Savage Popcorn

The Atheist Bus Campaign launched on Tuesday October 21 2008 with the hope of raising £5,500 to run 30 buses across London for four weeks with the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Professor Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, is officially supporting the Atheist Bus Campaign, and has generously agreed to match all donations up to a maximum of £5,500, giving us a total of £11,000 if we reach the full amount - enough for a much bigger campaign. The British Humanist Association have kindly agreed to administer all donations.

With your help, we can brighten people’s days on the way to work, help raise awareness of atheism in the UK, and hopefully encourage more people to come out as atheists. We can also counter the religious adverts which are currently running on London buses, and help people think for themselves.

As Richard Dawkins says: “This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion.”

It’s already wildly exceeded its target but donations are still open. You can find out more about the idea of a reassuring God-free advert being used to counter religious advertising by clicking here.

The Klingons for Jesus are coming

In fact not only should Klingons worship Jesus but Jesus is the messiah the Klingons have been waiting for all along.

It’s certainly the most consistent religious website I’ve seen in a long time.

Via Pharyngula

Geoff J Henley has a point:

My goal is to integrate skepticism into popular culture. When we watch commercial TV, read newspapers, attend weddings and sporting events or drive through our neighbourhoods at Easter, religion all gets a free plug. But to find something about scepticism, you have to go look for it on the Internet or at a bookstore.

And here’s what he came up with:

Via the New Humanist

The actress who played Judith Iscariot in Monty Python’s Life of Brian became the mayor of Aberystwyth this year. And in one of those quirks of fate, it turns out that the film has been banned in this particular seaside resort for the past 30 years.

Not surprisingly, Sue Jones-Davies (for it is she) is seeking to overturn the ban.

It appears that the ban was recommended back in 1979 by a committee made up of church leaders and, once the fuss had died down, no-one in the council’s licensing department remembered it was in place. But it’s always useful to remind ourselves where pandering to religious sensitivities leads - doubly so as Aberystwyth was where I spent my student years.

Found at Pharyngula

Windsor Hills Baptist Church appears to believe that the best way to bring young people to god is by giving them plenty of firepower – namely, an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle.

Good thing they aren’t handing out free pornography, or someone might get hurt.

Last week I mentioned that, after losing the pointless and frivolous court case against the BBC, Stephen Green wrote to the targets of his antics to ask them to let him out of facing the consequences for his actions.

Green started a petition to have his court costs waived, which prompted Roger Utting (via) to start a counter-petition calling for the costs not to be waived.

Green started the legal action that he now claims he can’t afford and is, quite rightly, liable for the costs.

Everyone is entitled to free-speech - but no one’s religious beliefs should put them above the law, or be paid for by the tax payer without the tax payer’s direct consent.

Click here to see or sign the petition and, if you have a Facebook account, you can also show your support by joining the Facebook group.

Christian Voice, the one-man campaign led by Stephen Green, is a group with a rather sordid history of resorting to threats and blackmail in pursuit of their aims. One of these aims was Green’s campaign to ban Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he lost rather spectacularly.

Now he’s facing bankruptcy.

At a hearing a fortnight ago, the BBC’s Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday, producer of JSTO, were awarded costs totalling £90,000 against Green. The BBC’s solicitors were awarded £55,000 and Olswangs Solicitors, who acted for Thoday, got an order for £35,000.

The money was due to be paid yesterday, but Stephen Green is pleading poverty.

And in an incredible display of bare-faced cheek he has written to both Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday asking them to waive their costs “in the interests of goodwill and justice”.

Goodwill? Justice? This man has no idea what these words mean. This is the man that heads a nasty little group (membership: Stephen Green) that has been willing to blackmail a cancer charity into refusing money raised on its behalf by JSTO, and has repeatedly used harassment and intimidation in its fanatical campaigns against JSTO and gay organisations it disapproves of.

I shall attempt to resist the temptation to gloat and suggest instead that if Green really does believe in his god, he should start praying.

The latest film to fall foul of exaggerated religious sensitivities is Mike Myers’ latest comedy, The Love Guru which has become the target of a petition, even othough none of the people objecting to it have actually seen it.

Even though both Myers’ and Paramount Pictures, who produced the film, have pointed out that religion portrayed in the film is purely fictional.

Mike Myers himself has described the religion he lampoons as a “mythical creation - it’s like the Force in Star Wars”.

I can’t help but wonder whether Myers has accidentally identified the real sensitivity behind this premature outcry: that deep down the religious know as well as the rest of us that all religions are as fictional as the Force in Star Wars.

According to Bhavna Shinde of the Sanatan Society in the US: “They should draw a line when it comes to people’s faith.”

They shouldn’t, of course, especially when the faith in question is more made up than most. Or should we expect to see Christians complaining about being lampooned in Cthulhu?

By the way, before you send your angry emails about my thoughts on religion, take a second to ask yourself: why is this the subject we all have to be nice about? And would you be just as annoyed if I wrote a story making fun of Wiccans or Thor-worshippers or grown-ups who believed in fairies or Santa Claus? One of the great weapons in religion’s arsenal is the accepted societal rule that we just don’t question other people’s faiths. But in a world where religious extremists have attacked America, are trying to outlaw choice and homosexuality, and are in fact sitting in power in the White House, all gloves have to come off.

- Devin Faraci on Religulous.