It was while I was watching one of my favourite TV programs, probably late one night, (“Have I got News for You?”) that I was reminded that for some time some London buses have been displaying certain ‘Christian’ messages. They are along the lines of Alpha Course advertising, such as, “Is this it?” or “If God exists, what would you ask him?” To counteract this blatant display of the Good News and the invitation to think about ‘life’, atheistic organisations have now arranged for ‘atheistic’ messages to be put on London buses which have begun this month. The most famous slogan is “There’s probably no God”. I think it is in the vein of those Carlsberg ads which were once not allowed to claim that Carlsberg was the best larger in the world (which is of course purely based on subjective judgement) so they had to modify all their advertising and suggest, rather, that Carlsberg is probably the best larger in the world. And it has led in to a whole cavalcade of advertising frenzy which has resulted in one of the most successful advertising campaigns we have seen; I’m sure you know them well. So the atheists could only say that there is probably no God!

The actual slogan in full is, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”.

I just had to look in to this a little further; I couldn’t resist it! So if you can bear with me for a few moments - I love these kinds of things!

Seemingly, the British Humanist Association (BHA) planned to raise £5,500, which was going to be matched by the well known, and prosperous, Professor Richard Dawkins, to reach a figure of £11,000 which was needed to keep two sets of 30 buses carrying the slogan across Westminster for four weeks. The BHA has now raised £36,000 of its own accord, and, as I’ve said, the slogan will run in Westminster from this month.

I find all this quite amusing and I wouldn’t get worked up about it all. The reactions to such a venture have been even more entertaining. The Methodist Church (in Britain, I presume), for example, has thanked Professor Dawkins for encouraging a “continued interest in God”.

The best article I found was a piece of writing by The Guardian Newspaper Reporter, Simon Barrow, written, however, way back in October, 2008, if the date is correct. Simon Barrow thinks the whole thing, and particularly the slogan itself is a bit “anodyne”, as he calls it; it’s all a bit insipid and fairly unexciting. He says, “I suspect that the vast majority of people will be as sceptical about being sold unbelief as they are about being sold belief. Well,” he goes on to say, “unless someone is thinking of throwing in a free set of wine glasses or something.” He thinks the slogan is “the non-believing equivalent of ‘God may very well exist. Now have a nice day’”. But, no doubt, he goes on to suggest, it will probably still be enough to upset counter evangelists of the kind who like to tell everybody they are going to hell...and who think atheism is ‘very very naughty’, in his words!

Now, perhaps already, you have probably heard enough about all of this, and we could conceivably divert our attention now to the nature of God that is being implied in theses slogans, and, indeed, to the meaning of Life, the Universe and everything, and so on and so forth. But the simple little truth about all of this, is that this whole nonsense amounts to nought. It is rather inane and a bit childish, and probably more to the point, I have to ask the question, why do atheists spend so much money trying to put across a particular point when ‘Christians’ do it for them, perfectly well - for free!!

You know this and we’ve said it before, that God only speaks twice in the New Testament and both times he says the same thing. I haven’t heard about God speaking from clouds recently, or at least not since New Testament times, although perhaps he should, because the biggest megaphone he has to counter-claim his good news is his own followers; there’s a countless list of them from the like of Jim Bakker to Jimmy Swaggart, both of American TV evangelist fame, not to mention our own church, the scandals in our neighbour’s Church, even to our old friends of recent news, the Robinsons, and you wonder sometimes is any of us without blame? Are we on that list? Have we ever done anything or said anything to help deny Him? Of course we have, which is why it is all the more extraordinary that the Church still exists at all not because of us, but in spite of us!

“The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim him with their mouths and deny him with their lifestyles is what an unbelieving world finds simply unbelievable.” You know that quote so well by Karl Rahner that I was trying not to use it, but, for me, it seems to say it all.

Why are atheists spending so much money on putting across a particular message when they’ve got Christians to do it for them – for free?

I’d like to go back to Simon Barrow. The real message that needs to get out there, he suggests, speaking as a Christian, is about encouraging one another in active compassion; an identification with suffering of others so that you feel the need to alleviate pain and challenge injustice – that surely is at the heart of the best kind of humanist thinking and living, and also the best kind of religious thinking and living. The truth of deeds matching words and vice versa seems to me, he says, to be a much more convincing argument for whatever it is people claim to believe than any attempt to cajole with arguments or posters

Simon Barrow would say that his life “is staked, deeply fallibly, on the conviction that the power of love is finally stronger than the love of power”.

It is easy to despair on the fate of a very flawed Church of Christ, and you wonder sometimes and indeed wish for a thundering exclamation from God himself. If he were to speak to our world, what on earth would he say to us today? What would he say to you, personally? If it just about love and compassion and healing for a broken world, then we have to look no further than the New Testament; we need it now more than we ever did.