Darwin Christmas cards from the British Humanist Association

Sara sez, "The British Humanist Association is stocking Christmas cards featuring naturalist Charles Darwin getting into the festive spirit."

I'm a lifetime member of the BHA -- they do good work (and make nice Christmas cards).

Christmas Cards (Thanks, Sara!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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http://twitter.com/tnielsenhayden tnielsenhayden

The world needs more Fibonacci Christmas cards.
Glen Able

How many more? As many as there were in the last two Christmases combined?
http://twitter.com/GiantRobotPilot Drew Christensen

Merry Christmas Charlie Darwin!
- Brainspore
  
  [insert Beagle joke here]
Alan Goulding

I can’t get their store to work properly. It keeps saying my cart is empty. Shame, I really fancied some of these…

Edit: It was a cookie thing. Bought now…
Ito Kagehisa

Well, OK, as long as you believe in the idea that the birth of Christ was so inutterably cool and utterly magical that it propagated backwards through time, and that the pre-christian ceremonies that Christmas is based on were actually precursors of Jesus’s birth.

However, if you believe in an immutable linear progress of time, and/or you don’t believe Jesus’s birth reverberated through the cosmos at a level transcending mere chronology, then Christmas is a shiny new frontispiece glued on the much older midwinter ceremonies common to nearly all pre-christian human cultures.

Personally, I’m old school. Deus Sol Invictus! All hail the invincible Sun!

Edit: I think it’s terribly sad that so many people objected to this visiting Christian’s “Jesus is the reason for the season” post that it was removed. Intolerance is ugly regardless of who does it.
Brainspore

I always thought the seasons had more to do with the planet’s axis in relation to the sun, but what do I know.
Ito Kagehisa

Obviously I agree, but to a devout Christian, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. The existence of a personal redemptive agent (Jesus was “the Word made flesh” who “dwelt among us”) predates the creation of most of the cosmos in Judeo-Christian creation stories. In that paradigm, the planet’s axis and rotation are driven by metaphysical forces anyway, so it’s perfectly OK to stop the sun in the sky for a whole day, or to reschedule eclipses in order to suit the needs of prophecy.

The deeper you look, in both theology and astrophysics, the weirder it gets. I still like the observational approach of modern astronomy better than biblical apologism, though. I don’t think God gave me the feeble wits I own so that I could avoid using them, and our function in the universe seems to be strongly related to observation, at least according to Schrodinger’s cat.