Recently I stumbled upon a great article about the atheist symbols that may be the descendant of the website I saw so many years ago. In it they decide that perfect circle is probably the best idea, but (for reasons that I feel are too concerned with commercialism and modernity) in the end they decided that the circle would not work.

On that one point, I couldn’t disagree more. I don’t think branding or recognition by theists that it’s the symbol for atheism should be part of the decision process. The symbol is meant to represent my ideals, and I wear it only to assert those ideals to whomever is paying attention. If I really wanted to be as in-your-face about it as, say, Christians, I’d wear a shirt that just says: God isn’t real.

I do like almost all suggestions I’ve seen about the symbol, but so many of them are aimed at the wrong audience.

• The Darwin fish is a wonderful icon, but it represents the fight against those who don’t believe in evolution. Hopefully atheists won’t always have to fight this fight.
• The invisible pink unicorn is great but it’s whole purpose is to mock religious ideas, and I don’t see mockery of anything as a defining feature of atheism. Most of my favorite symbols are like this, but just because they make me giggle doesn’t mean they are representative of atheism.
• The American Atheist’s logo is neat because the reference to the fundamentals of nature and the open-ended loop that represents incomplete knowledge, but it’s trademarked (bleh), it’s more of a representation of science, and the letter A immediately takes it out of the realm of the universal.
• The empty set symbol (ø) is a nice one but has an important flaw. It looks like a NO symbol or a symbol that something is forbidden. Atheism is not about forbidding things.
• The asterisk, or athterisk, is easily one of the best suggestions I’ve seen because it is relatively simple and represents concepts like “anything” and “We have the footnotes to prove it!” And it does have a resemblance to the pansy, a symbol for free-thought. The resemblance to a flower is actually a reason I vote against it because people will be apt to confusing it with an actual flower. And as far as the asterisk symbol itself, it’s commonly recognized as a symbol in a language. Far too provincial for a symbol that represents something as grand as I’m thinking.