Somtimes it's great being a Methodist....

Listening to the Radio the other day on the way home from a meeting, I heard an interesting tale... it seems that the British Humanist Association have decided to run an advertising campaign on London Buses with the message "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The person speaking seemed to think that this was probably the first Atheist Advertising Campaign, although she was rather hazy on whether this had been tried before - at one point there was some muttering that it hadn't been allowed before, which the interviewer picked up on and got her to admit that she didn't know whether it had ever been tried.

The article on the BBC Site includes a response from the Methodist Church in the person of Rev. Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer that is in many ways quite masterful: after thanking Richard Dawkins (yes, he's helped provide some of the funding) for encouraging a "continued interest in God", she is quoted as saying "This campaign will be a good thing if it gets people to engage with the deepest questions of life... Christianity is for people who aren't afraid to think about life and meaning."

I'm one happy Methodist after reading that! It's the sort of response I would have liked to have given myself. No doubt it will be ignored or dismissed by the more zealous atheists, but in some ways it shows that despite the best efforts of the atheist community to paint religion (not just Christianity) as being outmoded, outdated, irrelevant and even dangerous, we haven't gone away. We may not have as many followers, but we're still here. And, strange as it may seem, we haven't all left our brains in the box, or passed our decision-making to an institution and it's idea of morality. There are probably more thinking, questioning Christians around than ever before - many of us who have even read Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and are not convinced by the rhetoric within it, and some of us who can even appreciate what looks to be the satire of Dawkins proving that God is at best highly unlikely, echoing the claims of the Intelligent Design movement when it argues that certain biological structures are so unlikely to occur that they "must" have been designed....