The Freedom from Religion Foundation has a fast, neat little application to make your own atheist billboard. Mine's above and you can see more of them here. I learned about it from radio-show host Mike Haubrich.
When thinking about a quote, I thought about how a lot of people will possibly reference science or morality for these quotes (you can see them all here). As an artist and an atheist, I thought I would try to sum-up some of the feelings I wrote about it in this post two years ago: Gift from God? I don't think so.
In the post, addressing the 'compliment' of artistic ability being a 'gift', I said;
Just because something is hard to understand, just because complicated processes occurred that you did not witness, does not mean it was caused by a benevolent mythical being who hands out aptitudes like Santa with presents...
...That was studying. That was attempts at keen observation. That was making countless mistakes I attempted to learn from. Feedback. Crits and criticisms. Learning from indifference. Trying new materials. Replicating happy accidents. Sharing techniques.
I received a lot of support in the comments. When I re-posted it at my RedBubble (online store) account, I ended up with concern trolls.
Far too many artists believe in the divine - probably more in New Age nonsense than organized religion, though there are plenty of those types too. "Meant to be" is the cause of many happy accidents to many artists, when in fact, happy accidents have a lot more in common with Richard Dawkins' ratcheting up Mount Improbable: you hang on to the successes, duplicate them as close as you can and eliminate the artistic attempts that fail in your eyes. Developing a skill, technique and style in art has a lot in common with natural selection.
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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
