It's been put there by American Atheists. As much as I'd love to see a public campaign to de-stigmatize atheism, I'm not sure that we should be putting up billboards with slogans of this sort. Here's why. Imagine there's a country where an overwhelming majority of people are Christian but there is also a small Muslim minority. The Muslim minority is distrusted, discriminated against, and overall held in passionate contempt by most of the Christians, so some Muslim activists decide a billboard campaign could help their cause. After a brief debate, they decide on a slogan: Look, Jesus is not God, just one of His prophets. And a minor one at that.Would that be a good slogan, from the point of view of advancing the cause of ending anti-Muslim discrimination? I think it definitely would not be, and I also think the I-495 atheism slogan is basically just like that. The reason it's a bad slogan is not that it's offensive to religious people; I don't care about hurting their feelings. The reason it's a bad slogan is because it's trying to argue the veracity of religious claims. That's not a bad thing in itself; religions are, after all, false, and there's no harm in trying to argue that point--so long as it's done in forums that are explicitly dedicated to debating the truth-values of metaphysical claims. A public campaign against anti-atheist bigotry, however, just isn't about whether or not religions are true. It's about extending the existing norms governing day-to-day interactions in a society inhabited by people of different religious beliefs on atheists as well.
People of different religions, at least in the US, have succeeded in agreeing on such rudimentary norms. The gist of this agreement is: Inasmuch as it's possible, we live by the moral code provided by our religion, and if there's a conflict between different religious codes that needs to be resolved in order for society to function, we will try to work out a solution that does not make any assumptions as to which of the conflicted religions is fundamentally right. In a way, it's an agreement to disagree; but note that it's not an agreement to never talk about the disagreements. It's not a "don't ask don't tell" policy. If someone wants to proselytize, they can. But the agreement is that they can only do so on their own behalf, as private persons. In public sphere, trying to convert someone is seen as, at the very least, bad form, and this social norm is a great achievement. Us atheists should conform to it as well.
This doesn't mean I think billboards are a bad idea. For example, NYC Atheists (which is a New York City chapter of American Atheists) has just launched a bus ad campaign featuring the following slogan:
This is exactly what public debate needs. The problem that needs immediate fixing isn't that most people believe there's a God when in reality there isn't one; it's that most religious people seem to be convinced that atheists cannot be moral. From the point of view of efficient and fair functioning of basic social institutions, it doesn't matter if people do or do not believe in God. It does, however, matter if people believe that having certain metaphysical beliefs completely disqualifies someone as a moral person. As a matter of empirics, what God you do or do not believe in has little bearing on your moral character. If, however, you believe that atheists cannot be moral people, you very likely are a hateful person, and society should evolve a norm that would make expressing such beliefs extremely embarrassing for you, just as it has made it embarrassing to admit that you think Jews use human blood to bake Matzah. Such norms of social punishment are necessary not because they extinguish beliefs based on hatred; that is probably not possible in the short run; but because they, at the very least, make it extremely hard to act on those beliefs in an organized manner. Which, when allowed to happen, inevitably leads to lots of gratuitous human suffering.
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