Phil:
All kidding aside, would you mind explaining why the will of the majority isn’t good enough for you in this particular case? If you say, “because it is a constitutional issue,” then would your conscience be mitigated if that same majority amended that part of the constitution?
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
PLDennison wrote:
The point had been made that Christmas should not be an official holiday because Christians get a freebie. A rhetorical question was posed, challenging anyone to name a similar situation. Melin provided a factual answer to that question- Roman Catholics get a second freebie. And the connection is not entirely coincidental- New Year’s Day is on January 1, the Feast of St. Mary, because Pope Gregory transfered the beginning of the year to January from March.
The fact that Christians get a freebie on Dec. 25 would indeed be unconstitutional if they got it solely because they were Christians. You may feel that the answer to that is so obvious as to be self-evident. I maintain that an examination of the historical record suggests otherwise. Specifically, I maintain that if Europe had never been converted to Christianity, or even if Christianity had never existed, we would still be celebrating a holiday on or about Dec. 25.
In the OP Trumpy, speaking against the idea that Christmas should be governmentally sanctioned, said “of course you could just call them something else, but it’d still be the same thing”. I agree with that logic, it’s just that he wasn’t applying it consistently to the whole process.
The celebration predated Europe’s conversion to Christianity, it even predated the birth of Jesus, it probably goes back to before Stonehenge was just a daydream in the mind of some Neolithic sage. In fact the only threats to its continued existence that I can find in the historical record were the conversion to Christianity and later the Protestant Reformation. It passed through those barriers rather effortlessly.
So is Dec. 25 a holiday because it is a Christian holy day? No, it is a Christian holy day because it was already a holiday- Christians get a freebie because they hitched their wagon to it. Does the official sanction of Christmas reflect a Eurocentric cultural bias? Yes, but that’s not the issue we’ve been debating, and hardly the only example.
As for David’s proposal that there be no official holidays, and everyone be allowed an equal number of days off to use at their discretion, actually I have no problem with that per se, assuming it was doable. I just dispute the implication that the present system violates the First Amendment. Since the question of whether it is doable requires a very thorough analysis of efficiency issues which I can’t make, I will leave it at that.
Because I’ve never heard of it until you said it?
Gee, I have African-American friends, too.
Libertarian:
Because it is a constitutional issue."
If such an amendment were passed, I would immediately begin both moving for its repeal and looking for another country to live in.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Actually, it only goes back to 208 BC. It was to celebrate the birth of Mithras, who was a Persian god. So it isn’t even of European origin, though the Romans, to patronize their soldiers, adopted Mithraism as their official religion until Constantine. And you know the rest of the story.
“It is lucky for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
I suppose if the United States had existed prior to the spread of Christianity, and had already been celebrating a holiday on Dec. 25, and if Christmas hadn’t once been illegal to celebrate in many of the early American colonies, there might be a point, but otherwise, I really fail to see how a historical look back at Dec. 25 really changes anything. The government obviously feels that the religious holiday occurring on Dec. 25 deserves treatment that no other religious holiday gets. Seems like preferential treatment to me.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Nebuli has said it at least as well as I could.
Christmas and New Year’s are religious holidays for some people. They also happen to be, or to have become, secular holidays that are celebrated by a great number of people who are not religious, or are not Christian.
And, as Nebuli also pointed out, you asked a question to which I provided a factual answer, Phil. Maybe you and David don’t like the answer, because maybe you don’t want to make the same arguments about New Year’s Day that you make about Christmas. Certainly David has totally avoided THAT issue. You at least have argued that there’s a difference, but you haven’t articulated that difference yet.
BTW, the whole point of Thanksgiving – and certainly its origins – lies in giving thanks to a Deity for the blessings of abundance. So I guess the government folks have to go to work that day, too.
-Melin
Libertarian wrote:
No, the situation with Mithraism actually bears some parallels with how Christianity adapted itself to the holiday. The celebration predates the Mithra manifestation of it. In fact the northern European Yuletide celebration did not pass through the Mithraic phase at all.
David B wrote:
Actually, I did see it the first time, but I must admit that I didn’t make myself clear enough. The way I wrote it puts too much emphasis on the security staff. My actually feeling relate more to the supervisors. Just because someone has an ID which certifies that he really does work in that building and should be allowed easy access during regular work hours, that does not mean you’ll allow him to be alone in that place for eight hours unsupervised. He could spend that time sleeping, snooping around on other people’s desk, or doing even worse damage. And that kind of situation, to me, justifies closing the office to everyone.
There are also many positions where workers are dependent on each other. People in the postal system, for example, have specific roles in the delivery process, and cannot do their function properly unless others are there in the pipeline.
As I understand it, most laws on these topics say something about making “reasonable accomodation” for individuals’ religious requirements. The current discussion centers on what we consider to be “reasonable”. My feeling is that it is reasonable for me to require that my office allow me to leave a bit early on Friday to be home in time for the Jewish Sabbath, and I make up those hours by staying a bit overtime on Mon-Thurs. If I would insist on making up those hours on Sunday (when the building is closed and the air conditioning is off) I don’t think that would be “reasonable” to the same degree.
I’ll articulate the difference:
On the other hand, Christmas is dedicated to celebrating the supposed birth of Jesus Christ. It is specifically a religious holiday; Dec. 25 would have no other significance on our calendar if not for that. It would simply be the day between Dec. 24 and Dec. 26.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
PLDennison wrote:
It seems to me that the example you cite buttresses my point- the origins of the holiday in the this country were perceived by the colonial clerical powers-that-be as non-Christian or even anti-Christian. How does that translate into “ergo, it is exclusively a Christian religious holiday”?
Because I am trying to show that it has always had a nonChristian component. Therefore to base an argument on the premise that Christmas is exclusively a Christian religious holiday is to base it upon a historical inaccuracy.
Since there is a concurrent secular holiday occurring how is it obvious that it is the religious one being favored? I agree that if government gets involved in the religious one by erecting nativity scenes, etc. it clearly is preferential treatment. Absent that, it does not seem like preferential religious treatment to me.
Well, no. You’re overlooking the history and development of the calendar, for one. That day was considered a holy day long before it was considered to be the beginning of the calendar year.
Phil, I’ve known you long enough to know that you’re neither stupid nor incapable of reading comprehension. So what part of the bit about this holiday having significance in many cultures pre-Christianity don’t you get? Is it a fact you don’t like so you just decide to ignore it?
But this is not relevant to the discussion at hand because the topic has to do with separation of church and state and whether government workers should have paid holidays that are also holydays.
And what about Thanksgiving?
-Melin
pldennison said that Americanism is not a religion because she/he had never heard of it until I talked about it.
I would guess that something approaching 100% of Americans (or at least my college students at five different schools) had never heard of:
Wicca
Zoroastrianism
Dionysianism
the Greek Orthodox Church
Shakers
animism
etc.
Who, outside of a small group, had heard of David Koresh before Waco? or the comet/ castration club?
Is religion a belief system that acknowledges a power greater than oneself and which establishes codes of behavior? Is something a religion even if other people claim that it isn’t?
When I hear America and its icons described as “sacred,” that suggests a religious orientation to me (it also suggests balsphemy if the utterer is Christian, but that is another story). To someone who is fond of the Constitution but who doesn’t worship USA! USA! USA!, I have similar feelings about our self-worship as I do when surrounded by forced-Christian holidays. That’s not proof, I know, just illustration.
BTW, the point on MLK Jr. Day (for me, at least) was that some of my African-American friends treat it as a religious holiday. Who is to tell them that it isn’t?
Bucky
David, David, David…
Satan said no such thing bout what you quoted me as saying. As my post says (and it’s really unlike you to take a soundbite out of context and run with it - you cretainly don’t like it when that tactic is used on you), our FOUNDING FATHERS (or at least a bunch of them) found the practice of government sanctioned holidays to be monarchial and too much like what the country they were breaking free from would do for them to partake.
I threw this out in the hopes someone might decide to wonder, since we always seem to take into account what our founding fathers thought (gun control, seperation of church and state), how come we’re not taking this into account?
Is it because there are no specific comments about this in the actual legal documents themselves (AKA The Constitution)?
Doesn’t stop religious folks from bringing personal letters and feelings into the matter when they want prayer in schools. Doesn’t stop gun control people theorizing on BOTH ides of that debate what they really meant.
So I ask again - Since our founding fathers were against ALL holidays (not me, David), why on earth can we justify spending a single day of the year at home, whether it’s for Christmas, Thanksgiving, or blatantly “secular” holidays like Veterans Day and ironically enough, President’s Day?
Yer pal,
Satan
Melin:
OK, Melin, let me turn it around so you can see my point a little better: Exactly what was celebrated by the American people in the American colonies on Dec. 25 each year during the time that the celebration of Christmas was illegal? Do you think that if Christianity did not exist, the American people would be celebrating something on Dec. 25?
And, the corollary question: What exactly did people do before Christmas was made a Federal holiday by the executive order of Richard Nixon? Why can’t they just do that now, too?
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Corollary question #2: Who was it that went about the process of lifting the prohibitions in the colonies concerning celebrating Christmas, and for what reasons?
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
“We have a ‘Day of the Dead’–two of them, really, Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day. These exist solely to extoll the virtues of martyrs to Americanism.”
Not to nitpick – well, maybe a little – but Memorial Day is for the martyrs while Veterans Day is for those who performed military service and survived. By definition, a “veteran” is someone who completed service in the armed forces alive.
Or to put it another way: given a choice, most people fighting in a war would prefer that their service be commemorated on Veterans Day than Memorial Day. :^)
pldennison wrote:
IMHO,this is the crux of the matter. As I very specifically said in an earlier post, I believe the answer is yes. I’ve tried to give my reasons for believing that. You believe the answer is not yes, but what are your reasons for not accepting the possibility?
If Christianity had not existed, as far as we can infer from the historical record, most Americans, at least most from the European derived majority, would still be decorating trees, wassailing, kissing under mistletoe, decking the halls with boughs of holly and entertaining visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads to name a few activities.
Well, it is certainly possible to go back to the previous system whereby it was a holiday by State enactment instead of Federal. But why should we deny Federal workers a freebie which State workers can get?
Bucky wrote:
Bucky,
“Americanism” has been referred to as a religion, as have Marxism, Nationalism and other isms. But that is usually meant metaphorically, not literally. It is used to point out some of the parallels between those idealogies and religion, not to really imply they are the same.
Yes, but not the only one. I acknowledge that the federal, state, county and local governments are more powerful than I and that I have to follow their codes of behaviour. That doesn’t make it a religion. I think the common understanding of religion would require a supernatural aspect to both the greater power and to the self (allowing that for all practical purposes superior alien lifeforms in a saucer hiding behind a comet should be considered supernatural). Lacking that aspect, mere devotion to a cause, no matter how extreme, would not qualify as a religion IMHO.
Americanism: http://www.infidels.org/org/aha/essays/patriot.html
“Love 'em, fear 'em, and leave 'em alone.” – Dr. Spockiavelli
Kwanzaa is not a religious holiday. Nevertheless, should people be granted seven days off in order to observe it? Just because it was created in 1966 by one man, Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga, does that make it any less legitimate than any other special day or week or month? (BTW, the founder of Kwanzaa did not specify days off. But someone somewhere might ask for it anyway.) Info on Kwanzaa can be read at www.melanet.com/kwanzaa/ .
The reason Christmas Break, or Winter Break, if you prefer, is so long is because it can take two weeks or more to make the journey to Grandma’s house. Back in the horse ‘n’ buggy days, it could take that long just to travel to the next county and back, let alone the next state. Twenty miles a day was pretty good speed, especially in the winter when days are shorter and there’s snow on the ground. Since the parents were going to take their kids out of school that long no matter what, the schools bowed to practicality and made the two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s an official school holiday.
You may say, “But one can fly across the country in less than five hours today. You really only need, at the most, two days to make a cross-country visit.”
Yeah, if you can afford to fly. Far too many people must drive (or prefer to drive: “Damn the statistics! I don’t care if some pencil-necked geek with a pocket protector says it’s safe! I ain’t flyin’!”) to get anywhere. Or, as I’m going to do, ride the big Grey Dog to Texas to see Mom and the relatives I didn’t see at Thanksgiving. It’s gonna take thirty-six hours for the trip alone.
So, schools close for two weeks in December and January because:
>< DARWIN >
__L___L