"Autobusë ateistë" në rrugët e Londrës

The atheist bus journey

Thanks to you we raised enough money to put ads on 800 buses across the UK, and the campaign has gone global

ndiq nyjen

BRITISH atheists have been celebrating the appearance of flippant slogans on London buses this week but atheists in Australia have been barred from launching a similar advertising campaign on the nation's public transport systems.

The Atheist Foundation of Australia was knocked back by Australia's biggest outdoor advertising company, APN Outdoor, on its proposal for a nationwide campaign featuring atheist slogans.

The campaign - with slogans such as "Sleep in on Sunday mornings" and "Celebrate reason" - follows successful attempts by the British and American Humanist Associations to raise awareness for atheism in London and Washington.

ndiq nyjen

Next week, Barcelona will become the first city in predominantly Catholic Spain to copy the controversial UK campaign when its buses use a direct translation of the slogan adopted in Britain by the scientist Richard Dawkins and other prominent atheists.


"Probablemente Dios no existe. Deja de preocuparte y goza de la vida," it reads. "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life."

Madrid, Valencia and other cities are being targeted to run similar campaigns.

Campaigners say that with 20% of Spaniards professing they do not believe in God, it is time atheism becomes a visible phenomenon.

"It is time for non-believers to make themselves seen and display their pride in their own convictions," said the Catalan Atheists group.

ndiq nyjen

The Freethought Association of Canada, a Canadian charity, has decided to launch it’s own atheist bus campaign in Toronto, Ontario. The hardest part, we’ve found so far.., is coming up with a really good slogan that catches people’s attention without being confrontational or negative.

ndiq nyjen

Riding the atheist bus

Thanks to the inspiration of our friends in Britain, we've started our own atheist bus ad campaign in Washington DC

ndiq nyjen

'Why Believe in a God?' Ad Campaign Launches on D.C. Buses

ndiq nyjen

Atheist bus poster campaign moves to Genoa

The British-inspired atheist bus poster campaign proclaiming that God does not exist is set to appear on buses in Genoa next month
Richard Owen in Rome



The British-inspired atheist bus poster campaign today (Tuesday) moved closer to the Vatican after the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR) said slogans proclaiming that God does not exist would appear from next month (February) on buses in Genoa. The UAAR said it had chosen Genoa deliberately in order to challenge Roman Catholic beliefs "on Bagnasco's own turf."

ndiq nyjen

Atheist buses - Next stop: Germany

The next stop for the atheist bus ad campaign is set for Germany. Reportedly, the ads will run on buses in Cologne, Munich, and Berlin.



German organizers are currently trying to raise money to get their ads on seven transit buses. According to the report, "Phillip Möller, one of the campaign organizers, says the German group has collected €3,500 in the first four days of fundraising. They need €16,000 euros more to fund the project. " Each person who gives a euro or more will get to cast a vote for which slogan will run on the buses.

ndiq nyjen

Atheist buses headed to Finland

The Finnish Humanist Union and the Union of Freethinkers of Finland have joined together to raise funds to finance their proposed bus campaign. They plan to place ads that say "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life, " on buses in Helsinki and Tampere.

According to a report, the goal is to cast atheism in a more positive light than it typically is. Freethinkers of Finland Chairman, Jussi K. Niemelä, hopes the ads will stimulate conversation.

ndiq nyjen

ndiq nyjen

Atheist bus campaign squashed in New Zealand

A campaign with ads saying "There's probably no God" was rejected by a New Zealand bus company because it was considered too divisive. Atheists are claiming the decision is biased.

The full text of the ads reads "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The bus campaign originally started in the UK, and was rather successful there as the fund-raising campaign brought in far more money than was needed in a very short time.
Encouraged by this success, atheist groups in other countries started their own campaigns, which were also successful.

The campaigns are controversial, however, and several had to be cancelled because the ads were refused by bus companies.

Kelly Burns reports in the New Zealand "The Dominion Post" that a local atheist group had planned a bus campaign as well, and that it was refused by New Zealand bus companies as too divisive.

Fund-raising was just as easy in New Zealand as in the UK. It took a mere 30 hours to raise the $10,000 needed for the four-week campaign, resulting in a total amount of more than $22,000.

Kelly Burns quotes the spokesman of the atheist campaign, Simon Fisher, as saying that this refusal is discriminatory and:

In a way, the rejection by NZ Bus has shown why this campaign is needed in the first place. The message of atheism is not accepted in the public, showing the double standard between religious and non-religious messages.

The campaign was meant to raise awareness and provoke discussion on religion in a country where one-third of the population has no religion. However, religious groups pressured the company, NZ Bus, to refuse the campaign.

According to Fisher, "It is a potential violation of the Human Rights Act, discriminating on the grounds of non-belief". He also said that the company is clearly applying a double standard since:

atheist messages [are] not allowed on buses while religious messages are often seen on buses and in public

A spokeswoman of the bus company said:

NZ Bus has the right to decline advertising that may, in its perception, be considered controversial or divisive.

NZ Bus is not the only company to refuse the ads.

Michael Bott, a Wellington lawyer, said that the decision appears unfair and discriminatory, even though the bus companies are privately owned.

The bus campaign group is now looking at other ways to get its message out.

ndiq nyjen

Atheists reach out to nonbelievers with ad campaign on SMART buses

Advertisements for an atheist organization will begin appearing on a dozen buses in metro Detroit Thursday as part of a month-long education and outreach campaign.

The exterior ads — they say “Don't believe in God? You are not alone” on a blue sky and cloud background — will be on Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation buses, said Ruthe Milan, coordinator for the Detroit Area Coalition of Reason.

“Reaching out to like-minded nonbelievers is the most important goal,” she said.

The group is part of the Washington D.C.-based United Coalition of Reason, which devotes itself to raising awareness about atheism and secular humanism, and has put up billboards and subway ads, similar to the bus campaign, in other large U.S. cities.

The local chapter, which describes itself as “made up of five area nontheistic (atheist and humanist) groups,” spent $5,600 provided by the national organization to buy the bus ads.

The group didn't approach the Detroit Department of Transportation because it wanted to reach a wider audience than just the city, Milan said.

The ads met the bus system's guidelines and were vetted by SMART's legal department, said Beth Dryden, the bus system's director of external affairs, marketing and communications.

Additionally, because the ads are what SMART considers “viewpoint-neutral content” the agency can't reject them, she said. That's because a government agency cannot censor such content, which is protected by the First Amendment..

“I'm very up front,” Milan said, adding that SMART told her the ads would be pulled only if there was significant public outcry against them.

“The point of this national campaign is to reach out to the millions of humanists, atheists and agnostics living in the United States,” Fred Edwords, national director of the United Coalition of Reason, said in a statement. “Nontheists sometimes don't realize there's a community out there for them because they're inundated with religious messages at every turn. So we hope this will serve as a beacon and let them know they aren't alone.”

Information about the campaign is at Detroitcor.org.

SMART, which has been seeking to raise revenue and cut costs amid a budget crunch, has a 0.59-mill property tax up for renewal on the August ballot in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. The tax provides the system's operating funding.

The system's 640 buses service 1,200 square miles of suburban Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties (54 routes, 7,000 stops), typically seeing more than 12 million riders annually. The system connects to Detroit's bus system.

ndiq nyjen

Advertising for Atheism

Starting tomorrow, some "T" buses in Fort Worth will carry advertisements that will likely gain more than a little attention, and that’s what good advertising does.



The ads read, "Millions of Americans are Good without God," with which more than a few people likely will disagree. It’s part of an awareness campaign launched by a group called the Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason, or DFW CoR because everything needs an acronym.

ndiq nyjen

In Anti-Xmas Battle, Atheists Take a Page Out of the Pepsi Playbook

The American Atheists group bought a billboard outside New York City’s Lincoln Tunnel that shows the Christmas nativity scene under the headline “You KNOW it’s a Myth,” thus guaranteeing a phenomenal amount of media exposure for their PR dime. Whether it will de-convert anyone is another matter, but it does show that religious beliefs increasingly compete for customers through marketing just like supermarket brands.



Until recently, religions had largely stuck to promoting themselves. The Mormons ran a new campaign this year as did Scientology and the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family. The atheists did much the same thing.

But this year atheists have changed the game by adopting yet another page from the corporate marketing playbook: aggressive comparative advertising. Known to most people as “the Pepsi Challenge,” comparative advertising is as much about running down rival brands as it is about promoting your own virtues. The American Humanism Association started a similar campaign earlier this month as did a couple of other non-religious organizations.

ndiq nyjen

Christ meets Big Foot: more irreverent atheist ads to hit Canadian cities

The new posters bear the slogan: "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" with "Allah, Big Foot, UFOs, Homeopathy, Zeus, Psychics, Christ" listed below.



They will hit Toronto streetcars in January, pending final approval from the Toronto Transit Commission, said Justin Trottier, national executive director of the Centre for Inquiry, an atheist organization. After the Toronto debut, the organization plans to post the ads to buses in Calgary, Vancouver, Ottawa, Saskatoon and Montreal.

"Why is belief in Big Foot dismissed as delusional while belief in Allah and Christ is respected and revered? All of these claims are equally extraordinary and demand critical examination," says the campaign's website, ndiq nyjen.

ndiq nyjen