A plethora of new fundraising campaigns

Well three actually. . .

In case you've been living under a rock for the past week or so, a new "atheist bus" campaign has hit the headlines. On the JustGiving site at www.justgiving.com/atheistbus the British Humanist Association started collecting to put nontheistic messages on the sides of buses; to counter those fundamentalist religious messages one often sees when travelling in London.

The brief version of the story is this; the BHA set out to collect £5,500 and Richard Dawkins offered to match that amount to run a campaign on 30 buses for four weeks. The slogan was to be "There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Clearly the BHA must have set their target at an amount they thought they could achieve.

Something about this particular meme clearly spread it far more widely and far faster than anybody could have reasonably predicted. By 10am on the day the JustGiving page was put live, they had hit their target. As I look at the page now, the total stands at £111,079! The BHA are now having to scale up their ideas of where and for how long their campaign will run. And the donations are still flooding in.

Some commentators are saying that the word "probably" weakens the campaign (including the Christian Voice nutter, Stephen Green). In reality this only strengthens it; rather than doing as Mr Green did on Radio 5 and claiming to know that god existed, this campaign doesn't make any such opposing (and bold) claim. It simply says that god probably doesn't exist, which is all anyone can rationally say. Green then made himself look foolish again by claiming that he thought atheists were campaigning to legalise incest. Good work. Every little helps, as tesco say.

Personally I'd have preferred a wording I think Dawkins has used in the past - "God almost certainly does not exist"... But you cannot have everything. £10.00 of my own money in their pot, and good luck.

The Alpha Course (a church-run course that teaches the basis of christianity) reacted by starting their own JustGiving page - to get some alpha course posters on buses. Seeing the success of the Atheist Bus campaign, they, some would say arrogantly - some would say foolishly, decided to set their target at £100,000. Currently, 7 days after launch, their total stands at an amazing £387. As I always say, "nothing fails like a prayer".

And finally, no doubt flushed with success, the BHA set up a further JustGiving page to try and raise money to keep a person on full time to lobby against Faith Schools. www.justgiving.com/faithschools/ In under 3 days, this has achieved £4,224, so I'd say they stand a reasonable chance of raising their target £30,000 for a person's salary within a reasonable time frame.

What is perhaps most surprising about this situation is that players on both sides (atheistbus and alpha) are donating to each other's campaigns at the minimum £2 level simply to put messages in the comments section. As far as I'm aware, none of the christian themed messages on the atheistbus donation page have been removed or altered, whereas a suspicious number of the comments from folks like "A N Other Rational Person" on the Alphaposters have been blanked. Jolly poor show whoever administrates the AlphaPosters page.

So it will be interesting to see if any of this actually achieves anything, in terms of raising the rationalist perspective on life above the continual background hiss of religious bullshit. Whatever though - it's been a talking point amongst several people in my immediate group of friends (religious, non religious or "militant atheist"), and the general feeling has been that it's "a bit of a laugh". So, it's certainly achieved something then....