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“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
That was the core message of the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain early in 2009.
Comedy writer Ariane Sherine, in partnership with Cambridge professor Richard Dawkins (currently the world’s highest profile atheist), plastered their slogan on the sides of 800 buses around the country. The campaign was a response to the seemingly never-ending advertising of various Christian groups and ministries.
If the consortium of atheists and humanists that funded the initiative hoped to get people talking, they definitely succeeded.
Most of the conversation centered on the word “probably.”
When you think about it, that’s a less-than-compelling way to make a statement about personal security.
That elevator cable will probably work. So stop worrying and enjoy your ride to the top floor. That mayonnaise-based potato salad was probably refrigerated appropriately. So stop worrying and enjoy your lunch.
Sherine admitted that “probably” was probably not the best word to use. But while people of faith cannot decisively prove God’s existence, she was conceding that atheists can’t utterly disprove it, either. “Probably” was also a way to comply with the British Advertising Standards Authority, which forbids advertisers from making untrue statements.
The more noteworthy issue, however, concerns the second phrase.
Since there’s probably no God, stop worrying and enjoy your life.
That’s fascinating.
The implication is that believing we are alone in the universe should bring a huge sigh of relief. There’s no God: Now I can stop feeling anxious and fearful. Why would that be true?
The answer is fairly clear: God is seen by a number of people as the enemy of happiness.
He is the Cosmic Killjoy – the grumpy deity who shouts, “Now don’t make me come down there!” He is the intrusive spy who knows all our secrets, watches us indulge our hidden addictions, and makes us feel guilty because of our messed-up lives.
What a wonderful thing to get him off our backs, and to get ourselves off the hook.
Dawkins memorably declared in his book The God Delusion that the supreme being of the Bible is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
OK, then.
The Atheist Bus Campaign revealed that a good many Brits (and others in Western cultures) have concluded that erasing God from our consciousness will give us a real shot at joy.
To which Christians can only respond, “Everything changes if we choose to see God the way Jesus saw him.”
According to Jesus, the God who is really there is not a celestial tyrant. God is a Father who desperately yearns to be reunited with his family. God is a Parent who knows everything about us yet isn’t turned off or turned away.
Author and speaker Vince Vitale once asked a student at a Chicago university if he thought God loved him.
“No,” the student responded. Why did he think that? “I’m a bad person. I do bad things. I think bad things. I have a bad personality.”
Vitale then asked the student, “If one day you have a child of your own, and your child begins to think and do bad things, would you stop loving him?” “No way,” replied the student. Vitale went on, “If God is a Father and you are his child, wouldn’t he continue to love you through both the good and the bad?”
The student’s eyes filled with tears. “Yes, I think that makes sense.”
It’s so strange that we think that God would probably under-perform compared to a human parent, instead of being the perfect parent we have always longed to know.
If Jesus accurately described the God who is really there, and if we choose to abandon ourselves to him, we really do have grounds to stop worrying and enjoy our lives.
There’s no “probably” about that.