Posted on 06/05/2008 7:57:03 AM PDT by Between the Lines
With its image of blue sky and fluffy clouds, the rectangle floating lately over I-95 near Allegheny Avenue suggests something dreamy, almost heavenly.
At least from a distance.
Drivers headed north toward the giant billboard might first discern the words God and Believe and suppose this to be the work of a fundamentalist church.
But this is the work of no church.
"Don't believe in God?" it asks. "You are not alone."
Think of it as a sign of the times.
Mounted by a consortium of local atheists, it is an invitation to the area's atheists, agnostics, skeptics, rationalists and religious freethinkers (no one label fits them all) to overcome their differences and form a coalition.
"Hundreds of thousands of your neighbors in the Delaware Valley feel the same as you do," according to the Web site www.phillyCOR.org, to which the billboard directs passing motorists.
"Our mission is not to convince fundamentalists to change their position," Steve Rade, a Huntingdon Valley businessman, said last week. He donated the $22,500 needed to mount the billboard, which appeared May 1 and is to remain until the end of August.
"What we want to do is give people questioning their beliefs a place to go for more information and to meet like-minded people."
No horns poke through Rade's wiry gray hair. He is tall and bony, quick to laugh, and dressed for the office - he is president of Wireless Accessories Inc. - in shorts and sneakers. He has the restless energy of a teenager. He is 70.
"I'd like everyone to believe what I do," he said, referring to his "absolute certainty" that there is no divine being running the universe and no life after death. "I think it would be a better world if they did."
The son of a West Oak Lane synagogue president who insisted that his children attend Shabbat services every Saturday, Rade was bar mitzvahed at 13 and confirmed at 16. But his youthful doubts about God and supernaturalism hardened while an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University, where he was a finance major.
"It was just my own critical, rational thinking," he said Thursday with a shrug. "I accept that the universe began with the Big Bang, but I don't believe there were snakes talking in the Garden of Eden. . . . If God shows himself to me, I'll believe."
His grand plan - organizing the region's religious skeptics - began just three months ago, when he asked the American Humanist Association in Washington how to find its local chapter.
In March, he met for dinner with Joe Fox, president of the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia. Fox told him that there were many atheist groups in the region, but that few communicated with one another.
"Joe saw it as a lack of focus," Rade recalled. "I saw it as disarray."
Days later, he invited Fox and the heads of seven other like-minded organizations to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and asked if they wanted to expand and unify.
They agreed to create an umbrella group called the Greater Philadelphia Coalition of Reason (PhillyCOR), and Rade agreed to pay the salary of its half-time executive director.
After that, "the idea for a billboard was easy to come by."
The 20-by-60-foot sign has generated 7,000 hits for the Web site, which offers links to such member organizations as the Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia, the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, Philadelphia Atheists Meetup, and the Secular Society of Temple University.
The sign's original, geographically limited toll-free phone number generated only about 300 calls, however. The new number, 1-877-99HUMANIST, is reachable from any area code.
A recording describes PhillyCOR as a "local free thought group" for "those without supernatural beliefs."
"I'm so appreciative of Steve," Sally Cramer, president of the 300-member Freethought Society, said Friday. "I love the message. I'm really pleased we're able to be a part of this."
At age 24, she has no way to know if it is easier for today's atheists to be "out of the closet," but she said she had encountered hostility. The mother of a previous boyfriend "wouldn't talk to me when she found out I'm an atheist," she said.
No one knows how many American adults identify themselves as being in the atheist spectrum, but surveys suggest between 4 percent and 9 percent, the lowest of any industrialized nation.
Fred Edwords, spokesman for the roughly 10,000-member American Humanist Association, said he thought it was easier for atheists and agnostics to be public than in previous decades.
"In the 1980s, people were saying we're part of a great conspiracy, trying to take over the schools and courts."
The recent spate of best-sellers bearing such titles as The God Delusion, God Is Not Great and The End of Faith suggests a broader public interest in religious skepticism, Edwords said. "But we still feel we're the last minority group it's OK to say bad things about."
The god of genocide. How inspirational.
Maybe to some, but I just use the scientific method. Doing so means that you accept that nothing exists without scientific evidence for its existence. Most nonbelievers are like me. For them, atheism isn't a religion, it is the absence of a religion and a rejection of the supernatural for lack of evidence. It's not a choice at all. I CAN'T believe without evidence.
They're starting a church. I'n't that special.
Read the Bible, God has his reason for everything and by not following his command the Israelis absorbed a society that had open public orgies, child sacrifices, open stealing, and immorality and corruption at every level. It caused them to become immoral and turn from God and he issued several judgments against them for it.
No society can continue without falling by taking in that kind of behavior into its midsts. This great country that is America too will feel this type of fall if we do not stop the trend of tolerance and PC facade being perpetrated on us at every turn by the forces of evil and immorality. Whether you believe in God or not it spells a decay of your society to ignore/promote this type of behavior.
He gave his people the choice of driving out all Baal worshipers and those that chose not to leave were to be exterminated. His children chose to do what they wanted and spared those that would not move.
"What we want to do is give people questioning their beliefs a place to go for more information and to meet like-minded people."
Organizing people only works when the group is based on a belief system - not a non-belief. And that holds true for both atheist and interdenominational groups.
Eventually, people begin disagreeing on certain points, and the group narrows down to people who share one faith - whether that faith is secular humanism or a particular version of Christianity or an anything-goes version of faith or something else.
Non-belief doesn't hold people together. Only a shared faith does.
Really, you should quit before you do any more damage to the credibility of religion.
You’re starting from an assumption - materialism, then claiming that based on that assumption, that assumption is true.
Nice logic, if you can put it over on someone.
That assumption of materialism is your ACTIVE rejection of anything beyond the material, and it is a “theology”.
I don’t care about the credibility of religion. I do however read my Bible. Read Joshua and Judges.
In Jonah God was prepared to wipe out the city of Nineveh but when they responded to Jonah’s message and turned from their ways God showed His grace and spared them destruction. He had always rather be a loving God but He is not one to affront and ignore less you feel His wrath. Sodom and Gomorrah, there are others.
Thanks for the ping I need to get up to speed here.
Nice logic, if you can put it over on someone.
Well let's change the wording a little.
"You’re starting from an assumption - the existence of God, then claiming that based on that assumption, that the existence of God is true."
You are absolutely correct, the assumption does not make the conclusion true. Atheists agree that the lack of evidence that God exists, does not prove that God exists.
It is for this reason that I often state that education can never be religiously neutral.
Yes! There is no alternative to the Truth. When you seek the truth, you find it, end of story.
No doubt, but I’m sure God hasn’t yet commanded us or anyone to annihilate atheists or even Muslims (as much as so many of them deserve it). I get the impression that given Christianity’s nature of individual choice, you can very much allow dissenting viewpoints to do as they will since they’ll pay for it in the end.
As content (or, in many cases smug) as many atheists seem to be, I would imagine it’s a pretty lonely existence. I mean, if this were really all there was to it?
Some song lyrics come to mind—”Try to make ends meet, try to make some money, then you die.”
I cannot speak for God but I assume that the reason we are not asked to do this is because we Christians are no better and are sinful and it is his way of judging us. We get what we deserve.
The immorality in our culture is just as rampant from professed Christians as in atheist or other religions. Until we as a country decide to repent and turn away from the mounting immorality then we have no right to enforce anything on anyone.
Nope, we don’t start from an assumption of a Creator,
but, we don’t automatically exclude the possibility then try to make all theories fit it, like the “yo yo universe” theory proposed to exclude the evidence of a beginning of the universe.
Atheists limit their discovery to the material in order to avoid the consequences of the possibility of a Creator.
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