$10,000 and growing fast
11.12.09 | Duncan | 
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We have been overwhelmed with the incredible response from New Zealand, and have sailed past our original target of $10,000 in less than 48 hours. More importantly, we have started the discussion around the web, and hopefully at dining tables and in living rooms all over our beautiful country.
Of course we now doubled our target, so we need your help to continue spreading the message. Post on Facebook, tweet about it, get involved in the huge number of discussions going on around the web, and talk to your friends and family about it. Remember this campaign is about positivity, and we need to respect peoples alternative points of view, just as we hope they will respect ours. It is easy to get caught up in what can understandably be a very personal and emotional issue for some people.
Simon will be appearing on Close Up tonight, TV1 at 7pm to discuss the campaign. It should also be posted up on the TVNZ website later tonight.
Thanks to everyone who has sent us positive messages, and offered their support. We are trying really hard to answer all your questions, hopefully we will have more time over the weekend to do that!
December 11th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
$10,000 down. $20,000 HERE WE COME!
December 11th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Great stuff. Have you thought about selling bumper stickers to raise extra (and leave a lasting message)?
December 11th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
great idea, hayden. If they make them i’ll have 3.How about t-shirts with the slogan on both the front and back.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
If you’re looking for Atheist merch, how about visiting the Richard Dawkins Foundation and his ‘Out’ (The Red A) campaign?
I think there is no better time for us as Atheists and Secular Humanists to come out and show our vocal and very public support for science and rationalism.
December 11th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
There is NO WAY I will contribute a cent to this idiocy. You’re no better than the clergy, except you promote the opposite, there is no God.
December 11th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Just one more thing: believing in God is not compulsory, so there is no need to protest against the belief, especially no need for monetary contribution.
December 11th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Have you ever looked at a flagellum, or the biggest star of SE51.
http://www.se51.net/2007/07/02/the-largest-star-known-to-man/
There is a vast universe out there that couldnt just ‘happen’
And the body of the human being, even as it is made, its so intricate that it couldnt just ‘happen’.
There appears to be more evidence for a “Creater” than atheism.
Atheism is a religion itself because atheists ‘believe’ there is no God.
December 11th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Just watched Simon’s interview on Close-Up and thought he came across rather poorly. He seemed inarticulate and unprepared. Although to be fair, the interviewer Mike Hoskings was decidedly a lot more sympathetic toward the Christian spokesperson.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:00 pm
#7
There is no evidence for a creator, not one shred, and atheism is just absence of belief in the existence of deities, like an a-Santa Clausist is absence of belief in the existence of Santa Claus. It is not a religion like not believing in Santa Claus is not a religion.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Agreed. It’s a common retort for believers to assert that Atheism (like religion) is also “a matter of faith”. No so; Atheism rationally opts for the most probable position based on all available evidence.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Sorry Alec, our predisposition to see intention behind events that “just” happen is a legacy of our origins as a social ape. Recognising intentions in others improves our survival and breeding outcomes so it’s an adaption to be sensitive to them. We are so sensitive that we get a few false positives. (eg. interpreting weather as indicating a gods displeasure) These are not generally fatal so they don’t get selected out of the population.
Your argument is based on incredulity, that is, just because you can’t imagine a natural mechanism that leads to a complex result then god must have done it. I suggest you read a bit more widely. Truth, it turns out, is stranger, and much more interesting, that fiction.
We made god up. We have better explanations now.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Atheists would not believe in God even if the evidence for His existence hit them in the head. Atheism is a matter of choice, as much as faith. There is probably…. so at the end of the day they are not so sure. All they have is faith that there is no one to call them to account for their choices. The evidence for God is not compelling. It is sufficient for those who are open to God`s voice, and not sufficient for those who in their hearts have decided no to believe, whatever the evidence.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I’ve got a updated picture for you guys:
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/meRyA5Qvs0-hQqR2R4bQbg?feat=directlink
Also To the above post by “Jackson1979″ I would reference this quote from Richard Dawkins:
“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.” -Robert M. Pig ( author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
Please note nodelusions.com is opening soon for ALL your atheist “supply’s”.
Cheers,
~Jack
December 11th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Not so, Thomas. It wouldn’t take evidence to “hit us on the head.” Any evidence at all would be sufficient, but I’m afraid emotional desire or wishful thinking simply doesn’t cut it as evidence.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Really Thomas, if I got a body of verifiable evidence, I’d gladly change my mind. That is why scientific thinking is superior to faith thinking. That is why adding “probably” is just the honest position to take. Yes atheism is a choice but it is one freely made after reviewing the evidence. Hey, I spent most of my adult life as a believer so I am familiar with the mindset. But in the end the evidence just didn’t stack up. Faith requires you to suppress your critical thinking.
Your description of god as a he has human fingerprints all over it by the way. When you stand back and look at the god character it’s bleed’n obvious that he’s a human creation. Not the other wa around.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
An exert from the brilliant book of Christopher Hitchens – God is not great.
And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called “brights,” is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and-since there is no other metaphor-also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true-that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.
Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, “I am so made that I cannot believe.” In the village of Montaillou, during one of the great medieval persecutions, a woman was asked by the Inquisitors to tell them from whom she had acquired her heretical doubts about hell and resurrection. She must have known that she stood in terrible danger of a lingering death administered by the pious, but she responded that she took them from nobody and had evolved them all by herself. (Often, you hear the believers praise the simplicity of their flock, but not in the case of this unforced and conscientious sanity and lucidity, which has been stamped out and burned out in the cases of more humans than we shall ever be able to name.)
There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man’s most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be “holier” than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.
While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way-one might cite Pascal-and some of it is dreary and absurd-here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis-both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed-not too effectively at that-in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then-after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty-to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.
Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder. But still, what a difference when one lays aside the strenuous believers and takes up the no less arduous work of a Darwin, say, or a Hawking or a Crick. These men are more enlightening when they are wrong, or when they display their inevitable biases, than any falsely modest person of faith who is vainly trying to square the circle and to explain how he, a mere creature of the Creator, can possibly know what that Creator intends. Not all can be agreed on matters of aesthetics, but we secular humanists and atheists and agnostics do not wish to deprive humanity of its wonders or consolations. Not in the least. If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful-and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding-than any creation or “end of days” story. If you read Hawking on the “event horizon,” that theoretical lip of the “black hole” over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regrettably and by definition, not have enough “time”), I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive “burning bush.” If you examine the beauty and symmetry of the double helix, and then go on to have your own genome sequence fully analyzed, you will be at once impressed that such a near-perfect phenomenon is at the core of your being, and reassured (I hope) that you have so much in common with other tribes of the human species-”race” having gone, along with “creation” into the ashcan-and further fascinated to learn how much you are a part of the animal kingdom as well. Now at last you can be properly humble in the face of your maker, which turns out not to be a “who,” but a process of mutation with rather more random elements than our vanity might wish. This is more than enough mystery and marvel for any mammal to be getting along with: the most educated person in the world now has to admit-I shall not say confess-that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
I find the evidence for God`s existence a fascinating topic. For those who claim that there is no evidence for God – what evidence would convince you ? A writing across the sky saying: “I exist. Believe in me or perish” ?? Or would you expect every single atom to have the words “Made by God” written on it ? Surely, humans are not in a postion to dictate to God how much and what sort of evidence He should give them. As for the evidence of God`s non-existence – atheists have for ages tried to disprove God`s existence but no one has, as yet, come up with convincing evidence. All the so-called arguments for God`s non-existence have been successfully disproved. Still, there is faith for those who chose to “not- believe”.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
The universe is the largest thing. The second largest thing will be the helping of humble pie eaten by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins et al on judgement day. I find it very annoying that atheists insist on using the word “rational” to describe their beliefs, implying, of course, that any position other than theirs is “irrational”. Albert Einstein said that those who could no longer marvel at the universe and see the “mystery” of life were like “snuffed out candles”. I agree with him – atheists are like “snuffed out candles”. Pity.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
…and neither can I disprove Santa’s existence, or Odin’s, or the Tooth Fairies, not to a standard that will satisfy you so I won’t try. I will just choose not to believe in these characters myself. They are of literary interest only, along with the god of the bible.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
Atheists have never tried to prove God’s non-existence. It’s impossible to prove the non-existence of anything. The onus is on believers to prove God’s existence. As for what would constitute evidence, I would suggest anything that is physical and tangible. The sort of evidence that could be subjected to scientific analysis and study.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Here, here Robert,
What have you got Thomas??
Something we can measure?
December 11th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Robert. I am sure that not ”any evidence at all would be sufficient” – as you put it. You would always be able to say: “Oh yes, but …”. And No, not all Christians base their faith on emotions, nor are they required to. There is definitely room for reason in faith. I don`t know what your definition of faith is, but the way I understand it is not “believing in something despite the evidence – or even in the teeth of evidence (Dawkins` words ??)”. That would be childish faith, but, thankfully it is not the sort of faith God expectd us to have.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
So if you cant prove God`s non-existence, since you cant prove the negative – not in this case anyway – all that it leaves you with is agnosticism, not atheism, so the whole “bus campaign” is misguided.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
And why shouldn’t we question the evidence? Good evidence will stand scrutiny. But where is it? It’s all hear-say and say-so. Stuff people want to be true, perhaps understandibly granted.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
I think Richard Dawkins put it best. Technically, yes we are all agnostics. However, we can do better than that based on the balance of probabilities. Are we agnostic about leprechauns and fairies just because we can’t prove their non-existence?
December 11th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
The money would better be spent on promoting the folowing challenge :”Who knows ? Maybe God does exist. We have not seen Him but that proves nothing so … keep looking cos that could prove to be the most important pursuit in your life”. “There is probably no God…” is weak and leaves me asking myself :”And what if He does ???
December 11th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Thomas. So what makes more sense: To believe in a God for which there is not a shred of testable evidence, or to draw the conclusion that because there is no evidence, there is most probably no god? Like many others here, I don’t believe in Santa either – that’s not a belief, it’s a lack of belief.
And that doesn’t even get into why one would choose one particular faith/god/gods over another – how do you justify your concept of God over someone else’s? What makes them wrong and you right?
December 11th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
So its an insurance policy for you?
The god argument just gets weaker and weaker.
On the evidence and on the balance of probabilities, god does not exist. Prove otherwise.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Religious apologists regularly misquote the pantheist Einstein out of context
December 11th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Im an atheist and this is a pathetic waste of time. There is nothing wrong with being an atheist in New Zealand. THIS IS A PURE PUBLICITY STUNT, ONLY OUT TO OFFEND. What a WASTE of money and a pathetic way of giving people who dont believe in god a bad name.
Perhaps you could actually do something newsworthy and give the money idiotic and ignorant people gave you for a good cause, like, I dont know…Samoa?
Imagine how many people that would help.
Besides who cares what anyone else believes? You’re just searching for an argument. Why not “stop worrying” about other people and “enjoy your [OWN] life”.