Oh. My. God.

On earth as it most probably is in heaven, God doesn’t work on an even playing field. So long as it concerns the Omnipotent One, the scales tip in Thy favor, by default and in perpetuity. Amen.

It’s always about The One Upstairs. The Queen and the US President believe in one. Curtis Stigers sings about one. Heck, Aretha Franklin sings and screams about one. One horned guy couldn’t even stand a chance.

God, Creator of the Cosmos, wants everyone to know He (or She) wins, just about every time.

What British comedienne Ariane Sherine hath wrought then was one filament in a longer continuum of age-old theological questing. Like most atheists, Ariane Sherine was no more blasphemous than someone, feeling pariah, acts on a whim in an ocean of holier-than-thou fanatics.

So it happened that when a London bus plied past her one day, with an ad asking “When the Son of Man comes, will He find Faith on this Earth?”, Sherine felt Her Last Straw was at hand. It didn’t help that the ad directed Sherine to a site that, in her words, damned non-believers to “eternity in torment in hell.” In a “fiery apocalyptic sunset,” she adds.

But hell hath no fury than an atheist scorned.

Her sensibilities scathed, she cooked up the now anarchistic counterpunch:

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

All she needed hereafter was the sterling to pay for London buses to bear the message. In an article for The Guardian, she urged all atheists to contribute £5 to bankroll a campaign.

That call to arms resonated stridently, striking the strongest chord with The British Humanist Association. They helped Sherine in the fundraising, which had an initial target of £5500, enough for an ad campaign with 30 bendy buses.

Donors inundated the campaign site upon its launch. In just a day, organizers received a whopping £31,000 ($74,000), five times the targeted fund! Plus, Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, a celebrity atheist, had agreed to match all contributions.

On January 6, the bus campaign made its overture, the real-life equivalent of biblical pillars of fire razing London.

Uproar could not ensue more palpably. Complaints over the ad copy queued at UK’s advertising watchdog. In the end, it ruled in favor of the advertisers, the adverts judged as “unlikely” to offend and mislead. That the ad uses the word “probably” is the sticking point for the judgment; with that, a reader could not infer if the ad outright proclaimed God as nonexistent.

A sly fox of a copywriter, that Sherine.

Christian groups are avenging themselves with ads along the lines of “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God,” “There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life,” and “There is God. Don’t worry. Enjoy your life!” At least one driver, a certain Ron Heather, declined to drive the atheist buses.

In any case, the atheist buses have ended their run on February 1. Over the course of the campaign, the ad has been splayed on around 800 vehicles in Great Britain, including 200 bendy buses in London alone. By January 31, the campaign has received over £135,000 in donations.

Sherine’s posse is preparing for an encore in April, while similar campaigns are being readied in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia. In March, an inspired campaign should announce, “The bad news is that God does not exist. The good news is that we do not need him”—in Italy, the Pope’s bastion.

Social percussions of touchy ads are often the only sensory things in their wake, their subjects’ denouement being too elusive in comparison. When one tries to dissect atheism for example, the morass of a debate is sure to come up, especially in an epoch of religious rationalism.

In one respect, atheism has claimed victory. By embarking on a successful ad campaign, atheism has wrested some tolerance normally accorded to bodies of belief. Atheism, after all, believes in nothingness. Surely that couldn’t demarcate an atheist from another’s moral compass.

For sure, Ariane Sherine has written one helluva copy. Perhaps the ad’s greatest achievement is the fact that it wasn’t crafted by a pro copywriter or a snobby ad agency. Then again, some ad subjects do stir the pot.

There is something to be said for faith, even so. I won’t breathe the proofs for God’s existence to another here, seeing as faith is best left to one’s call.

Just a thought: When comets ram the earth or nuclear weapons explode in unison, that becomes the part when faith in someone/something stops becoming a source of anxieties.

My philosophy teacher says that humankind could choose from four scenarios. One is to believe in a god, and die to realize there is no such. The second is to believe in a god, and find upon death that there is, in fact, one. The third is to believe there is no god, and to discover that to be true. Last is to believe there is no God, when in fact, there is one.

Either party variably won’t lose in the first three scenarios, my teacher said.

I believe it vindicated then to play safe, not for fear of perdition in a “fiery apocalyptic” lake of fire, but for the sheer embarrassment of passing on opportunity.

PS

You can join the fun! Generate your own bus slogan here.

Advertising Agency: CBS Outdoor
Copywriter: Ariane Sherine
Photographs by Jon Worth of The British Humanist Association

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