The War on Christmas: Final Skirmishes
Dec. 28th, 2005 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianOkay, so some nameless individual has a message for the people who have declared religious tolerance and so forth to be a "War on Christmas", and the message is "Fuck you".
Frankly, I don't care where Christmas came from. In the last few paragraphs, the writer obviously gets up on his/her high horse about these things, not giving a thought to the fact that the dominant religion of the Roman Empire went from Mithraism to Christianity nearly overnight thanks to Emperor Constantine. Yes, it's impossible that Jesus was born in the middle of December if you believe the stories in the Bible, because the shepherds would have been freezing their arses off and said shepherds only sat out with their flocks in lambing season anyway. Yes, it's true that the tree, the mistletoe and holly, giving of gifts, Yule logs and the like are all pagan at root. Frankly, who cares? If the Christians made a celebration without overly fucking with the traditions they found around them when they went around conquering half the planet, good on them. It's a shame they can't remember the spirit of accommodation, tolerance and universal sharing that I like to think went into that adoption of pagan traditions, but even if it can't, it's nice to see that these traditions survive in such an anti-pagan environment as the US is becoming, in whatever form. Frankly, there's room for everyone's worship in the symbology currently in use. Holly King reference or a representation of the crown of thorns? You make the call.
What I do care about is the attacks being made by that fuckhead O'Reilly on, among other groups, the ACLU. He called the ACLU terrorists, for fuck's sake! That, for anyone unfamiliar with the acronym, is the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been set up to defend people's rights to free speech, free worship and a life free of discrimination for everyone. If you'll note from this list, this includes Christians who feel persecuted by the attempts to keep prayer out of schools. Which, incidentally, is about it being mandatory, not about what an individual decides to do. This explains it rather nicely. But in cases where the separation of Church and State is clearly going overboard? There's the ACLU, defending Christians as they would anybody else.
All the links above, and many more, are available on the profanity-laden rant linked to in the first paragraph. I'm just trying to put it in some kind of perspective. No, I don't like it when people bitch about how Halloween in this country is nothing but a commercial device and a 'bad American habit', obviously forgetting about Samhain entirely despite there not being much else going on that day. I don't even like it when they bitch about Christmas being too commercial, for all I'm not a Christian. It's still a good holiday, whatever name you give it. It's a time for fellowship and joy and finding a little bit of warmth, light and happiness in the middle of winter, just when you need it most. It's not about pillorying your fellows just because they make their winter solstice devotions to different names, particularly not when most of those devotions are exactly the same as the ones you're making. And it's certainly not about crucifying an organisation that defends the beliefs you claim to have along with everyone else's rights to free worship.
Everywhere you go, you get rabid Christian fundies telling you that Jesus Christ is the reason for the season. However, let's be perfectly fair, rational and scientific about this: the tilt of the earth's axis is the reason for the season. The reason for the holiday depends on where you're standing.
Frankly, I don't care where Christmas came from. In the last few paragraphs, the writer obviously gets up on his/her high horse about these things, not giving a thought to the fact that the dominant religion of the Roman Empire went from Mithraism to Christianity nearly overnight thanks to Emperor Constantine. Yes, it's impossible that Jesus was born in the middle of December if you believe the stories in the Bible, because the shepherds would have been freezing their arses off and said shepherds only sat out with their flocks in lambing season anyway. Yes, it's true that the tree, the mistletoe and holly, giving of gifts, Yule logs and the like are all pagan at root. Frankly, who cares? If the Christians made a celebration without overly fucking with the traditions they found around them when they went around conquering half the planet, good on them. It's a shame they can't remember the spirit of accommodation, tolerance and universal sharing that I like to think went into that adoption of pagan traditions, but even if it can't, it's nice to see that these traditions survive in such an anti-pagan environment as the US is becoming, in whatever form. Frankly, there's room for everyone's worship in the symbology currently in use. Holly King reference or a representation of the crown of thorns? You make the call.
What I do care about is the attacks being made by that fuckhead O'Reilly on, among other groups, the ACLU. He called the ACLU terrorists, for fuck's sake! That, for anyone unfamiliar with the acronym, is the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been set up to defend people's rights to free speech, free worship and a life free of discrimination for everyone. If you'll note from this list, this includes Christians who feel persecuted by the attempts to keep prayer out of schools. Which, incidentally, is about it being mandatory, not about what an individual decides to do. This explains it rather nicely. But in cases where the separation of Church and State is clearly going overboard? There's the ACLU, defending Christians as they would anybody else.
All the links above, and many more, are available on the profanity-laden rant linked to in the first paragraph. I'm just trying to put it in some kind of perspective. No, I don't like it when people bitch about how Halloween in this country is nothing but a commercial device and a 'bad American habit', obviously forgetting about Samhain entirely despite there not being much else going on that day. I don't even like it when they bitch about Christmas being too commercial, for all I'm not a Christian. It's still a good holiday, whatever name you give it. It's a time for fellowship and joy and finding a little bit of warmth, light and happiness in the middle of winter, just when you need it most. It's not about pillorying your fellows just because they make their winter solstice devotions to different names, particularly not when most of those devotions are exactly the same as the ones you're making. And it's certainly not about crucifying an organisation that defends the beliefs you claim to have along with everyone else's rights to free worship.
Everywhere you go, you get rabid Christian fundies telling you that Jesus Christ is the reason for the season. However, let's be perfectly fair, rational and scientific about this: the tilt of the earth's axis is the reason for the season. The reason for the holiday depends on where you're standing.