Last week, some students at the University of Texas at San Antonio ran their now-annual “Smut for Smut” campaign. The deal is that holy books could be exchanged for hard-core pornography.
<you can insert your “???” comment here>
Is this a joke? Nope, it is a real offer, so what is this all about?
The goal here is for the Atheist Agenda student group to make a bold statement, a sort of shock-jock approach – they describe it like this …
“The point is not to hand out porn, but rather the primary purpose is to get people to come talk to us so we can get our message out,” Kyle Bush, the group’s president, said. “We want to spread atheism and bring it more to the spotlight. We offer another alternative to people who might not fit in anywhere else.”
Some non-believers have criticised them for doing this and suggest that “it invites a lot of negative publicity — and not in the any-coverage-is-good-coverage sort of way“.
For the public high-street, this perhaps would indeed be a bad idea, but the context here is a college campus, I feel comfortable with it in that context. Satire and humor is always a great way to reach people, and I suspect that apart from the bible fanatics, most of their audience gets it.
“Oh but they are pushing porn”
No actually they are not, this is more akin to a bait and switch tactic. “Want some free porn? Surprise! Let’s chat”, so quite obviously this is not about porn.
“Oh but it is really offensive to believers”
These days almost anything at all that is not “them” is. Even the word “Atheist” all by itself is apparently offensive … quite literally … billboards with just that one word and nothing else on it have offended these nutters, so a stance in which you don’t offend is only viable if you choose to remain gagged and invisible. No matter what you do, people will be offended, and that’s fine, because individuals have no right to not be offended by factually based valid and reasoned criticism.
If you would like to get an idea of what actually went down on the day … well, here is a YouTube clip …
Now did you perhaps notice that all the discussion there was all about religion, not porn.
A few final thoughts .. anyone who thinks porn and the Bible are incompatible obviously hasn’t read the Song of Solomon, and as for the thought that the bible is a good book, well you need to also remember that it touts genocide, rape, Misogyny, and slavery as rather good ideas.