On Jan. 6 some 800 British red "bendy" buses carried the sign: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
The Atheist Bus Campaign organizer, a young comedienne named Ariane Sherine, took exception last June to several London buses swathed with biblical quotes, placed by Christian fundamentalists.
Her idea to fund a few challenge ads took off; donors sent in $200,000 in two days. Ms. Sherine was joined by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, a leading British atheist and author of "The God Delusion."
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Religious institutes, church pastors, and divinity school professors have not treated the ads with Old Testament wrath, but with a relatively open mind and even embrace of so important an issue.
If Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, they say, the ads remind that an unexamined faith is not a real faith, and people need to think, and even pray, more deeply.
"The campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life," says the Rev. Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer of Britain's Methodist church.
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Believers have criticized the second part of the message, "stop worrying and enjoy your life." Nick Spencer, of Theos, a public theology think tank in London, felt the "enjoy yourself" message – coming in the midst of an economic crisis that is taking jobs and spreading anxiety across Europe, possibly implies selfish indifference, and "could not be more ill-timed.... But since Brits are frightfully embarrassed about bringing up God in public, it is a godsend in some ways to have the atheists do it for us."
Dawkins, whose book, "God Delusion" sold 1.5 million copies, told the Los Angeles Times that "We've all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You're not allowed to criticize it."
Christianity does have a history of intolerance, theologians admit. But it also has a healthy history of doubt and skepticism, as well as interchanges between faith and science – and has reformed itself through a seeking of truth in and outside the church. Some of its best-known modern thinkers have expressed admiration for nonbelievers.
Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading midcentury American theologian, sometimes invoked by Barack Obama, said he preferred honest agnostics to overly pious believers.
The Lutheran Karl Barth, a leading 20th-century European theologian, wrote the forward to the English language version of Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach's prominent atheist critique, "The Essence of Christianity." Barth wasn't worried about the atheism, says Herman Waetjen, professor emeritus of New Testament studies at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, because Barth felt Feuerbach exposed many fault lines, mistakes, social and collective projections, and other falsifications of Christianity that had arisen around the 19th-century church.
"Barth was happy to write a forward to a book that exposed the kind of Christianity he felt to be so unlike the radical God of the Bible he was reading. He saw the value of Feuerbach. So for a campaign like the bus ads that forces us to think – well, I thank them for it," Professor Waetjen says.
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