Another one? Really? I had to refresh the page to make sure it was real. Another organized group of rational humans are going to wage a very public campaign to hopefully convince people that it’s better to operate from a logical and intelligent perspective than to base your morality on a myth?
The American Humanist Association is a group which, surprisingly, has been around since 1941. Humanism, as they describe it, is "a worldview which says that reason and science are the best ways to understand the world around us, and that dignity and compassion should be the basis for how you act toward someone else."
They are about to launch their Holiday Ad Campaign which will place their message of "No God? No Problem!" on transit systems from coast to coast, making it the first ever nationwide humanist ad campaign. They describe it as…"Celebrating a new kind of holiday tradition, the American Humanist Association has launched a new advertising campaign. Ads will be blazoned across transit systems in five cities–including Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco–marking the first-ever nation-wide humanist holiday advertising campaign."
One of the group’s principles is something most people of faith fail to understand about those of us who don’t subscribe to mythology in order to live our lives, and that is… "Humanism is nontheistic. By this, we don’t mean to say that there is no God. Instead, we say that there is no proof for the existence of God, any gods, the supernatural or an afterlife."
So often in debates concerning whether there is a mythological being out there who designed everything around us, I’m faced with the question that virtually all those who don’t subscribe to mythology are faced with…"Why don’t you prove to me that there is no god?" Of course, we can’t do that, no one can, but the problem is that non-believers in any form of mythology do not have the burden of proof, the believers do. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a non-believer who has definitively stated, "There is no mythological god, no god, none, no chance at all." Instead, the response is typically…"I don’t know if there is a god or not, and if one appeared before me now, I’d believe in it, but until that happens, I’m not going to subscribe to any of those theories." (Okay, it’s not worded quite that way, but that’s basically it.)
So that’s the fatal flaw in certainly the American Christian argument, as well as every other group of "faith" on the planet. They know they can’t prove any of it, but they also know they can’t continue their wages of discrimination, war and condemnation if they enter into a debate on proof, so they turn it around and throw it back in the direction of non-believers, which is, of course, ridiculous. I’ve actually been told by many believers over the years that their "proof" that a Christian God is out there is how strongly they’ve felt it in their heart. Really? Then we should let all those committed to mental institutions go free. If "feeling" something is all it takes then pretty much anything goes, doesn’t it? You can see where that kind of "proof" would lead us…
I’m surprised this kind of public advertising is finally happening, as with the other recent ad campaigns which I’ve reported on here before. I’m just thankful it’s happening.
