The American Humanist Association has taken a leaf from its British counterpart and run its own atheist bus campaign in Washington DC. Being in America, the message was somewhat milder; rather than telling people that "there is probably no god", it asked "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake." Of course, as one might expect, it still aroused an explosive reaction:
It's a simple question: "Why not try Jesus?" Equally simple is an opposite: "Why believe in a god?" Yet in the United States the first question is widely viewed as positive, or at least ordinary, while the second can be perceived as offensive and even hate speech.
The sudden high volume of visitors to our special campaign website www.whybelieveinagod.org crashed our server twice. Soon, the conservative talkshow hosts were clamouring to give us air time so they could argue against us and further rouse their audience. And conservative Christian organisations not only denounced our efforts but encouraged their flocks to come bleat in our ears. All this before our bus ads actually started to appear one week later. By the beginning of December we'd received 37,742 hits on our campaign website, logged 638 new members and received over $6,000 in new contributions.
I'm going to stick my neck out and predict that we are witnessing the beginning of the final fizzling-out of religion in the USA. It's true, religion is far more "in your face" there than in other Western countries. But I sense it is a flimsy facade, and like religion in Australia in the 70s before it basically disappeared from view. Most people are half-heartedly going alonw with the crowd, to avoid the kind of hassle described above. A few public announcements by sensible middle-class atheists who don't appear to be trying to smash the state - like these bus ads - and critical mass could easily tip toward atheism or agnosticism a la the rest of the West. Something rather like this happened politically in the US this year.