The World’s Third-Largest Belief Category

A BIT OF CHEERING NEWS

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:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/23/atheism-disestablishentment-rowan-williams-humanism

EVEN MORE CHEERING NEWS

If you visit this Wikipedia page, it gives you a breakdown of adherents to all the world’s religions and beliefs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Worldwide_percentage_of_Adherents_by_Religion.png

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:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Athiests_on_move_God_on_backseat/articleshow/3883051.cms

… even if, like many people, they haven’t spelt “atheists” correctly. The old adage “i before e except after c” has a lot to answer for!

Tags: Atheists, Belief, Breakdown, Google, India, Non-Religious, Population, Religion, Search, URL, Wikipedia, World

4 comments 28.12.08

Design: Second To Nunn

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 -”.

Tags: Advert, Art, Artist, Atheists, Design, Designer, Graham Nunn, Ironic Names, My Creative Year, Simon Bishop, Slogan

7 comments 7.12.08

Mary Kenny – FAIL!

If Mary Kenny is a journalist, I am a brass rooster collector. (And I promise you, I’m not a brass rooster collector.) I didn’t think it was possible to get every single fact wrong in an article, but reading through Kenny’s latest piece in the Irish Independent is like playing a game of “spot the error”. I honestly think there’s one in every line, and it’s not a short piece:

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/atheist-bus-more-like-a-bandwagon–on-highway-to-hell-1550742.html

But it’s not just Kenny’s errors which are startling – it’s the way she attempts to equate atheism with all that is wrong with the UK, including child abuse, unforgivably using the tragic case of Baby P to generate emotion with no relevant context (Kenny has no evidence to suggest that his killers didn’t believe in God, or that their religious beliefs (or lack of them) were a factor in the case in any way).

In addition, Mary Kenny is a Roman Catholic, so she’s on very shaky ground indeed when writing about any link between religion and child abuse. Catholic priests, anyone? Magdalene Laundries? Kenny seriously believes the world would be a better place if we all believed in God. 9/11, Mary? Iraq? The Middle East? The Balkans? Northern Ireland?

You can write a letter to the editor of the Irish Independent here:

independent.letters {at} independent(.)ie

Here’s one from an atheist:

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/so-whos-really-intolerant-mary-1552011.html

Tags: Atheists, Facts, Inaccuracy, Irish Independent, Journalism, Mary Kenny, Morality, Roman Catholics

24 comments 25.11.08