Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Dueling Billboards

So, a few days ago I saw the news story about a group of atheists putting up an anti-Xian Xmas message in New York City, apparently in a spot where traffic slows down a lot as people prepare to enter the Lincoln Tunnel. Which has so incensed the Catholic League that they've taken time off from trying to stop people from reading Phillip Pullman and taken out a second billboard, one of those Christ-is-the-reason-for-the-season ones, to counter the message.


Two observations:

First, the atheists' message is self-evidently not 'reasonable', since the majority of people seeing their billboard will not in fact agree with them. So there's a self-imposed limit on how much damage a self-contradictory, smug little message like this can do.

Second, the Catholic League billboard in most contexts wd be so ordinary as to attract no notice -- we all see things like this around all the time. But it's a sad commentary that the League doesn't think God can take care of himself; that the Almighty needs them to rent billboard space. As the article-writer suggested at the end of his piece, there are more Xian uses for that money.

--JDR

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