Advertisements for an atheist organization will begin appearing on a dozen buses in metro Detroit Thursday as part of a month-long education and outreach campaign.

The exterior ads — they say “Don't believe in God? You are not alone” on a blue sky and cloud background — will be on Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation buses, said Ruthe Milan, coordinator for the Detroit Area Coalition of Reason.

“Reaching out to like-minded nonbelievers is the most important goal,” she said.

The group is part of the Washington D.C.-based United Coalition of Reason, which devotes itself to raising awareness about atheism and secular humanism, and has put up billboards and subway ads, similar to the bus campaign, in other large U.S. cities.

The local chapter, which describes itself as “made up of five area nontheistic (atheist and humanist) groups,” spent $5,600 provided by the national organization to buy the bus ads.

The group didn't approach the Detroit Department of Transportation because it wanted to reach a wider audience than just the city, Milan said.

The ads met the bus system's guidelines and were vetted by SMART's legal department, said Beth Dryden, the bus system's director of external affairs, marketing and communications.

Additionally, because the ads are what SMART considers “viewpoint-neutral content” the agency can't reject them, she said. That's because a government agency cannot censor such content, which is protected by the First Amendment..

“I'm very up front,” Milan said, adding that SMART told her the ads would be pulled only if there was significant public outcry against them.

“The point of this national campaign is to reach out to the millions of humanists, atheists and agnostics living in the United States,” Fred Edwords, national director of the United Coalition of Reason, said in a statement. “Nontheists sometimes don't realize there's a community out there for them because they're inundated with religious messages at every turn. So we hope this will serve as a beacon and let them know they aren't alone.”

Information about the campaign is at Detroitcor.org.

SMART, which has been seeking to raise revenue and cut costs amid a budget crunch, has a 0.59-mill property tax up for renewal on the August ballot in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. The tax provides the system's operating funding.

The system's 640 buses service 1,200 square miles of suburban Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties (54 routes, 7,000 stops), typically seeing more than 12 million riders annually. The system connects to Detroit's bus system.