Bibles for Porn
It appears that a group of atheists in San Antonio, Texas, have launched a program in which college students can swap Bibles and other religious texts for high-class pornography. The idea is for people to equate the two rather than to actually promote porn. Clever? No doubt. Effective? I'd say no.
As an atheist, I'm well aware that our popularity ranks somewhere between Dick Cheney and herpes. Voters would almost certainly elect a transsexual murderer president, so long as he was a believer, over an atheist. I'd like very much to be able to put my weight behind an effective pro-atheist movement.
Bibles for porn isn't it, for a few reasons. For one thing, it reinforces the image of atheists as a group of licentious libertines who would spike the school water supply with LSD given half a chance. Hardcore Christians like to think that their morality derives entirely from faith, and that ergo those without faith somehow lack a morality. This idea is of course wrong, but handing out porn is hardly the way to disprove it.
The second thing I object to is the notion that the Bible is 'smut', as the program's manifesto calls it. Hardly. The Bible is a book upon which the foundation of Western culture is based. For that reason alone, it has immense historical value. Rather than trading Bibles in for porn, atheists should actually sit and learn it. The world would be better off if people were to analyze 'sacred' texts critically rather than simply adopt their tenets wholesale.
Far more effective were the light and breezy 'atheist bus' campaign that made a slight stir in England last year.
