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Are you secular? Humanist? Even (gasp!) atheist? Or are you any one of the thousands of other non-Christian religions peppering the planet? And yet, do you celebrate Christmas every year, reveling during the moment, but feeling shamed and guilty on Boxing Day?

Then do so no longer. It’s OK to be non-Christian and celebrate Christmas. And for proof, you can read the 42 essays comprising the book The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, edited by Ariane Sherine (Amazon UK and Amazon US).

Yes, that Ariane Sherine, the one who created the Atheist Bus Campaign in the UK. Ariane is a humor writer and a journalist, and is also a genuinely wonderful human being who is upset by the way nonbelievers are portrayed in the media, and decided to do something about it. The bus campaign was her first organized effort, and this book is the second.

She found 45 comedians, scientists, philosophers, story tellers, and artists — all of whom find the stories associated with Christmas to be, well stories — and asked them to write a short essay about what the holiday means to them. The result is a collection of funny, warm, and interesting journeys into the mostly secular festivities of the world’s most maligned demographic.

I’ll note that one essay in the book — Starry Starry Night — was written by none other than myself. I was flattered and honored that Ariane would ask me to write for the book, where my musings would sit along side those of Richard Dawkins, Derren Brown, Simon Le Bon (yes, from Duran Duran!), my friend Brian Cox, and many others.

None of us who wrote for the book were paid in any way (well, I got a free copy). All of us who contributed donated all proceeds to the UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, a secular group that provides information, advice, and support for HIV positive people in the UK. It’s a very good cause, and one that fits the reason for the season, don’t you think?

The history of the book is pretty interesting, too, and Ariane has been blogging about how she got this project started; Part 1 is here and the other parts are linked in her sidebar. She is a funny and warm writer, busting a lot of stereotypes about atheists as the spawn of Satan. After all, just look at this picture of these two notorious examples:

Doesn’t Ariane just radiate evil?

Go buy this book. Give a copy for Christmas, or just get one for yourself. You’ll be helping a good cause, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find out that Christmas really is for everyone.

QualiaSoup, known for high-quality logical videos, has another fascinating look at belief versus evidence:

As I have said on this blog and IRL many times, if people want to believe whatever they want, it’s up to them. We have freedom from and of religion in the United States. But if they want to convince me they’ll have to do a lot more than give me anecdotes or non-scientifically based evidence. And if they want to affect politics and legislation, then they’d better sit down with the Constitution and give it a good read.

Remember Anna Falling, who ran for mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, under the platform that there just plain ol’ wasn’t enough religion in government?

Yeah, she got 10% of the primary vote, way behind her competitors. I don’t know much at all about her competitors, but I have to think that running on the single plank she did, with hardly anything else to go on, couldn’t have helped.

On the other hand, one out of ten Tulsans voted for her. Think on that.

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Hemant over at Friendly Atheist.

On this day, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, it’s common for people to look back at what they were doing at that time, how they were involved, what they were thinking. It’s human nature to look back on big anniversaries, both happy and otherwise, and recollect.

It’s also natural to seek meaning in such acts, try to make sense of them, fit them into our view of how the world works and how it should work. Sometimes the pieces fit. Sometimes they don’t.

Today I saw once again a picture that’s been floating around the web for a few years now. It shows the Twin Towers, and the caption reads, "Science flies people to the Moon. Religion flies people into buildings." It’s an interesting quotation. It’ll guarantee enraging religious folks, while self-satisfying people who are antireligious.

But is it accurate? After all, it was science that created the airplanes, science that built those buildings, science that developed the technology to bring the two together at high velocity. You might then say yes, but religion was the pilot; it was the fundamentalist jihadic brand of Islam that guided those men to do what they did.

And I say, yes. Exactly. In this case, both science and religion were tools, used for nefarious ends.

Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality.

Religion, to those who are religious, is similar in that they believe it is a way of making sense of the world. It is of course entirely different than science in its methodology, but it holds no less thrall over the way people see reality. To someone who is very religious, there is no other way to perceive life.

In that sense, religion and science are different because to a scientist science is a tool used to help understand the world, but to the religious religion is the way to see the world.

However, religion can be a tool as well. It was used to brainwash 19 young men, to convince them to do something that countless generations of evolution have almost completely bred out of our systems: commit suicide. With fantasies of an afterlife and admonitions of the greater good, those men flew multiton jets into buildings, and changed our lives forever.

But it’s not hard to imagine things being a little different. Had those men not been subjected to that fringe religion, had they instead grown up in a more open environment, exposed to things like diversity, open-mindedness to other people’s ways of life, and the realization that they may be wrong and that all knowledge is tentative… we might not be spending this day in remembrance.

Still. They were immersed in their beliefs, told what to think, how to think. In this case, religion was a tool for abuse.

It’s not difficult to create a list of both good and bad things both science and religion have brought us. Such lists have been debated and used as bludgeons for years, so I won’t belabor them here. The point is, as tools, science and religion are neither good nor evil. They can be used either way.

Note that I am not saying any particular religion is right, or even that any of them accurately portrays the Universe for what it is — it should be clear by now I don’t think that at all. As a tool to seek truth in the Universe, I don’t think religion works very well. But as a framework for many people, and as tool to inspire them, its motivational abilities are without question. For good or for ill.

I’m not necessarily trying to make any grand point here. All I’m doing is making an aside, if you will, a mumbled comment amidst all the rhetoric that will no doubt fly today about moderate versus fundamentalist religion, about atheism versus religion, about us versus them, and this versus that.

In the hand of a carpenter a hammer can build a house, and in the hand of a madman it can stave in a skull.

Which will you be today?

Several people sent me a link to a short and pretty little video showing two cycles in the sky: the Earth’s rotation, and that of Jupiter.

Nicely done! I was surprised to see the video was made by Thunderf00t, whom I didn’t know was an astronomer. Thunderf00t is well-known on YouTube for his great "Why People Laugh at Creationists" series, showing in very basic terms why creationists are laughably wrong. Well, it would be laughable if they weren’t trying to brainwash entire generations of schoolkids, but that’s another story.

I hope in between fighting for science he makes more astronomy videos like this one. It’s very cool.

My colleagues and fellow Hive Overmind bloggers Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer have written lengthy essays on why they will no longer participate on BloggingHeads.tv, a video interview site.

Sean and Carl are fine writers, and they wanted to be careful when they make their point; thus the longish essays.

But I’ll be more succinct. Bloggingheads had full-blown creationists being interviewed, making all the same long-debunked claims while the other person talking basically supported them. And BloggingHeads called that science.

So Bzzzzzzzt! I’m done with them. I was on BloggingHeads (with Carl) a few months ago, and I won’t ever do it again either. If they want to cast creationism as science, they might as well say Holocaust denial is real history, 9/11 truthers are engineers, and Birthers are patriots. They can do that, but it’s a crock.

Folks, the debate is over, and has been for decades: creationism is wrong, and provably so. And it’s certainly not science. Portraying it as such is either breathtaking ignorance, or a lie. Sorry, BHTV, but creationism is the shark, and you’re Fonzie.

Via Orac comes this tale of religious kneejerking that shows just how big a problem it is in America.

I urge you to read the whole thing, but the basic story is a band made t-shirts with the theme "Brass Evolutions" using the famous cartoon sequence of a monkey changing into a man. It’s a cute idea, and no big deal, right?

Right?

Not so right. Some parents complained about the shirts because they depicted — gasp!– evolution (never mind that it’s a cartoony version that’s really not even terribly accurate). Assistant Superintendent Brad Pollitt decided to make the students turn in their shirts so as to not offend any parents’ sensibilities.

The sheer dumbosity of this already has my head reeling. You might think at first that this isn’t a huge deal: it’s just another example of narrow-minded thinking we’ve seen so much of from creationists.

But in fact it’s a lot worse than that. From the original article:

Pollitt said the district is required by law to remain neutral where religion is concerned.

I’m afraid that is simply not true. Like, really really not true.

First, by taking away the shirts, he was not being religion neutral. He was kowtowing to a specific religion. That action immediately contradicted his words.

Second, think about what that sentence means. If being religion-neutral means not offending any religion, then nothing at all could ever be taught at school. Certainly not science, which clashes in almost every conceivable way with Fundamentalist creationist doctrine. You can’t teach anything past 6000 years ago under Pollitt’s reasoning. No astronomy, no biology, no history (Sumerians were around long before 4000 BC). Some interpretations of Islamic law state that music is forbidden. Does traife food touch kosher food in the cafeteria (or is it served on the same plates)? Does anyone wanna go through Leviticus and see what rules from there the school breaks?

If we are to believe Pollitt, then they’ll have to ban the Pledge of Allegiance because Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t worship idols. That’ll go over well, I’m sure.

This whole idea of "religion neutrality" is a crock, and clearly is being used to the advantage of one narrowly-defined religious viewpoint. There’s a difference between being neutral — which Pollitt clearly was not being — and not promoting one religion over another.

Being religion-neutral in the sense Pollitt means is conceptually impossible. You cannot appease every religion, because many common modern religions contradict each other. However, we can be religion-neutral by actually refraining from making any decisions based on religion. That’s what that First Amendment is all about.

So what we have here is yet another shot in the battle over religious freedom (both of and from) in this country. I suspect the band leader could pursue a First Amendment case here.

But if he chooses to pursue it, he may have an uphill climb… it depends on how many people there hold the same view as band parent Sherry Melby, one of the people offended by the very concept of evolution:

“I was disappointed with the image on the shirt.” Melby said. “I don’t think evolution should be associated with our school.”

Yes, because teaching the very fundamentals of biology in a school?

Heaven forbid.

[Update: Steve Novella has a funny and pointed take on all this.]