The People Who Hate Me are Making Me Rich

Pennies from heaven?

The people who hate me are making me rich. 

OK, not exactly the people who hate me.  It’s the people who hate my ideas who are making me rich. 

OK, not exactly making me rich. I’m still only earning pennies per day from my web essays. But it did go up to 49 cents one day which is way better than the 10 to 20 cents a day I usually get.  

I wrote an article called “The Billboard Wars: Good without God.” It was based on a presentation that Fred Edwords, National Director of the United Coalition of Reason (www.UnitedCoR.org). He gave the presentation at the FreeFlo Humanist Conference in Orlando in October 2014. 

 

 

Fred gave me permission to adapt his presentation for the web. I carefully edited to create an objective piece of reporting.  I explained how some free-thought groups started putting up billboards and ads on the sides of buses. Most of the ads were promoting the idea that people can be good without God.  

These ads got some Christian groups so incensed that they put up counter ads. This brought lots of publicity to the atheist ad campaign. The publicity brought in lots of new members and donations to the atheist groups. Ironically, it was the people who hated them who made them successful.   

I write for HubPages and HubPages encourages their writers to comment on each others’ work (hubs). When someone comments, everyone who “follows” that person will see their comment.  One person got really nasty.  At first I was upset. Then I realized he was giving my hub a lot of publicity within the HubPages community.  The more he ranted, the more views I got and the more money I made. 

 

Some of my other hubs generated a little bit of controversy, but not enough to make a real difference. Check out What is Secular Humanism? and Thou Shall Not Kill: The Morality of the Death Penalty. 

Additionally, these two hubs were a little bit shocking to a few. Right Livelihood: The Quest for Ethical Work and An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism. 

So if you hate me, maybe you’ll do a comment on facebook and google+.  Better yet, if you love what I have written, please like and comment. Or you could link to these articles on your own websites. (These links are like manna from heaven.)