Religion, Posters and Public Transport

You may have read about all the furore this month around the posters expressing doubt in the existence of God. They have been termed 'atheist' posters and the £140,000 campaign (€140,000; US$207,000) has been run by the Atheist Bus Campaign fronted by writer Ariane Sherine. It was lauched in June 2008. The campaign needed £6000 just for the advertisements in London but within two days of being launched donations had reached £87,000 and ultimately rose to £135,000 allowing the campaign to expand. It has inspired a parallel one in Washington DC in the USA where in November 2008, the slogan, 'Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake' appeared inside 230 buses. In the UK the posters will appear on 200 London buses, 600 buses across England, Wales and Scotland (interestingly not Northern Ireland with all its religious difficulties) and a further 1000 posters on the London Underground, I do not have the details, but I assume this is both walls and inside trains. This extended campaign has cost £140,000. The UK slogan is much more ambivalent, saying 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life'. I would argue that the 'probably' makes it agnostic rather than atheist and in contrast to the US version it seems to suggest replace a moral code enforced by a deity simply with hedonism. This is rather missing the point as it neglects to point out that atheist viewpoints such as Humanism do have a moral approach to life. In my experience, all the Humanists I have met have a much more caring attitude to humans as a whole than the bulk of Christians, Muslim and Jews, many of whom seem to want to categorise people and criticise and neglect, even oppress those in different categories to them, even when they follow the same religion.

The point of the campaign was to provide a balance to all those Biblical tracts and advertisements for various gurus that have appeared particularly on the London Underground for years. No-one complained about a whole slew of things some of which indicated that if you were not following the particular line they were promoting, eternal damnation awaited. I would have welcomed a more ardent atheist text saying something like 'Stop wasting your time reading the Bible/Torah/Koran it was written long after the events portrayed and in a way which helped promote the interests of the men who produced it. Instead go and do something to help real people in the 21st century.' Instead we have a very British, very tepid approach, which in the words of Theos a UK 'religious think tank' which told 'The Guardian' newspapr that '[t]he posters will encourage people to consider the most important question we will ever face in our lives. The slogan itself is a great discussion starter. Telling someone 'there's probably no God' is a bit like telling them they've probably remembered to lock their door. It creates the doubt that they might not have.' I just had to laugh at this phrase: 'a bit like telling them they've probably remembered to lock their door'. People are dying around the World over issues of God, it is not like leaving your door unlocked. Religious warfare is alive and well in this century, just ask Christians in Iraq or Iran or atheists facing prejudice in the USA or non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia, let alone anyone who lived under the Taliban or lived in Northern Ireland at any time, especially since 1969.

Now a bus driver in Southampton has baulked at driving a bus with one of these posters on it. Given that millions of us have had to travel on public transport for years with religious slogans all over the place this is rather rich. However, it does expose the fact that though Britain (i.e. the UK outside Northern Ireland) is ambivalent to religion there is a tough resistant prejudice that actually we are all guided by Christianity are we not? This is the worst form of religion in the UK. Most of the followers of what you might term 'society Christianity' are not that moral. They are in fact usually self-righteous, very selfish and intolerant certainly to difference. They do not really follow Christianity's morals and yet use it for disapproval and to beat others they feel are 'different' or they simply do not like the look of. This is the state religion in the UK today, far more than people who actually attend church. They pick and choose among the elements of religion to give themselves a social control tool. For these people who number in their millions in the UK I suggest a poster 'you say you're a Christian, well, behave like one then!'. The Advertising Standards Authority has received 232 complaints about the atheist posters and to some degree these people are just being indignant for the sake of it. I am glad we have not had the avalanche of indignation that seemed to be a fashion at the end of last year. The posters are so bland that there is little to take offence at and it is irritating that some people are unwilling to give a centimetre, to even allow any challenge to their way of thinking even if they only pay lip service to what they say is their 'faith'.

The bus driver in question, Ron Heather, I accept is probably a genuine Christian, but he wants to police what his passengers are exposed to and that is not acceptable. It is pathetic that he says that many of his passengers are over 90 and/or ill and it is bad to suggest to them that there might not be any God. This is a terribly patronising view of the elderly, most of whom, I imagine will have made their minds up long ago about what awaits them after death. They might welcome some stimulus to discussion at the bus stop or to provoke them to think something different. The elderly do not need anyone to silo them into what is seen as nice, comfortable pathways. Heather totally neglects the fact that many thinking of being judged by God will worry that they have not lived good enough lives and may have such fears alleviated by thinking they will simply dissolve back into atoms and become part of the World. We need to challenge those who think they are 'good' but their definition is that they are because they can shop for their family and charge around in their 4x4 with little concern for anything beyond their own desire.

I welcome having some theological/philosophical debate on our public transport. I think the Atheist Bus Campaign has missed an opportunity to really create this and instead have ended up with a tepid British approach to these things. I look forward to more ardent slogans on buses I see, ones I hope will challenge people to actually live a moral life, one that concerns itself with the welfare of all of our fellow humans.

Britain - The Land That Time Forgot 2: Buses

Last year I did a posting about how obsessed the British were with the past and how we seemed to only be able to derive pride from things that were very dated like pre-decimal currency and I did another similar posting about imperial measurement. Well, all of this stuff seems to be going on but I was alerted this week to a new and more vigorous example of this obsession. When the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson, a real buffoon who has a made a career in the media of appearing like a real-life version of the 'Tim Nice-but-Dim' character of the comedian Harry Enfield, was elected to be the Mayor of London, he said he would reintroduce the Routemaster bus to London by 2012 and remove the so-called 'bendy bus' by 2015. The Routemaster double-decker bus was produced 1954-1968 and used in London from 1956 onwards up until present day, though they were phased out actively from 2005 onwards. This means that the Routemaster is not a pre-Second World War bus as many people assume. In fact its predecessors were Leyland Titan, in service 1938-9 and the AEC Regent III RT produced from 1942 onwards and used in London primarily 1947-54, though the last RT ran until 1979. They are often mistaken for the Routemaster.

None of these old buses, including the Routemaster was designed for an era in which we are concerned about disabled access. Its aisles are very narrow as is the staircase to the upper deck and it is high off the ground so is difficult for children and the elderly to access let alone anyone in a wheelchair. The Routemaster is open at the back, it cannot be closed against the weather and it allows people to jump on and off while the bus is moving causing on average 10 serious accidents per year and also making fare evasion easier. Every day 1000 wheelchair users travel on buses in London. This is compared to 6 million users in total, but it suggests on average there are 1-2 wheelchair users on every London bus route every day. Obviously this does not take into account the many more pushchair users or the numeous elderly people using the three-wheeled push along supports or people with other mobility difficulties or even luggage to get on board who welcome the low-level floors and ease of access of modern buses. This is why there are only 18 routemasters running compared to 5,197 modern double-deckers and 389 'bendy', i.e. two compartment buses in London, A bendy bus can hold 149 people compared to 90 on a modern double-decker and only 69 on a Routemaster.

People complain that there are fewer seats than on a Routemaster, but have they actually tried to sit in the seats. I am 6'0" tall (1.86m) which is about average height for a man in the UK now. I cannot sit on most Routemaster seats because my knees are jammed so hard into the seat in front, so I have to turn them to one side so I take up two slots or I have to stand anyway. Routemasters are more expensive to run than modern buses. People complain that they are safer on a Routemaster because of the conductor. Well, I know modern buses do not have conductors, but there is no reason why you cannot put one on or have a 'guard' if it makes people safer. I have travelled often on the Docklands Light Railway which is totally automated. There is no driver and all the tickets are bought from machines, and yet often, especially at night, they have a guard to make people feel safer. The structure of a bus does not determine who you put on it. If you wanted to, there is no reason why you could not have four armed guards on every bus. We do not have conductors on underground trains and yet people pack on to those.

You can see how successful modern design buses are if you note that bus passenger numbers are rising faster than at any time since 1946, they carry more people now than at any time since 1968 (when the Routemaster was dominant) and they cover more distance than at any time since 1957. Why is that? It is because they are clean and safe and easy to get on and off.

What is hilarious is that there are more complaints about the abolition of Routemasters online than there are people complaining about inflation. As I have noted before the British will always sacrifice comfort and efficiency for some perverse sense of nostalgia, that it is somehow better to be jammed on to a draughty bus that fills up quickly because it looks 'right' than to be on a modern efficient, safer service that their granny can get on without difficulty. Its removal is not portrayed as a step forward but, and I quote, 'an act of cultural vandalism'. No-one says every Routemaster must be destroyed but there is a difference between things you see in a museum and what you need to get to work or the shops in the morning. It is the same with the old red telephone boxes. They may have looked good but you had to be a weight-lifter to get the door open, not a child or an elderly or even just an average middle-aged person.

Johnson is clever, he knows how masochistic the vocal British public is, in its desire to live in some fantastical golden past that costs more and works less efficiently. His policies pander to that. It is ironic that most of the people who want the Routemaster back do not travel daily by bus in London. It is no different to saying that we should replace modern airliners with the aircraft you might see at a historic airshow or that the British Army should return to scarlet jackets and muskets because we won more battles with that equipment. Nostalgia has its place but not in informing the best approach for tackling the challenges of day-to-day life in 2008 Britain.