— — Billboards are not necessarily the best way to get a point across (witness one that sat for months on the northbound I-190 just south of Tonawanda’s G.M. Powertrain plant, advising motorists that psychotherapy is a fraud. Bet you never even noticed it), but we’re about to see an interesting one. The national and Amherst-based Center for Inquiry, an organization whose mission “is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry and humanistic values,” is about to install a billboard on the Thruway, near Niagara Falls Boulevard, advocating the virtues of life without a relationship with God.

The center’s “Living Without Religion” campaign has come and gone in a number of American cities — Washington, Indianapolis, Houston, Portland, Ore., but not Knoxville, Tenn., where the billboard installation company declined it on the grounds it would be “offensive to a large percentage” of residents (these quotes come from a center press release). Our billboard will read “You don’t need God — to hope, to care, to love, to live,” aside a photograph of what appears to be a happy, loving dad-mom-kid family.

So we’ll soon have an advertisement suggesting we consider living without God. Bravo, sez I.

I have the good fortune to have friendships, many of them and many of long standing, with people who have absolutely no idea how I feel about religion or God, and they possess the same lack of knowledge about me. I don’t ask, they don’t tell, largely because it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because they likely understand my attitude about belief is my business, not theirs. Knowing a friend is a Presbyterian or a Catholic or a Muslim tells me little about him or her, except possibly the name of a preferred church or mosque. The hate-filled or sinful are equally welcome in whatever house of worship he or she chooses to patronize as those who consider themselves on a righteous path.

Never mind what I am, or what I’m not. The world is full of good people of many persuasions, including the one that thinks there is no God, and I’m pleased to see that minority is getting its message out.

There is a trend in motion here, not one that turns the faithful into non-believers, but more one of coming out of the closet on the topic of faith; those who profess there is no God (the archaic term is “freethinker,” which goes back to 17th century England and favors reason over dogma) are publicly professing it without much blowback. A post 9/11 movement of sorts has sprung up to include people convinced religion in the 21st century is more divisive than inclusive. Books on the topic by authors as varied as (in descending order of intellectual rigor) Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Penn Jillette hit best-seller lists and reinforce the point.

Even President Obama noted it in his inaugural address: “For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness.  We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.”

He couldn’t think of a way to identify that last group by what they are, as opposed to what they’re not, but there you are. Those who do not rely on a god for guidance are shopping in supermarkets, worrying about their country’s future, fixing your plumbing, defending your land, educating your children and their own, and living perfectly valid lives, in peace with those who do. Take that, Rick Perry.

I suspect our Northtowns billboard, scheduled to rise on Sept. 12 and remain overhead for four weeks, will cause some controversy but not much. The television news crews will interview a few local religious leaders, who likely will disagree with the message but otherwise be cool about it. Then they’ll shop around until they find one who is apoplectic with rage over it. Then we’ll all go back to what we’re doing, except for those in whom a seed will be planted: Maybe it’s okay to be something other than a believer in God.

It would be hard to quantify, but I suspect that for every person you know whose life (or lifestyle) was saved by a newfound relationship with a god, there’s another who remembers the day he or she stopped believing as the day the mind got clearer, the sky got bluer, the grass got greener and the beer got colder. You make your own choices in this world, and pick your own poison; mine is for me to decide.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.