Yeah, NYC atheists!

From the NYT:

For the city’s organized atheists — here’s hoping that doesn’t sound oxymoronic — the rotten economy would seem in one respect to be Heaven-sent.

“You got it,” Kenneth Bronstein said. Mr. Bronstein is president of New York City Atheists, whose name should be self-explanatory.

For the last month, his group has run 12-foot-long advertisements on the sides of city buses in Manhattan. You may have seen them, though perhaps not.New York City Transit has 981 buses assigned to Manhattan, and the atheists could afford ads on only about two dozen.

The message, in white lettering on a sky-blue background, is nonconfrontational by design. It doesn’t attack religion or say there is no God. It simply says: “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person.” Hard to gainsay that thought. Most of us know nonbelievers who are pillars of rectitude. We also know pious types who are as honest as a Siberian winter’s day is long.

Mr. Bronstein said that the ad campaign, scheduled to end this weekend, was a resounding success that prompted donations and requests to join his organization. “We don’t announce our numbers,” he said, “but we say we have hundreds of paid members.”

Religious people have contacted him to say they agree with the message, he said. More meaningful to him are calls from fellow nonbelievers. “Many, many atheists were so proud that we finally put a sign up,” he said. “We announced to the world that we’re around. We’re here.”

In some respects the strategy echoes that of the gay-rights movement, by persuading once-closeted people to come out. Polls show that atheists’ numbers are growing around the country. “I got phone calls from people who said, ‘I’ve been an atheist all my life, and I was afraid to tell anybody,’ ” Mr. Bronstein said. Because of the ads, he said, those people now feel, “Hey, there are others of us out there, and I’m proud to be an atheist.”

To get back to the point raised earlier, the poor economy has been something of a blessing for the nonbelievers. “We probably could not have gotten this poster program in New York City if the financial times were very good,” said Mr. Bronstein, who is 70 and retired from I.B.M. “But people are looking for business.”