For Zeus's sake..

A Humanist campaign designed for the upcoming UK census featured the above wording on a poster, the company that owns the advertising space has prevented this organisation from using these words because of hypothetical "offence" that it might cause. Presumably this company are concerned about offence to people that believe in "God", although which particular "God" is unclear, the fact that this is a very common expression of speech in the UK seems to have been ignored in favour of a more literal reading. Clearly the words were chosen for effect, why would you have an advertising campaign that didn't draw attention? Surely this is reasonable, the word "God" appears all over our language it is part of our culture for example, oh my God, good God man, goodbye (short for "Godbwye" or  in modern English God be with you) etc. is this company seriously suggesting that people would be offended by having the word "goodbye" on a poster?

The campaign is a serious campaign, it makes the point if someone isn't really religious then they should say so rather than simply checking the "Christian" box because that's what they've always done. Failure to correctly assess the proportion of religious and non-religious people in the country will skew the practical outcomes of the census in areas such as law-making and government resource allocation, particularly around sensitive issues such as government funded faith schools, science policy, social policy and sexual/gender equality legislation.

Being a skeptic and a geek I find that most advertising offends me for one reason or another, but I don't feel the urge to deny others their freedom of speech or their delusions so long as no one is harmed; at the end of the day I assess things based on evidence and fully expect to be offended some of the time. Sticks and stones etc. in any case I get over the offence pretty quickly if not instantly. So this banning is IMO utterly pathetic and shows the lengths faith based lobby groups will go to in order to prop up their superstitions with a blunt stick rather than evidence, reason or argument.