Free The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas by Robin Harvie Page B

specifically for the purpose, and I cut one down for us using a bow saw and everything. It was very macho.
    Ironically, my wife—raised with this holiday—prefers fake trees. But maybe that’s because she always winds up doing the decorating (I’m hopeless at it, and likely to set fire to something) and it takes her all day. However, I won’t stand for an ersatz tree. Every year we get a real tree and let it make our house smell piney and arboreal.
    And, yes, Christmassy.
    Now, after many years of celebrating this holiday, I’ve come to really enjoy it. I know my in-laws well enough to know what kinds of gifts to get, and my own daughter makes it clear what she wants (somehow the video games we get for her are always the kind Marcella wants to play). I always get the same sort of gift from them: a big Toblerone bar (400 grams), thermal socks (my office is cold even in the summer), and various computer doodads and gizmos.
    And every year I’m happy. I mean, honestly happy. Some people say the gifts are not the reason for the holiday, but they’re wrong: of course it’s about the gifts. They’re the centerpiece of the holiday; it’s about giving them, and having fun getting them, and then playing with them (or wearing or eating them) afterward. And not to be all TV Christmas special here, but it’s about being with family while you’re doing all that.
    So here I sit. An atheist, a skeptic, a guy raised Jewish who hated Christmas, has found the meaning of the holiday, and he wasn’t even searching for it.
    And every year, when I read the blogs and the papers and watch the news, I see that same story of the Christmas star resurrected, an undead story that won’t stay down. And people keep looking for the evidence.
    But they won’t find it. They can’t. It’s a story.
    So for me, just being with family, enjoying their company, is enough. And, of course, every winter I still go outside to observe the sky and look at the stars, the real stars. You don’t need to search for them—they’re there, festooned across the sky for everyone to see.

Chapter 12
The Ironed Trouser: Why 93 Percent of Scientists Are Atheists (Depending on Whom You Ask)
    A DAM R UTHERFORD
    Atheism and science should make good, comfortable, spooning bedfellows. Even though they are totally separate types of thing, the former being a position, the latter a process, the casual assumption is that they should skip hand in hand through gloriously evolved fields of reason. Those who attack either or both like to conflate the two for a convenient jab-swing combo to pulverize rational thought in favor of religious fervor. Science must be bad because it lies so comfortably with godlessness.
    The term “scientific atheism” is tossed around sometimes, but I don’t really understand what it means. Atheism exists fully independently of science. As the onus is on the faithful to demonstrate the existence of Yahweh, Allah, Thor, Hanuman, or whomever, atheists need to do nothing at all to be devoted to their stance. “Scientific atheism” is equivalent to saying “ironed trousers.” Like science, ironing is a process, which can be applied to all manner of items: dresses, shirts, even underpants, if one were so inclined. It straightens things out, makes them fit together nicely. Fortunately, trousers exist and function perfectly adequately without ironing. And atheism exists without backup from science. But science does make it look a bit smarter.
    In the twentieth century, there were several attempts to quantify the overlap of eggheads who were godheads. In 1916, psychologist James Leuba found that out of 1,000 scientists, 60 percent were agnostic or atheist. Eighty years later, the experiment was repeated, and the results were virtually identical. Within a different sample, only 7 percent of the members of the American National Academy of Sciences indicated a belief in God. More recently, a survey of the fellows at the UK’s most august scientific