Skepticum

In searching for topics for a Holiday edition of “What Would the Atheist Say?” I happened upon an “atheist Christmas story” from last year. Being that the story has gotten most of the commentary it was going to get, now it makes for a good topic to summarize, especially with the upcoming Winter Holidays knocking on our door.

Possummomma wrote back in January about her daughter’s reaction to a pop-quiz assignment requiring the kids to write an essay on what they wanted for Christmas:

What do I want for Christmas, I want a less assuming teacher. I want a teacher who thinks past the standard “What I want for Christmas…” assignment when she’s aware that three out of her twenty students probably don’t celebrate Christmas. I want a world where my friends will be asked to write essays about how they might use their winter vacay’ to help other people. I want my mom to be healthy again. I want my grandmother to quit smoking. I want my grandfather to quite bugging her about it. But most of all, I want to not get an “F” on this assignment because you get angry with me for saying all of the above. Merry Christmas, Mrs. “X”

Apparently, the teacher gave an A+ to this essay and asked to talk to the student (named here possum#1) after class.

After class, possum#1 said that her teacher told her she couldn’t be an atheist because her “ability to care for others’ feelings isn’t an atheist trait.” and that her “attitude was very Christian.”

As you can imagine the comments poured in on possummomma’s website, and the story was picked up by about.com as well.

Austin Cline at about.com turned the story in an article titled “Caring for Others’ Feelings Not an Atheist Trait?”

Anti-atheist bigotry isn’t just widespread, it’s also very fundamental to how bigots view the world around them. By this I mean that when someone is bigoted against atheists, they are unable to grant any real sympathy or consideration to atheists: they refuse to accept that atheists can be kind, moral, decent, civil human beings. Atheists are barely even human from such perspectives and it really drives home just how destructive religious theism can be.

Of course, more discussion ensued after the publication of the above-mentioned article and Cline got a response from Michael William (”master of none,” who also says, “when you’re Michael Williams every day is a good hair day”), who claimed Cline, “denounces stereotypes of atheists by leaning on stereotypes of Christians in the very first paragraph.”

Aside the fact that I’m thinking Williams is trying to say something else than what he’s saying, and Cline’s first paragraph being the one above, the reader can see that Cline doesn’t mention Christianity specifically in that paragraph. Secondly, Cline notices how subtly Williams implies being an atheist negatively changes behavior:

If it strikes you as bizarre that Michael Williams would assume that the first paragraph is about Christians generally (which suggests that he’s the one with stereotypes about Christians), it gets better. He quickly insists that being an atheist isn’t like being Jewish or black because skin color has no inherent effect on behavior. Well, that’s true, but what Williams misses is that atheism isn’t a philosophy or a religion either and, like skin color, has no inherent effect on behavior. It’s precisely the assumption that atheism prevents people from being moral which drives so much anti-atheist prejudice, but for some reason Williams passes over this.

I’m guessing I’ll be spending a quiet Christmas watching TV and having lots of irreverent thoughts. The most Christian gesture I will do on Christmas will be to try and stay off the roads to not increase the Christmas-induced rates of drunk-driving.

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