Neil DeGrasse Tyson is my god

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Thank you Lord Tyson for taking our minds off American Atheists’ horrible billboards, David Silverman’s poor TV performance, and Bill O’Reilly’s ICP-level stupidity.

Rebecca Watson has written a great response to the this failure of a billboard campaign by American Atheists as has Staks at Dangerous Talk. Of course I planted my flag first on criticizing this campaign a month ago here and here. The former earned me the title of “faithiest accommodater” by one commenter who apparently put on their crankypants that day.  Well, welcome fellow faithiest accommodaters who feel there’s a difference between blunt, unapologetic, but articulate intellectual criticisms of religion and just being an asshole who nobody’s going to want to hang out with.

As I said before, advertising isn’t about making arguments; it’s about selling a product. And if you want to sell a product like atheism in the month of December, you ought to be associating yourself with positive humanist values like good will towards your fellow human beings. That wins friends and influences people. Plus there’s that bonus of actually having helped people. Something I hear we atheists are all about and yet I see little of from the American Atheists.

And if you still REALLY want to get under the Religious Right’s skin, as one group of atheists learned this holiday season, you’re going about it all wrong.