Cynicism is free
I start off most work mornings with a cup a coffee and a sprint around the homepages of The Guardian or The Times. This morning this article – All Aboard the Atheist Bus – caught my eye.
Now putting aside whether you think a priority for atheists should be handing over £11,000 to the cash-strapped advertising industry for the sake of annoying the religious people of London for four weeks, it is interesting that this article has pride of place on The Guardian’s homepage. In fact, it is interesting to note that The Guardian regularly has quite a few articles or Comment is Free blogs on religion vs atheism – at least one a month it seems, if not more. Most of these have comments enabled and attract an obscene amount of them (863 on the Atheist bus post as I write – who are these people?!).
Does The Guardian have some kind of duty to their readership to raise religious issues? Or is this simply a guaranteed way to get those mouseclicks and increased advertising revenue? From the tiresome predictability of most of these articles and their comments, I suspect that religion really does sell.
Next week on Cocktails and Records
Readers recommend songs about why God might / might not exist and if he does how he feels about The Wire, the credit crunch, Sarah Palin, the new Bond film and the current England team line-up. Oh, and porn.
Tags: marketing moments, religion
October 21st, 2008 at 10:12 pm
It’s a disgrace. I really hate atheistic zealotry, they’re the worst kind of people (along with erm, religious zealots).
Live and let live people.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Got into a bit of an argument with someone about this today. Well, they were the second person to interrupt my lunch hour with silly prattling. I’m rather partial to silence as it happens. Anyway, as soon as she mentioned the story, I could tell from her snorting and braying that she thought the posters were a brilliant idea. I decided to vehemently disagree with her, as much as a matter of contrarian principal as anything else, and then wished I hadn’t…..
All I said was that the humanist society of Britain were a bunch of smug wankers.
Some people, eh? ;)
I sense the grimy hand of Dawkins in all this, but I could be wrong…….
October 21st, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I don’t really have an opinion on this. Unbelieveable, I know.
On one hand I’m like you RE, I’m tired of fundamentalists and zealots, atheists and otherwise, and wish they’d all get over themselves. My liberal side says let people live their own lives.
On the other hand, as a embittered, cynical, judgemental fascist who probably leans more towards the atheistic side than the other, I like the idea of deliberately annoying people – in the same way that I’m annoyed by Scientologists harrassing me whenever I make the mistake of walking past their ’shop’.
It’s difficult. And the fact that I’m currently struggling through a book called ‘An Introduction to Theology’ isn’t helping.
And yes, Ill Man, Mr Dawkins is partly behind this. He is matching the contributions made by Guardian readers up to £5,500.
October 22nd, 2008 at 4:48 am
My mom always said don’t discuss politics and religion. There are zealots on all sides, among believers and non-believers as well. They can all really drive you crazy. Religion is something that means a lot to many people around this planet. It is something that should be beautiful and offer people some peace and serenity in this insane world.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:11 pm
I just relgious types would practice what they preach and get on with making the world a better place by their actions rather than telling other people what to do (or more often what not to do.
) As to comment pages on paper websites they are clearly just designed to drive traffic and clicks I don’t read them most of the time as they are usually deliberately contrarian and the debate beneath isn’t worth reading.
As to bus advert they should have more conviction and just said “God is dead”. I can’t see how that is anymore offensive than the “Jesus loves” you ads that have started cropping up.
It’s a hard concept to grasp (is seems judging by media debate)but you can respect someone’s rights to their beliefs but challenge and cast doubt on what they believe, just because some believes something it doesn’t mean it’s free from discussion or even possible ridicule.
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Keith, I’m afraid that I disagree with your mum. I know where she is coming from, but I like to discuss religion and politics and I think its important to. If there was more reasoned discussion and debate (as opposed to offensive slanging matches) then surely the world would be a better place? I wish I could talk about religion more with people. There are so many things that I would like to understand better, but it’s a difficult area to go in to without people getting upset.
BLTP, the ‘There’s probably no God’ logo is decidely wishy-washy. I agree with you that you should be able to challenge religion, but the first step is probably not being deliberately provocative about it.
Really, the role of the national media should be to engage the public, faith groups and organisations like the National Secular Society with questions like ‘Has religion failed?’, ‘How do we get through our crisis in faith?’ and ‘Why secularism works’.
*skips off to make daisy chains and hum happy songs about cats*
October 22nd, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I think that’s her thing. You are always going to upset people with your talk of either religion or politics. People disagree on both of those. It can get very heated. We can see that over here right now with our election. There is so much mud slung on both sides. Supporters of each candidate have been really nasty to supporters of the others. I think if different points of view on religion and politics could be discussed in a civil manner then that would be great. Things seem to get down and dirty quickly most of the time. People start resenting you if you have a different belief than them. I don’t mind talking about either subject. I usually do it more privately than publicly, but I am interested in both subjects.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Yes, it seems a sad, but inevitable, fact of human nature that the things that are theoretically meant to bring out the good in you, like religion or politics (sometimes!) also bring out the worse. It must be very interesting times, to say the least, in the States at the moment. We obviously get a lot of election coverage over here, and even from a distance, you can tell that a lot of it is mud slinging and character assassination rather than useful debate about actual policies.
October 23rd, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I saw this, and think it does bugger-all to enrich the debate. It’s just childish and silly. I thought Dawkins had proclaimed himself the Adult in all of this, and it was the Deluded Religious who were the idiotic name-callers?
A plague on all their houses.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I think that the concept of enriching the debate (how novel, ISBW) has long been abandoned in all of this. It’s just pure provocation, and wishy-washy provocation at that. Something that sadly Mr Dawkins is now beginning to excel at.
I first saw Richard Dawkins talk a few years ago at UCL event, mostly comprised of science students, academics and fascinated parties like me who liked his books on biology. He was brilliant, gently prodding and poking at religion and the vibe was like an AA meeting with people pleased to finally have the space to stand up and shout ‘I’m an atheist and I am proud’. But since then it’s all sadly descended into fundamentalism.