An interesting article appeared on CNN.com the other day. To sum up, a group of atheists in Olympia, Washington, put up a plaque next to a nativity scene with the following text:

At this season of THE WINTER SOLSTICE may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

As you’d expect, the Christian community is going absolutely bugshit over this, and someone even stole the sign! (It was later found in a ditch, and returned.) While I firmly support the atheists’ right to free speech, and agree that the Christian aspects of Christmas have been overblown over the past decade or so, it’s the way in which the atheists went about stating their piece that I’m not keen on.

If you want to change people’s minds, that’s fine. But the group worded their plaque in a rather rotten manner, and that’s only going to piss people off, not encourage intelligent discourse. A humanist group in Washington, D.C. ran a bus ad campaign that simply said “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” That one’s far more agreeable. It doesn’t single out any particular religious belief or deity, nor does it shit on anyone if they do believe. It just calls on all of us to be decent human beings for a change, and that’s something humanity desperately needs, no matter what season it is.

People in the United States have a very unfavorable view of atheists and agnostics, and that view is largely driven by the evangelical Christian community. Atheists and agnostics are routinely painted by religious groups as evil, horrible people. While this clearly isn’t true a vast majority of the time, plaques like the one placed in Olympia do nothing but reinforce the negative stereotype. Cut the shit; there’s much more polite ways to get your point across, without sinking the same level of negativity as your adversaries.