Atheist Susan Jacoby makes an excellent point about the Atheist billboard at the Lincoln Tunnel:
What this billboard really represents is a scramble for power (petty power, to be sure) within the secular community.The warfare exists within organizations as well as between them: it is basically an argument between "confrontationalists"–people who favor the in-your-face approach on both a personal and political level–and "accomodationists," who are in the business of forming alliances, for purposes of furthering specific political and legislative goals, with moderate religious believers. . . .
. . . a billboard doesn’t seem to me the most effective way to shake anyone else’s faith. I grew up in a place and time with "Jesus Saves" billboards on the shoulder of every highway, and they didn’t turn me into a believer. Given that the secular community has nothing like the vast financial sources available to organized religion, I don’t see the point of spending big bucks to reduce atheism to a slogan. Whether the billboard is really meant to push atheists out of the closet or to rile up devout religious believers, the cost-benefit ration just doesn’t seem, well, reasonable.
Read the full article. It is quite informative and sheds a lot of light on the New Atheism: The Spirited Atheist: Selling atheism with billboards – On Faith at washingtonpost.com