Billboard asking people to skip church on Christmas stirs controversy

According to the organization, billboards they put up previous year featured a child writing a letter to Santa, telling him that all she wanted for Christmas was to skip church.

American Atheists” holiday billboards promotes being “Good for Goodness Sake’ in the Winston-Salem, North Carolina area and in Colorado Springs, Colorado, going up in December 2015. “Giving gifts, spending time with family, spending time with loved ones, those are all fantastic things that don’t have anything to do with religion”, he said.

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American Atheists plans to run the billboards in several Colorado and SC communities in the coming weeks leading up to Christmas.

“One person in Colorado noted the message, “…can be insulting to those who are religious and do celebrate it for Christianity and religion in general”. “They see standard issue Christian messaging, and they can feel very lonely, very alone”. “We’re trying to make it easier to make people open and honest about what they believe”.

A number of atheists still go to church, however. They continue to go [to church] because of strong cultural ties.

With the churches we seem to have around here, the new @AmericanAtheist billboard is good advice for Christians too.

Damara Metrick wasn’t necessarily offended, but she did think the atheists could have made their point a little less provacatively.

The American Atheists insist the signs aren’t an attack on Christmas.

“It is beyond disrespectful to my community and disrespectful to my beliefs”, said a local resident. Another, a temperature-based rating system from Pew that measured how Americans felt about different faith groups found that Americans have the “coldest” feelings for atheists and Muslims. “That’s not inherently religious”, said Gotovich.

The billboard is a follow-up to last year’s controversial ad where a little girl asked to skip church. “We know there will be controversy”.

It’s that time of year again. “Happy Holidays.” It has been paid for by American Atheists. “I am an agnostic”.