MrV: *If you don’t want secular people celebrating in secular ways, then start lobbying to have its status as a national holiday revoked. *
Hear, hear! No fair saying that Christmas should be recognized as a holiday in secular contexts (including having public decorations paid for with taxpayer money, as well as being a national day off) but shouldn’t be treated as a secular holiday. That is known as trying to have your fruitcake and eat it too
And don’t forget that we say “holidays” partly because the “winter holiday season” traditionally also includes New Year’s, which is a much more universal and non-controversial holiday (and has often been a prime occasion for gift-giving even within Christian societies). As we join Belrix’s crusade to remove Christmas from the list of official government holidays, I move that we lobby to replace it with an extra day off at New Year’s.
So black people are exactly like white people now? Both groups have the same names, eat the same foods, go to the same churches, wear the same clothes, speak the same language, read the same things, and entertain themselves the same way? Black people are just white people with tans?
If you believe this foolishness, then you must believe that there is no “Jewish culture” or no “Southern culture” or no “Italian-American culture”. If you don’t, please explain to me why these things aren’t divisive but for some reason, the culture developed by black Americans is.
Scrooge going to church has been shown, to the best of my knowledge, in only one version of A Christmas Carol- THE MOST RECENT ONE MADE!!! (and among the best) - the Patrick Stewart TNT version! (And it’s kinda funny- he comes in, with top hat on- an usher points to his hat, Scrooge tips his hat, THEN realizes what the usher means & takes it off, then sings rather cautiously, then quite lustily- what else?- God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.)
I think the Alistair Sim & maybe the Reginal Owen ones have Bob & Tim Cratchit in church.
Nobody can take the Christ out of your Christmas, belrix. You do that to yourself by obsessing on the secular world’s enthusiasm for commerce, glitz, and excess. Wretched excess. Lovely, wonderful, joyous excess.
I love the lights. Love the shopping, the frenzied crowds, the plastic gee-gaws and tacky decorations. Love 'em. Love the whole damned overblown crazy season.
And I love being in Church at midnight on the 24th singing “Silent Night”. Makes me cry, every time. Love being reminded that God approached us in the guise of a child, open, giving without reservation, accepting everyone he met in all their glorious sinful humainty. Love being reminded that Christ is present, in a real and literal sense, whenever people gather together in his name, in reverence and quiet awe.
The secular world will always want to play in your garden, and it’ll look like they’ve “taken over”. But keep in mind that only you rule your heart, and you can choose who to let in, and who to keep out. Let the world have its Giftmas; it’s a lot of fun. Keep Christmas, and you’ll find the rest is just noise, light, and bustle.
These two comments seem mutually exclusive to me. What exactly would be “celebrateing right”? You are aware, as subtlely mentioned by several posters, that Christmas is actually a hijack of older Pagan holidays.
Please review these statements of yours, and ask yourself if they reveal anything about your Christian bias. You started out by referring to the “bashing” of fundamentalist Christians, and cited the “ridicule” of Ned Flanders and the absence of Jesus in quasi-religious primetime television dramas as examples. This suggests, to me, that you think “bashing and ridicule” are on the same level as failing to acknowledge that Jesus is the savior. Do you? If so, can you see how deep-rooted, possibly unconscious biases can color your perception of the way this season is celebrated by mainstream America?
Well didn’t you get enough Christ time there? And why does everyone else have to celebrate why and how you do? Last time I checked this was America, and you aren’t Oliver Cromwell.
So I expect you to be putting Saint Patrick back in St Patrick’s day then? And Saint Valentine in St Valentine’s day?
Have you ever seen George W. Bush give a speech? He can’t talk about the weather without praising Jesus. Do you ever see a Muslim who isn’t portrayed as a zealot or a terrorist? Do you ever see a Buddhist at all? The media is very pro-faith and pro-Christian because that’s the majority of its audience. How many Christmas specials are shown on televison every year compared to Hannukah specials? Have you ever even seen a television special about any non-Christian religious holiday?
i don’t actually understand your point about religious shows that don’t talk about Jesus. So what? They’re not supposed to be aboutJesus they’re supposed to be about a more generic God. What would be the point of inserting an exclusionary message into a program whose sole purpose is to attract viewers to watch commercials. If the networks were to promote a specifically Christian message in this shows they would be cutting their own throats by turning off non-Christin viewers. BTW, those shows don’t say anything about Mohammed or the Talmud either. Does that make them anti-Muslim or anti-Christian?
Well we have different definitions for what a “fact” is. Christmas is not a Christian holiday. It’s a winter celebration which has existed for thousands of years. The fact that some Christians have incorporated it into their own religious calndar does not mean that anyone else has to acknowledge it as religious in any way.
It isn’t “supposed” to be about anything. I can celebrate the hair on my ass that day if I want to. You don’t own the holiday. In fact, i don’t see why Chjristians want to fuck up a perfectly good winter solstice celebration by polluting it with a bunch of tiresome, preachy religious significance. If Christians want a day to celebrate the mythical birth of their God let them do it in February. Nobody cares about February.
Belrix: I think it would be interesting if you responded to some posters here who asked you to imagine if you were a Christian living in a Muslim-majority nation. Would you be at all interested in people who wanted to put Allah back in Ramadan? Or would you feel it to be an effort to shove a religion you have no part in down your throat?
Besides, as many have pointed out, Christmas is returning to that from whence it came: A non-Christian holday celebrated by diverse groups for diverse reasons. It can be called anything (and usually is), and there is no `right’ way to celebrate it. If you want to sing the most religious carols and recite the 23rd Psalm and so forth, go and do it in peace. Do not, however, imagine for an instant that you are any more correct than I.
And, finally, this caught my eye:
Remember: Christ had a Family, and he was considered rather extreme by the people in charge in his day. If I were you, I’d be a bit more circumspect in comparing the religious figures of others to criminals and lunatics.
I’m celebrating Sexmas on December 25 because that’s the day my husband gets off of work, and it’s hard to celebrate Sexmas by yourself. Hard, but not impossible.
Belrix, lay off the weed, son, it’s messin’ with your mind.
Christ has not been stripped from Christmas. You just said that you were at your church rehearsing a Christmas play, which I assume has something to do with the birth of Christ. See, you have Christ in Christmas, after all! You can go to church, pray, read the bible, and do all the religiously significant acts you enjoy to your heart’s content.
But that’s not enough for you. You want to make everybody else observe the holiday your way and do what you want them to. This is the chief reason I intensely dislike fundies–they’re essentially fascists at heart who cannot tolerate the idea that other people should be able to make their own choices in life.
I will observe Christmas the way I choose, not the way you choose.
(Namaste xeno!) I must say, though, much as I enjoy all the hoopla and whoopie of the secular Christmas, not to mention “Messiah” sings and other aspects of the religious Christmas that don’t require you to be a believer, I agree that the whole thing is maniacally overblown in America these days.
Of course, since most of the US population (and hence most of its retailers, advertisers, and present-buyers) is Christian, the OP ought to be out convincing them to reform instead of coming here to bitch about how “evangelical atheists” might react. Personally, here in Jaipur I had all the “Christmas” I needed on Diwali, and I am quite enjoying the refreshing absence of the commercial Christmas blitz in a Hindu-dominated society.
