A logo for the godless: an impossible assignment?
Norwegianity has put out a request to design an appropriate logo for all of us godless heathen bloggers. There’s a certain religious deathcult that uses an instrument of torture as its immediately recognizable logo—it’s very simple, clean, easy to draw, and they’ve made it their own. You see one of those things on a website or on a necklace and you instantly know to a very rough approximation the predilections of the owner. Why can’t we have something like that?
You might be thinking the very idea is ridiculous, since freethinkers are such a diverse group, but you know, Christians also encompass a very wide spectrum of beliefs on so many issues, and that hasn’t stopped them. It would be great to see somebody with some graphic talent come up with something we could all use.
There is a tradition of using the pansy (pensée) as a symbol, but it isn’t exactly easy to render. The Invisible Pink Unicorn is cool, I think, but really just mocks silly beliefs. American Atheists has a trademarked symbol, a stylized atom, which really ought to be the symbol for Scientism or something, and I’d rather see a symbol that isn’t specific to just atheism. I ran across one site with a simple idea, which might work; I’d have to think about it. It’s an asterisk, which looks a tiny bit like a pansy, and has that open wildcard vibe to it.
Anyway, the kind of thing I would be looking for is something simple, fairly abstract, easy to render, and that wouldn’t antagonize deists, agnostics, or atheists. It should be positive: no crucifixes with a slash through them, for instance. It shouldn’t be weird—no flying spaghetti monsters, please—it shouldn’t be ugly, it shouldn’t be in-your-face and gloating, it should be unobtrusive. It ought to be the kind of symbol that if it were done up as a piece of jewelry, it would be tasteful. Remember, even if you do come up with a nice logo, the hard part is going to be getting a critical mass of unbelievers to adopt it and build a recognizable association with it (and be warned, no matter how gorgeous and elegant and clever an idea you come up with, there will be a solid cadre of the godless who will resolutely refuse to have anything to do with it, on general principles and intrinsic cussedness…which is OK.)
Talk about it in the comments at Pharyngula, doodle up stuff and send it to me, and if there is any response at all, I’ll put up a gallery of ideas later. If we’ve got something good, I’ll use it on my site, maybe Mark will join in, and we can get the ball rolling.
October 28th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
How about this:
http://paranormal.se/images/ghostbusters.gif
October 29th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
I think the asterisk needs to be pushed apart more with shock waves radiating out. Some of these pictures capture the feel.
http://img.search.yahoo.com/search/images?ei=utf-8&fr=slv8-&p=big%20bang%20theory