Persephone is the reason for the season.
Somebody better claim that as a sig before I do!
gasp
Look - this whole thing is about the secularization of the second most important day on the Christian calendar. It’s not about some semi-obscure Catholic saints.
Do those of you who practice what may be called the minority religions want recognition of the reasons for your holy days? Should I recognize that the Winter Solstice is a holy day for Pagans that represents the return/rebirth of the Sun God? Or perhaps should I just say, oh - it’s where Pagans wear holly and watch the sun rise? Is Beltane just a secular celebration where the Pagan’s get together to have sex?
It’s common practice in America now to be very careful to recognize everybody’s minority status while ignore the equal validity of the majority. “Culturally Sensitive” is a code word for “Minority Sensitive” (look at the furor at the club started by the high school girl for the studies of white european culture).
I may not agree with your beliefs and you may not agree with mine. But if you want me to recognize that your view of life has validity to you, you must recoginize that my view is similarily valid.
My point, made I think more than once, is:
[ul]
[li]Hanukah is a Jewish Holiday[/li][li]Solstice is a Pagan Holiday (apologies, I know that “Pagan” is a broad brush word)[/li][li]Kwanzaa is a secular holiday[/li][li]and Christmas is a Christian holiday, not a secular one.[/li][/ul]
Homebrew I didn’t ask to have everybody “celebrate right”. I said that we had to get “what we’re celebrating about right”. There’s a difference. My point is that the celebration of Christmas shouldn’t primarily be about lights & gifts. It should include recognition of Christ. The lights and the gifts are fun but they’re extras.
Nope - I don’t think that bashing and ridicule are synonymous with lack belief in salvation through Christ. I do think this is an example, though, of my point above. The media and, frankly, many members on this board, bend over backwards trying to be “Culturally/Sexually/Ethnically/Gender/etc. Sensitive”. It seems to be consistent that this sensitivity is usually about the minority and not the majority.
Knock Kwanzaa and people post in anger about how we’re not being sensitive to black culture (as if Africa had a single consistent culture that’s being fully encompassed in this holiday).
Bashing the majority is allowed however. As the member of the majority there’s the viewed position as somehow being the winner of something and everybody lines up to knock you off that pedestal. White male? Get down here. Christian? Off you go! Homosexual? Wait! Lemme get out my sensitivity training manual.
The “Ned Flanders” comment is to point out that creating a blindly idiotic Christian to laugh at for 10 years is OK. If The Simpsons had a gay character being portrayed as laugh target for 10 years of gay jokes, there’d be picket lines around Fox studios.
Finally a late addition following a preview. Diogenes, how many of those Christmas specials on TV this season are about Christ versus the secularized thing that Christmas has become. You may think that there’s Christmas specials on TV (rather than Hanukah or Ramadan or whatever) but they’re only Christmas specials in the “Giftmas” secularized meaning.
Derleth If I was a Christian in a Moslem society, I’d not be concerned how much Allah was in Ramadan. Frankly, I don’t have a horse in that race. I would be concerned, though, that my fellow Christians remembered that the holiday was not supposed to be about Santa Claus. I’d want my Moslem coworkers and friends to remember that Christmas was a holiday I recognized as a holy time - even if they didn’t celebrate it.
Monstro I acknowleged the Pagan iconography of Christmas in my original post along with the intentional placement by the early church of the traditional birthday of Christ intentionally to eclipse the previous solstice/Saturnalia celebrations.
My original post has an excellent example in a later post by gwendee with her inability to find a Christmas card that even had a Christian message inside.
First, I can’t believe there is anyone who doesn’t grant that there is such a thing as African-American culture in this country. “The dozens,” chitlins, big hats in church, baked macaroni, bridge whist, home training, "dappin’, " and “double dutch” are just a few of the universe of cultural signifiers that have meaning for African Americans.
African Americans are, in some sense, an “invented” people. Their ancestors didn;t immigrate to America to find a better life; they were kidnapped, raped, branded, and enslaved in a foreign country. The peoples of West Africa who were brought here–Wolof, Yoruba, Ashanti, Fang, Fulani, and others–lost their names, their languages, their culture.
Their descendants, the black folks you see every day, have had to recreate folkways that give them a shared identity. If we do not begrudge other ethnicities theri Oktoberfests, their St. Patrick’s parades, their San Gennaro festivals, then why be so sniffy about Kwanzaa? So what if it was invented in the 60s? So what if the founder was a slimeball? That has nothing to do with the right of black Americans to celebrate their heritage and their restored birthright to know who they are and where they come from.
And Monstro needs to let fellow black folks choose to celebrate or not–calling them “ignorant” and “idiots” for making a different choice is just as wrong as the white folks giving you grief for your choice. Should an atheist have to celebrate imani or a libertarian have to participate in ujamaa just because they share a skin color?
Aww, thanks for remembering my birthday. It sometimes gets overlooked with all the other things going on in December.
Oh, now I see you’re talking about the other guy. Different Dads.
For me and many others, it’s NOT about Christ. It IS about the lights and gifts and fun and family. As it was in before the Christians took it over.
Okay, I’m resorting to bullet points:
[ul]
[li]Not everyone in America is Christian[/li][li]Christmas is a federally-mandated national holiday[/li][li]Other people celebrating in whatever way they want doesn’t have any impact whatsoever on what Christmas means to you.[/li][li]Insisting that other people celebrate a holiday the way you do is arrogant and rude.[/li][/ul]
Happy holidays.
[sub]Don’t make me get out the italics.[/sub]
I respond to people who call holidays “bull-shit, made-up crap” willy-nilly. And if someone posted the same thing about Christmas or Easter or any other holiday that you celebrate, you’d get angry too.
You misunderstand me, gobear. I’m not calling black people don’t celebrate Kwanzaa ignorant or idiotic. Hell, unless I get invited to a party, I don’t celebrate it.
But a person who celebrates one pagan holiday (Christmas) and refuses to celebrate another one simply because it IS pagan is–IMHO–an idiot. There are a myriad of good reasons not to celebrate a holiday, including not wanting to practice paganism. I’d just like people to be consistent, that’s all.
You can be a good Christian–as dropzone put it–and appreciate the principles of Kwanzaa. I don’t know why people think they’re mutually exclusive.
Obviously, you’ve never seen Will & Grace.
In any event, as I pointed out, you don’t get to bogart Christmas. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in presents, and lots of 'em, along with carols, cookies, hugs, family, affection, and the warm glow fo the holidays. You do things you war, and stop trying to dictate to us your commands.
No, no. Axial tilt is the reason for the seasons.
Belrix said,
Belrix, in case you didn’t know…joy, hope and yes…even love, were around before Christianity.
While I understand your anger at the idea of people other than Christians having a good time on December 25th, it’s too late. You guys should have started bitching about it around a hundred years ago. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, and we ain’t giving it back!! 
My apologies, Monstro, I did indeed misunderstand.
Then it sounds to me like the subject of this thread should be: My fellow Christians say, “Jesus Who?”
American media & businesses aren’t Christian – they’re secular entities. What makes you think they have any more obligation to recognize Christ than I do?
It’s not just that there is pagan iconography in Christmas. The whole point is that the Church used Dec. 25th because there was already a pagan celebration on that day. They, basically, came in and usurped their holiday. And here you are complaining that people who aren’t even members of your religion aren’t celebrating your religious holiday correctly. You don’t see any problem with this?
Again, your beef is with your fellow Christian. Tell them to buy more cards with Christian messages in them. If those cards were profitable enough they would be sold in every card store. It’s not some slight the big, bad corporations are committing against your religion.
So, the non-Christian-specific themes of “Touched by an Angel” and “Joan of Arcadia” are esamples of the media bending over backwards not to offend non-Christians. In other words, these shows should be Christian-centric, but the networks deliberately avoid mentioning Jesus because they’re afraid to offend minorities. Again, is it your own bias that leads you to assume, maybe without even thinking about it, that these shows would naturally be Christian if it weren’t for political influence?
Fail to acknowledge Jesus Christ as the King of Kings in a public holiday display or greeting card, and belrix posts in anger about how you’re bashing and ridiculing his religion. What’s the difference? Actually, the difference is that nobody “knocked” your holiday at all, you started this thread because you’re angry that Christians don’t hold exclusive control over the symbolism of the season.
Can you give an example of a time that you, personally, have been unjustly harmed simply for your status as a member of a majority group? If so, I’m sorry to hear that, and you have my sympathy and support. If not, could it be that you’re imagnining this huge problem where there really isn’t one?
They most absolutely do have a gay character who has been the butt of jokes for 10 years! It’s Whelan Smithers, Mr. Burns’ right-hand man. They’ve also had a comedy-relief Hindu for all that time. The thing that Ned, Apu, and Smithers have in common is that they’re all basically sympathetic characters. They do not demonize the groups they belong to, in fact they actively humanize them. I like Ned! I don’t agree with his religious or political views, but I think he’s a swell guy.
I asked you to examine your possible biases, belrix, and I hope you’ll do that. Either way, Merry Christmas.
I must have missed the picket lines about Smithers. They’ve been making gay jokes about him for 10 years.
http://www.thechristiancardstore.com/starscripture.html
I just found this in 8 seconds on google.
Belrix, I’m a bit tired of the Flanders bashing. Although he is occasionally shown as embodying some of the worst characteristics (baptizing other people’s children, for example), on the whole, Ned is shown as a decent, compassionate, caring person whose heart is in the right place and who is willing to help his fellow man. Sure, he is played for humor. Name me one character on that show who has not been a laugh target for the last 10 years. He is not a target because he is Christian, as you seem to think. But then, you seem to think that everything you don’t like is a direct attack on you as a Christian, so I may be talking to a brick wall here.
Just IME, the people who whine the most about Christians being “persecuted” or “supressed” in the West are the ones least able to do so (the “think about what it’d be like” bit, I mean).
I agree with This Year’s Model. Aside from the fact that there has been a gay character for the past 10 years, Ned Flanders is mostly bashed by Homer, which I’d say generally qualifies as a sympathetic portrayal of a Simpsons character rather than a hostile one.
But Christmas cards are a secular tradition, not a religious one. They belong to the secular side of the holidays, along with the gift giving and such. Why would you expect them to be available with religious messages?
I cannot speak for them but I’m fairly sure their response will be, “When the Methodist Church co-opts Kwanzaa and injects some Christianity into it instead of its basic Animism then we’ll talk about celebrating it. Until then…” But most are theologically conservative enough to make Vanilla seem like a Unitarian.
Most are too polite to pay any attention to your “idiots” comment.
Doesn’t taking ‘Christ out of Christmas’ actually return the holiday to its pre-Christianity roots in which it was a festival centered on the solstice and the fact that the sun ‘died’ and was ‘reborn’ on that day as the light stops getting shorter and starts getting longer after the longest dark of the year?
That was the point of burning the Yule log all night, to await the re-arrival of the sun, and the festival had traditionally been celebrated with holly and evergreen because they represented life in the ‘bleak’ time of winter when everything seemed dead.
I seem to remember a show on either the History Channel or Discovery Channel that was ‘in search of the real Jesus’ or something similar, in which they stated that if there ever was such a person as Jesus Christ, the indicators they had (the lambs in the manger and the stars visible to guide the ‘wise men’ to the place of his birth) would indicate that his birth had to have taken place sometime in February or March.