Gift Ideas For Atheists

This post was initially written in 2008 and was updated for the 2012 holiday season.

Looking for a Christmas gift for that atheist on your list? Yes, many atheists do in fact celebrate Christmas. If you have such an atheist on your Christmas list and want to get them something that has to do with atheism in order to show your support, I have some suggestions for you. Best of all, since none of my gift ideas are in any way Christmas-specific, they would be appropriate for birthdays or other occasions too.

Before offering some atheist-oriented recommendations, a quick disclaimer is needed. We atheists are just like everyone else except that we do not believe in any gods. If you are a religious person, you probably don't believe in most of the gods that have been worshiped over human history either, so you can relate. The only difference is that we atheists place your god(s) in the same category as all the others which you do not believe either.

Shunning and Boycotting Fellow Atheists

I've read Ron Lindsay's post on atheists shunning and boycotting other atheists again since posting a brief mention of it, and I want to come back to some questions it raised from a somewhat different angle now. I am happy to see that it has already generated quite a bit of discussion, as I think that is potentially quite useful.

Shunning and Boycotting

Lindsay defined both shunning and boycotting in the context in which he discussed them, so I will use his definitions even though I find his view of boycotting a bit different from how the term is usually used. He defined shunning as:

…deliberately avoiding association with an individual, even when the association is as attenuated as attending an event or conference where the shunned individual is speaking.

He defined boycotting as:

…deliberately avoiding association with anyone or any entity (such as an organization that sponsors an event) which does not support one’s shunning.

I am going to set aside Lindsay's argument that the organization he represents, the Center for Inquiry, should not acquiesce to requests to bar particular speakers. That can be debated another time. Instead, I'd like to examine the question of whether it is ever appropriate for atheists to shun or boycott other atheists. Admittedly, this is a question which Lindsay does not directly address apart from his organization. However, I have seen a few other blog posts addressing this broader question, and so I'd like to give my opinion.

Responding to Christian Email

After I joined several other atheist bloggers in encouraging people not to buy holiday trees from the Boy Scouts this year, I noticed several of these bloggers talking about how their posts on this subject brought out some interesting responses from proponents of the Scouts. I did not receive any emails like this, but I did get one that I thought was going to be similar and then turned out to be something else entirely. I'd like to share it and offer my response because it raised some good questions.

The author of this one identified himself as an Eagle Scout and "part of the Catholic Church." This was what led me to believe that he was going to defend either of these institutions. He did not. Here is his email (unedited except for the removal of his name and the paragraph breaks I've inserted for the purpose of addressing specific questions) and my response:

I'm __________ Eagle Scout and part of the Catholic Church. Now I understand that in our great country we have the right to believe in what ever we want with the understanding of not getting Judge. I honestly don't give to shits that you are a atheist and I respect you for having your on thoughts. What i do like to know is are you doing this for the right reasons.

Holy Hyperbole, Squidman!

When Ministry Best Practices referred to people who dare to leave their church as excrement, atheists noticed. From the perspective of these Christians, someone who does not agree with their particular doctrine should leave. Fair enough. I mean, it is not like they are going to change their doctrine and become more reasonable.

Still, the comparison to excrement may have struck me as being a bit over the top at one point in time. But that point would have been sometime before I read PZ Myers' (Pharyngula) comparison of atheists who disagree with him on the Internet to mass murderer Marc Lépine.

After quoting a news article about Lépine, PZ wrote:

I remember following the events of that day intently, horrified that there are people who will kill women simply because they are women. And these anonymous monsters on the internet who shriek affrontedly about women and feminists and moan that any feminist allies are ‘manginas’ — to me, every one of them has the name Marc Lépine, and is just hiding it in shame and fear and hatred and cowardice.

Right. Because calling PZ a "mangina" or expressing opposition to what passes for feminism in some corners of the atheist community today is an awful lot like murdering 14 people and injuring 14 others with a rifle.

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Skip the Salvation Army

I was driving home from work yesterday, and I had the windows in my car about half-way down. It has been way too warm for this time of year, and I believe yesterday's daytime high was approximately 75 degrees F. I had the radio tuned to NPR, as I often do. As I stopped at a stoplight, I could clearly hear the unmistakable sound of a hand bell being rung. I was surprised by how loud it was, and I looked around to see where it was coming from. To my surprise, the Salvation Army bell ringer was standing in front of a drug store that had to be at least 300-400 yards from my position. That I could hear it at all with my poor hearing, engine running, surrounded by traffic, and radio on still surprises me. But there it was.

I have been in and out of that particular drug store a number of times, and I found myself wondering how easy it would be to walk past the Salvation Army kettle without feeling a little twinge of guilt. When I was a child accompanying a parent on errands, I was almost always given a few coins to put in the kettle. Of course, we did not know then what we know now about the Salvation Army. We were unaware of the Christian extremist nature of the organization. We did not know that they support proselytizing and engage in discriminatory hiring practices. And we certainly did not know their position on LGBT persons.

I decided I would not feel the slightest bit of guilt today for ignoring the bell. In fact, it would be something of a challenge not to inform people I saw putting money in the kettle what they were supporting.

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