By TANA GANEVA - ALTERNET
Added: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Aurelian for the link.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/142978/imagine_no_religion_atheist_movement_gains_momentum/?page=entire

This month, San Francisco's public transit system was enlisted in the battle against organized religion.

A publicity campaign by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for the separation of church and state, covered the sides and interiors of 75 city buses with the anti-religion quips of assorted atheist wordsmiths.

Here's Mark Twain: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Clarence Darrow: "I don‘t believe in God, because I don't believe in Mother Goose."

Richard Dawkins: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction."

Butterfly McQueen, who played Prissy in Gone With the Wind: "As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion."

The bus campaign is part of a wider push by FFRF to promote atheism around the country. In the past few years, the organization has put up billboards in Denver, Detroit and Seattle. FFRF billboards have even popped up in the Bible Belt, asking Alabama residents to "Imagine no Religion."

AlterNet spoke with FFRF co-founder and co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor about the organization's efforts to push atheism – or "free thought," as Gaylor says -- in the most religious industrialized nation on earth. Also discussed was: why many atheists know more about the Bible than do a lot of Christians; if liberal Christians are worse than right-wing fundamentalists; and whether "New Atheists" Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are annoying.

AlterNet: What's the thinking behind the San Francisco bus campaign?

Annie Laurie Gaylor: It's free thinking. We want to bring our message to the masses. And we've been censored for so long. For decades we tried to put up billboards, and we were denied access.

That's slowly changing -- we have a national billboard campaign, and now we're moving to the buses, and that's taken from the British bus-sign campaign, which made a big splash. So that's been a global movement.
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http://www.alternet.org/rights/142978/imagine_no_religion_atheist_movement_gains_momentum/?page=entire

TAGGED: ATHEISM, CAMPAIGNS