car bombs into each others’ mosques.
Jesus did not say “Love thy neighbour — unless he’s one of those nutty Samaritans, in which case feel free to take a swing at him.” He was, indeed, quite careful to specify the opposite. Which is why so many atheists and agnostics still hold him in a notably, and otherwise bafflingly, high regard. It’s something that even the most religious among us should remember when, and if, a passing bus tells us to abandon our faith.
National Post

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home