And lastly, I was really excited to be asked to give the first non-religious Thought For The Afternoon on Radio 4 last Saturday. You can listen to it here at 4.35 minutes in:
The presenters of Australia’s biggest television show, Sunrise, are not just very funny and great with puns – they’re also the most freethinking people I’ve come across in TV since the start of the campaign! Watch this and feel hopeful…
Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and President of the BHA, wrote a fantastic article in this week’s Guardian declaring that the Atheist Bus Campaign slogan was her Christmas message. You can read her article here:
Atheists comprise 2.35%, but when combined with the category “non-religious” we’re up to an impressive 14.27% – making us the world’s third-largest belief category! That’s 924,311,385 of us and counting – and we’re also the UK’s second largest belief category, with 23% either stating “no religion” or refusing to state one on the 2001 Census form.
WE’VE REACHED INDIA!
Okay, so there’s no Indian Atheist Bus Campaign. But the Economic Times, affiliated to the India Times, have run an upbeat (if inaccurate) story on us:
Firstly: lots of you have been asking when the atheist buses will roll out onto the streets. We can’t give you a date yet I’m afraid, but it will definitely be in January – so not long to wait now! We’re very grateful for all your support – and with the help of the fantastic Simon Bishop, we’ve just broken the £130,000 mark, which is amazing when you remember that our original target was just £5,500.
Secondly: the American Humanist Association’s ABC-inspired bus campaign has been running across Washington DC for over a month now, and though it hasn’t met with approval across the whole of the US, it’s a big step forward. For more on the AHA campaign, please visit its official website.
Lastly: an atheist has taken out a quarter-page advert in a Hong Kong newspaper, saying “Consider – you don’t need to believe in a god or have any religion, just take a break, celebrate and enjoy the holidays with your loved ones – that’s the reason we need holidays, and that is all we need!”
This campaign has a habit (ba-boom) of generating notable atheists with ironic names. As well as our fantastic top donor Simon Bishop (and fellow donor Joanne Vickers), an atheist called Graham Nunn has also contributed. But as well as being the fifth person to donate, he also, entirely for free and quite uncredited by the press, created every single design element for the campaign, from the now-infamous colourful Atheist Bus Campaign slogan, to the ABC t-shirts available here, to the banner for the site you’re reading now. This campaign hasn’t been about big corporations, media buyers or advertising agencies, but hardworking individuals in unrelated jobs who feel passionately about the cause and have volunteered their time and talents to help us. Graham, we salute you!
As well as producing all our design and holding down a ten-hour day job, Graham also started an (often very funny) project in October called My Creative Year, during which he has pledged to produce one piece of design a day for 365 days. As it’s a big, time-consuming project, he produced this GIF (click to enlarge) as one of the pieces, in order to put his endeavour into proper perspective – and succeeded in creating an amazing visual history of the universe, from the Big Bang all the way through to the (eye-wateringly brief) existence of humans. I think this timeline represents just how short our lives really are, and how we have to make the most of them – because in the great scheme of things, they’re over before you can say, “But I’d just started to find happine -”.
I was asked on to talk about the new Churches Advertising Network nativity adverts. Apologies – I meant to say “more apathy” rather than “less apathy” (that’s a 5.40am start for you) – but on the plus side, I know all about cathode ray tubes!
