Peter Suderman is sceptical about the point of the atheist bus. When, he asks, did a bus ad ever convince anyone of anything?
Ads [he adds] aren't all that good at making arguments, and I don't know why theoretically intelligent people like the atheists at the BHA think they are.
Now, speaking personally, I mostly don't see advertisements, or see them only long enough to know I'm not going to keep looking. So, in some ways, I'm the ideal recipient for what Suderman is saying. But, actually... it's not so clever. He's making life rather easy for himself by pretending that this is about argument. Or, to put it another way, does he adopt the same attitude to all advertising, not just atheist advertising - dismissing it as a waste of time because it fails in setting out an elaborate chain of reasons?
It might just be that the atheists at the British Humanist Association don't in fact see their bus ad as competing with the works of theologians down the ages but, more simply, as registering an atheist presence in the public domain, the sort of presence that religious believers for their part possess in spades. Houses of worship and religious symbols, slogans on church notice boards and the public singing of hymns, these are, none of them, arguments, but they're there in plenty, all the same. The atheist bus may be regarded as that kind of thing. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)