Feeling a little threatened?

A bus driver in Southampton, Great Britain, refused to get on the bus he was supposed to drive...because it offended him.

A Christian bus driver has refused to drive a bus with an atheist slogan proclaiming "There's probably no God".

Ron Heather, from Southampton, Hampshire, responded with "shock" and "horror" at the message and walked out of his shift on Saturday in protest

The slogan in question is from the British Humanist Association's recent ad campaign promoting atheism. The full text of the ad is "There's probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

OH THE HORROR!

Mr Heather told BBC Radio Solent: "I was just about to board and there it was staring me in the face, my first reaction was shock horror.

"I felt that I could not drive that bus, I told my managers and they said they haven't got another one and I thought I better go home, so I did.

"I think it was the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God."

So, apparently, just the idea or mere suggestion that there is no God is so overwhelming that this guy refused to do his job in protest? Seriously, he even admits that the sign is just a freakin' implication. How on earth can that be stark and shocking?

Bizarrely, Gerald Warner, a blogger for the Telegraph, used this story as a springboard for a disturbing and insane non-sequitur: how atheism needs "martyrs" before it can be considered legitimate:

One further observation by Ron Heather will strike a chord with many: "There would be no way buses would be able to drive around with an anti-Muslim message like that on the side mentioning Allah." Christians have two millennia of martyrdom behind them. If atheists want to crusade and play with the big boys, are their convictions strong enough to brave a fatwah? Answers on the side of a bus...

Wait, what? An advertising campaign on some buses is now considered a "crusade"? The rest of the article is the usual steamingly smug pile of ignorance ("Oh, it says 'probably', that doesn't seem very atheistic to me! BTW atheism=nihilism kthxbai"), but I found it really odd that the title of the article and the last paragraph somehow connect this bus campaign with martyrdom. It's almost like Warner had a knee-jerk spasm of crazy, and then decided to try and mold it into and article resembling coherent thought.

Seriously - the title and last paragraph have nothing to do with the meat of the article. WTF.

Anyway, it's interesting that so many people automatically assume that any expression of atheism is also an attack or criticism of Christianity; notice how Heather and Warner jump on the slogan as anti-Christian and leap to the implication that violence should be the response.

I just don't understand these people.