This one’s going to be short, because I don’t really do this anymore, and with good reason.
This billboard just went up in Times Square, and it’ll be staying there until the 10th of January. Predictably, it’s attracting a lot of criticism, and not because they hired a shitty graphic designer - because apparently, saying that Christmas tends to be more fun without all of the Jesus stuff is on the same moral level as Holocaust denial. Or something.
Actually, here’s what the criticisms really are - that atheism, as an ideology (and that’s possibly an inappropriate term), is predicated on saying that something else is wrong, and that in this case the “something else” is a belief that can be extremely personal, prop up the lives of countless individuals and generally be an all-round good thing regardless of its validity or not. Basically, it doesn’t matter if they’re all factually baseless - it’s still baselessness that does good, so why try and educate people if it’s just going to turn them evil?
Something about that doesn’t sit right with me. Before I mention a much bigger reason as to why I think that billboard exists that doesn’t have anything to do with turning the religious into secular heathens, let’s assume that that was the sole intention. In that sort of case… so what?
As an atheist, the problem that I see is that a lot of the rhetoric directed at it tends to frame it as Yet Another Religion - one with inaccuracies, contradictions and a general faith requirement for it to make sense. And that’s… wrong. I became an atheist because I learned about the world. I don’t think it’s possible to claim the “strong” version of atheism - active non-belief, rather than passive lack of belief - without straying outside the facts, but neither can you claim any religious conviction more specific than deism without essentially misleading yourself, or - worse - being misled. Atheists know that religious people are not in possession of all the facts - or they are, but they’re so hard-wired to believe (technically, we all are) that the cognitive dissonance they experience ignores them.
That’s why bad stuff done in the name of religion - and, um, there’s a lot - seems so much worse to atheists than bad stuff done without, because society holds up Christians as paragons of moral virtue, and the Bible is riddled with stuff that’s just incorrect. When people kill other people on religious grounds, unless it’s Islam, the religion’s always downplayed, even if Anders Breivik did write a 1,000-page Christian manual before going on a killing spree. They’re just ‘bad people’ - and, sure, they almost always are, but they’re also bad people motivated by something that most people think can only produce good. No-one kills in the name of atheism, because there’s nothing behind that name other than an absence. If you’re non-religious, and adhere to that conviction because you got there through critical reasoning rather than by default, then there’s a justifiable sense of moral outrage when you see religion put on a pedestal.
All kind of irrelevant, though, because I don’t really think that was the intention of that billboard. The phenomenon of closeted atheists is played down in the US, in part because there are other issues that take greater real precedent (you can’t discount LGBTQ communities - or, more importantly, the lack thereof - here), but also because most people writing the things you read tend to have liberal, middle class families that don’t really react to hearing that their kid’s a non-believer.
As someone who’s witnessed a family tear itself apart over their son’s atheism - and this was a family living in Pennsylvania, not Texas or Alabama - I can attest that it still exists, and I’ve read countless other similar cases. Something like this billboard, I think, is intended to make closeted atheists feel like they’re not fucked in the head - that regardless of the vitriol that’s piled upon them by the people entrusted with their care, they’re not alone, and that they don’t deserve to be hated.
And yes, the way they’re doing that is by saying that the idea that a fairly nice guy endured a torturous death to somehow absolve some middle-aged obese Texan mother of the sin of not sharing the box of doughnuts meant for her equally obese family is kind of absurd, because it is, and because that’s what becoming an atheist is like - it’s recognising absurdity in things that other people take for granted. Christians use the candle metaphor way too often to describe Christ (I’ve been to church a grand total of twenty-four times, and heard that crap twenty-four times), but becoming an atheist is just as much about seeing a flicker of light in the darkness, of making a few connections where the people around you don’t. A billboard like this, rather than delivering some colossal fuck you to every suffering, oppressed Christian in America, is saying to one of the largest but most under-represented minorities: we see it too.