This Bus is an Athiest, Because It’s Angry at God

[Note: Postings have been light lately, because I’m putting in long hours at work. I hope things calm down later this week. In the meantime, here’s a quickie about a bus that worships Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins.]

Ron Heather and the bus that thinks the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

I found an amusing title while browsing the blogs at OneNewsNow. It’s “Bus Driver Refuses to Drive Atheist Bus”. I knew that this provocative title could only mean one of two things: (1) That a bus had achieved sentience and was already more intellectually sophisticated than the average fundie (can cylons be far behind?), or (2) that some fundie hack writer doesn’t know how to construct a sentence that doesn’t give the wrong impression.

I’m going with number two here. The article appears to be by somebody named Tasha Easterling, who writes:

A couple of months ago I blogged about the controversial atheistic ad campaign in Britain which state ‘There’s probably no God – Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Now a bus driver in Southampton who is a committed Christian is refusing to drive buses which contain these ads. Ron Heather’s bus company, First Buses, have put the ads on 20 of their buses, and Heather went on strike for three days to protest the ad campaign.

I don’t know what the level of atheism is over in Britain, but I’m sure it is way higher than our five or ten percent. Let’s just say it’s 20%. That means there is a fair number of atheists employed as bus drivers. Buses carry religious advertising all the time. Have any atheists ever refused to drive such a bus? I’ve certainly never heard of one.

So what we have here is yet another example of Christians professing to be tolerant, yet being far more intolerant than non-believers.

Heather says: “I felt that I could not drive that bus, I told my managers and when they said they had not got another one I thought I better go home, so I did. “I think it was the starkness of the advert that implied there was no God.”

It does more than imply. It stops just short of saying it’s a certainty.

Heather was called into a meeting with the managers of his company, and he agreed to work provided they would ensure that he would only have to drive a bus containing the atheist ad if no other buses were available. A First spokeswoman said: “As a company we understand Mr Heather’s views regarding this atheist bus advert and we are doing what we can to accommodate his request not to drive the bus concerned. Mr Heather accepts though that he may need to drive one of these buses if no other vehicle is available for him.”

It sounds like it’s working out the best it can for all concerned. Heather keeps his job, and the bus company keeps the ads and doesn’t have to hire a new driver. I have no problem with a company trying to make a reasonable accommodation for an employee’s beliefs, but what if those beliefs are unreasonable?

The other way to look at it, though, is what would the fundies think if it were a Muslim driver who refused to drive a bus with Christianity, pork, or alcohol ads? Fundies and other conservatives got into a hissy when Tyson Foods let their employees trade Labor Day for a Muslim holiday.