It’s Dec 25th and looks like Christmas has survived another year. Thank you Gibson and O’Reilly, I was worried for a moment there.
Starving Artist, you said earlier that the response to the War on Christmas is defensive. How do you think I feel? Unlike you, I do go to church regularly. Nevertheless, I have been told I can’t be a real Christian because of my views on homosexuality, evolution, or even the nature of God’s mercy. Look at the recent case in Dover, PA, where people who opposed the teaching of Intelligent Design were called atheists. There’s also that whole bit of nonsense that liberals aren’t religious or Christian when, indeed, the liberals I know are liberal in part because of their Christian faith. Indeed, the friend whose beliefs are most conservative, who is an ardent supporter of Ronald Reagan, hates Clinton, and who even voted for Nixon is a Wiccan. Needless to say, his conservatism does not extend to the Religious Right. 
There is no War on Christmas. What there is is a tissue of lies and half-truths spread by people for their own purposes be it money, fame, or merely a chance to ram their views down other people’s throats. As I said earlier, the “banning Christmas colors” claim is apparently based on a school’s not allowing people to use a school’s Christmas party as an opportunity to proselytize. As for people complaining that stores are wishing people “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas”, isn’t the usual complaint “Christmas is getting over-commercialized”? This seems to me to be one way to transfer the commercial aspects to its proper place. Also, the clerk at the local bookstore has no way of knowing whether the book on gardening I’m buying is going to a very dear friend who’s a Christian or to an equally dear friend who’s Wiccan, or what religion I follow. My Wiccan friends wouldn’t take offense at being wished a “Merry Christmas”; unlike the folks objecting to “Happy Holidays”, they’re sensible people. The reason I singled you out in my last post, and it was done somewhat lightly in tone, is because I had the temerity, I tell you, the temerity to give the fellow who delivers my newspaper about whom I know almost nothing a card which wishes him “Seasons Greetings” rather than the explicitly Christian Christmas cards I also bought this year. (The card, of course, contained his tip.) I do give my building superintendent an explicitly Christian Christmas card because I know he’s a Christian.
Yes, Bush calling the national Christmas tree a “Holiday Tree” was stupid, at least on the surface. On the other hand, it might be smarter than it looks. After all, if our devout, born-again Christian president doesn’t feel to call a large, green, vaguely triangular plant lit up with lights in December a “Christmas tree”, the secularists must be taking over, right? :rolleyes:
War on Christmas? If so, then why was my church packed for the early Christmas service last night? Why was there a mini traffic jam as services at my church let out around the same time services at the Catholic church across the street were starting? Why was the lead story on yesterday’s morning news about the crowds expected for last minute Christmas shopping? The morning paper hasn’t arrived yet, but if it follows its usual pattern, somewhere above the fold it will be wishing people a Merry Christmas.
Actually, as I’ve written this post, it seems to me there might be one group of people who feel Christmas is being overlooked and caught up in a wave of commercialism. As I recall, Orthodox Christians don’t celebrate Christmas until January. As it happens, my city has quite a few Orthodox Christians of various stripes, including Greek and Ukranian Orthodox, yet I haven’t heard anyone from those denominations saying anything about a “War on Christmas.”
As far as I can make out, as far as I’ve experienced, the “War on Christmas” doesn’t exist except as an excuse for people to draw attention to themselves, and maybe even point out how Christian they are and how easily wounded they are. To me, taking offense when none was intended is more of a threat to Christmas than some store clerk I’ve never seen before wishing me “Happy Holidays”. It goes against the spirit of love and charity which this holy season is supposed to be about. Christ is born! Not in high, unreachable splendor and untouchable, unfathomable power, but in the poorest, most vulnerable circumstances as a helpless infant without even a proper bed. By this demonstration that God who holds unfathomable power is willing to demonstrate that He does understand our fallible, human nature and we are forgiven and loved despite that. Surely to a Christian that is far more important than what bit of nonsense someone calls a symbol we hijacked from the pagans or what an overly-harrassed sales clerk calls an overly-harrassed shopper during the chaos of holiday shopping. (If I do go to hell, it may well include elements of a mall at Christmas, and I say this as both a shopper and a former sales clerk! :eek: )
Merry Christmas, everyone, and peace be among you.
CJ
By the way, Starving Artist, you do realize that when a devout, liberal Christian like me reads a conservative referring to
not long after he’s said
it gets a tad frustrating. How can I be out to secularize the country if I go to church more during Holy Week than you do in an entire year? (During Holy Week, I’ll go to 3 or 4 services, including Good Friday and Easter Vigil.)
If you’re that concerned about the secularization of the country or you’re perceiving the country as that secularized, perhaps the problem is more within yourself than the country. This is not offered as an insult, merely an observation from someone who’s still a bit frustrated with herself because she was too tired to attend two services last night and yet would be labelled as “anti-religious” by some because of her liberal views.
Also, technically, if you take the “Christ” out of “Christmas”, linguistically, you’re left with “Mass” since Christmas is a shortening of “Christ’s Mass”, as I understand it. Ironically, this may be seen as no better in the eyes of those Christians who don’t consider Catholics to be Christian. I’m still amazed to remember they do exist and I’ve encountered some of them.
Respectfully,
CJ
Heh. Reminds me of Mushmouth from Fat Albert. Awfully stubborn of you to keep responding when it takes that much work to do it.
Next time your monitor comes up, try and read your last post as neutrally as possible. Try to take your own politics out and read it like it was someone elses post. Does it sound a bit “tin foil hat conspiracy” to you? I’m not trying to be insulting, but this whole vast left wing conspiracy is kinda ridiculous. The left can barely organize itself enough to be much of an opposition party, much less wipe a holiday off the books.
How is this being attributed to the left anyways? What kind of evidence is there that any democrats are behind this sort of nonsense in any way? This seems to me like an arrow the more religious and nutty are trying to put in their own quiver to show how much the left hates Jesus and the religious.
My irony meter just exploded and you owe me a new one.
That’s what you get for using an irony meter to measure hypocrisy.
If there really was a war on Christmas, believe me, I’d be the first to volunteer for front-line active duty. No one wants to secularize the country more than I do, and no one can beat me for superior, high-minded scorn! It’s kinda like when I hear that Jews run the media and control all the money . . . “Ah, if only . . .”
Speaking of Irony…
Try reading a post from Starving Artist, followed up immediately by the following Google ad:
It’s kind of sad when even the advertising engine here at the SDMB thinks your posts are an attempt at humor! 
Sam
Jesus Christ, SA, if you’re actually buying into this “War on Christmas” bullshit, I’m going to have to entirely re-think my attitude towards you. The War on Christmas didn’t exsist until folks like Bill O’Reilly invented it. It’s a blatantly hypocritical politicization of the holiday. No one is forcing anyone not to say “Merry Christmas.” I’ve never seen anyone advertise a “holiday tree,” and I live in Marin County, California, which is just about the most liberal place in America. I’d like a cite that such things even exsist. And then I’d like to know why it’s “liberals” fault. Shouldn’t the owner of a store be free to call his merchandise whatever he likes, so long as he’s not defrauding the public? And when are you finally going to get it into your head that liberals are every bit as Christian as conservatives? Atheists are a tiny, tiny minority in this country, with virtually no political power at all. How many elected officials on the national scene are professed atheists? I don’t know of a single one.
The War on Christmas is bullshit. It’s the most cynical, manipulative, manufactured scandal I’ve ever heard of. I’m very literally stunned - and more than a little disappointed - that you’ve fallen for it. I really thought you were smarter than that.
I’m sorry to say it, but I suspect it’s a general inability on your behalf to perceive the world in terms other than “black and white,” or “us and them.”
Have you considered that this might have more to do with the quality of your arguments, than their content? I remember how you used to post. It bore a strong resemblence to your post in this thread about there being a “war on Christmas.” That is to say, almost entirely delsional, and based more on what you want your perceived enemies to be, rather than what they actually are.
Well, it’s blindly partisan bullshit, is what’s wrong with it. Same sort of crap that made me write off posters like ElvisL1ves or rjung a long time ago. Anytime anyone blasts “conservatives,” or “liberals,” as if they were one monolithic, fungible group with identical ideas, goals, and methods… well, they’ve pretty much just demonstrated that they don’t have anything to say that’s worth my time to listen to.
No, and no. For one thing, the “left” isn’t a party. It’s an incredible vague descriptor for just under half of the population of the United States. That’s far too vast a group to make any reliable generalizations about. Sure, there are some people on the left who fit your description. There are an equal number of them on the right. Seems to me that both groups are pretty much assholes. Why make it into a “left v. right” issue? Why not “assholes v. decent folk?”
Yes, it is. If I, as a self-identified liberal, say “We should be tolerant of other points of view,” and someone else who identifies as a liberal says, “Fuck all those motherfuckers who disagree with me,” then it is entire unfair to say that liberals are hypocrites, unless both statements are being said by the same person. And, even then, the best you can say is that that person is a hypocrite.
You do understand that no one who argues in favor of “tolerance” is arguing for universal tolerance, right? No matter how open-minded someone is, there’s always going to be an idea or a belief that is so totally incompatible with their own belief system that they have to fight against it? I mean, I suppose you could say I’m pretty “pro-tolerance,” but that doesn’t mean I have to give, say, rapists a slide. Personally, my big “tolerance” issue is gay rights. Which, obviously, means that I’ve got to be pretty intolerant of homophobes. Otherwise, my stance on gay rights is pretty meaningless. You’re going to have trouble finding someone more open-minded than me, but there are still some things that I find absolutely unacceptable. Does that make me a hypocrite? I certainly don’t think so, and the same goes for the people you’re having a problem with in this thread. “Tolerance” is a pretty broad term: so broad, in fact, it’s pretty much meaningless. Everyone has their limit on what should be tolerated. Instead of assuming someone is a hypocrite because they don’t measure up to what you think they should mean by tolerance, you’d be better served by finding out what they mean by tolerance.
It’s in imputing on one side qualities held in equal measure by both sides, and then in further extending those qualities to hold to everyone on that side, wether or not that’s accurate.
Evidentally, we don’t, as you seem to think a significant portion of the left are atheists who want to destroy Christmas. I honestly have no idea what you consider to be the left, as everytime I see you in a thread like this, you’re describing a political position wholly unfamiliar to me.
You couldn’t be more wrong. These widely accepted terms are precisely what obscures political debate on this board, and in the political landscape of the country as a whole. This nation is made up of hundreds of millions of people from every conceivable cultural, religious, and ethnic background. The idea that such a vast, heterogenous group of people can be usefully divided into only two political groups is so stupid it would be hilarious, if only the idea didn’t have so much popular currency.
Anyway, Merry Christmas, SA. Hope Santa brings you a new moniter and keyboard today.
Now that I have opened all my presents, let the war on Christmas continue.
This is utter made up bullshit. No one anywhere is attempting to “suppress the use of the word ‘Christmas.’” That’s a baldfaced lie, unless you’re just spouting ignorance from under a rock.
I just watched a movie made in 1933–a Christmas movie–wherein explicit mentions of the baby Jesus and the star of Bethlehem and yadda yadda yadda were just incidentally part of the presumed cultural background. There was no attempt in this movie to kowtow to special interests, or whatever the latest phraseology is. Nonetheless, the characters in this movie also referred to the “Holiday Season” and “Happy Holidays” and several other iterations of the word “holiday.”
Use of the word “holiday” is not now, nor has it ever been, an attempt to drive Christians underground. Idiots like SA who take offense at the phrase “Happy Holidays” have created this controversy out of whole cloth. It’s a fantasy. The “antagonism” you sense, SA, is a collective bristling at the ridiculousness of suddenly labeling this very old convention of using the word “holiday” around the Christmas season as an “offensive” act.
What’s funny is that this whole “War on Christmas” thing isn’t new at all. Back in the 70s and 80s the same type of people were doing exactly the same thing over the use of “Xmas”. That’s where all the “Keep the Christ in Christmas” stuff started. The sheer amusement I derived from knowing that the form “Xmas” was one started by Christians in the first place got me through that period nicely…
I think we should go back to the values of our founding fathers, and ban the heck out of Christmas. Just like the Pilgrims! Whee!
What? What?
Interesting stuff.
We’ve got enough dishonesty and sensationalism in the so called journalists. I think these folks need to be busted as dishonest when ever they can be. If they can admit they were wrong and annpunce it publically then fine. If not that shows their charecter. However, let’s be clear that we want and expect honesty from Fox and Air America. Liberal and Conservative alike.
I understand any school district wondering about blatent witnessing. I also understand Christians feeling the need to witness when celebrating the birth of Jesus. So let them witness. If they’re just passing stuff out then you can always throw it away. The same amendment that promotes seperation of church and state guarentees the freedom to worship and that is not an easy balance to find. It seems to me that the school in TX did a decent job of finding a compromise.
I’d like to mention also that FOX is looking for any story that might take the heat of the President and his problems. So why not just make something up. It’s like
Well the war in Iraq is pretty serious but look at this. Bill OR seems more of a White House pawn than ever before. I can only watch in limited doses. I just hope people continue to bust em for the lies and publisize it as much as possible.
You can only get caught in a lie so many times before you lose your credibility on just about anything.
Not necessarily. He’s obviously very serious about following that “old time religion”. If that’s not being truly conservative, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, the “War on Christmas” is a crock. It’s a right-wing media-created crisis designed to keep the devoted followers of Fox, Rush, Hannity,O’ Reilly, etc. in a state of perpetual anger so that they keep tuning in for more daily “outrages” and thus ensure further support for Republican candidates.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from an agnostic who just got a new keyboard.
I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone is being told not to say Merry Christmas. I have seen evidence that people are useing economic clout to force stores to change Happy Holidays signs to Merry Christmas. So you tell me, who’s free speech is being violated.
I do think we are in a time where seperation of church and state is being challenged more than ever before and we as a nation seem to be redefining those boundaries. Traditions are being challeneged and that’s not wrong but it is painful. I don’t agree with all of the attitudes about a more secular America. I keep remembering that the 1st amendment guarentees freedom of worship and so we must find a balance.
This story though, seems to be just bullshit. It’s not being conservative or liberal to call a liar a liar.
Just to save space and conserve therads, could we change the title to “John Gibson fo Fox Nwes, and Starving Artist fo Straight Dopes, Class Acts in the War on Christmas.” Pretty please? 
FOX NWES SPECIAL REPORT:
Anti-Christmas Partisans Sink USS Maine!
For better or worse (I am inclined to see it as the latter), Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton long ago proved that there is no substance to that statement.
Naw, tomndebb, serial liars lose their credibility as sure as shooting – it’s just that they can always depend on the abundant supply of good folks who will never, ever lose their credulity to keep things ticking along as per usual.
So it goes.