Let's take Christ out of Christmas

[guizot]

@Dave_Hartwick

"Sooner or later, on television or in church, its arrival brings individuals and culture into direct confrontation with ideals. It causes us to examine relationships with our families, our community and our faith. At Christmastide, we must, directly or even by omission, set our priorities, establish our tolerances, and square our hopes with reality.”

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Maybe she’s talking about the soulful conversations that emerge while folks are waiting in lines outside of malls at 2:00am on black Friday?

[Dave_Hartwick]

“This seems as good a time as any to set our priorities by omission, honey.”

[Una_Persson]

True story…in elementary school, we were in music class singing Christmas songs. It was 1979. We were singing the song that goes “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat…” and one child sang, apparently too loudly, “Chr[long i]st’s Mass is coming…”…because just a few days before they had read in an encyclopedia that “Christmas” was really “Christ’s Mass”, referring to the Catholic religious celebration of Jesus. So this girl thought it was more correct to pronounce it “Christ’s Mass”, and that everyone was dong it wrong.

Well, the teacher absolutely fucking had kittens - she stopped everyone and immediately yelled at the kid, telling her “you will NEVER take the Lord’s name in vain again in MY class!” This little girl was sent crying to the Principal’s office, where even at her young age she distinctly heard the Principal asking the teacher “that’s it? That’s all she said? What’s wrong with that?”

After being quizzed by a genuinely flummoxed Principal, the girl was later sent back to class, and at the end of that day sent home with a note telling her mother of her hateful blasphemy. Said note was torn up and flushed down the toilet (and never asked about). The next day, the girl was made to stand up in front of the entire class, in tears as she was very shy, and apologize to them - for being disrespectful to Jesus. And the class then laughed at her and teased her for weeks afterwards, with the teacher’s nodding approval, for “hating Jesus.”

This was a public school, FTR. That little girl was me.

Take the Christ out of Christmas? Sounds good to me.

[dhkendall]

@Dave_Hartwick

You’ll need to ask Der Trihs for the cite because A is his:

“Why would left wingers wage a war on Christmas? The vast majority of them in this country ARE Christian.”

I’ll say it’s not a far-out assumption, IMO, but “vast majority” is probably an overstatement. The majority of Americans are indeed some sort of Christian per the CIA Factbook (Protestant 51.3%, Roman Catholic 23.9%, Mormon 1.7%, other Christian 1.6%). I don’t know the political split and don’t know how to find it out.

Yeah, B is Der Trihs’, too, so maybe he did mean to put in “right wing” to his claim that many Christians suffer from a persecution complex. I dunno. He’s awfully terse, maybe he’s cutting random bits out of his posts. That would explain a couple things.

I’d think that what with the SDMB being so American and all, and America being so religious, it would be odd if there wasn’t at least a couple observant Christians who vote Republican showing up. The claim that I’ve seen repeated is that the SDMB leans left, not that its participants are exclusively left wing.

I would agree that the SDMB leans left, but it’s also common knowledge that the SDMB leans atheist. Whenever there’s a time I want to “Ask the Athiest”, I don’t even turn to my athiest friends, I go straight to the Dope because I know I can instantly get feedback from all different stripes of atheist.

Long before I became a Doper, I’ve made the general observation that the more religious and evangelical you are, the more right-wing you are. Despite knowing hundreds of Christians personally, I personally can count on one hand the people I know who fall in the area on the Venn diagram where “left wing” and “highly religious” meet - and every single one of those are some of the best Christians I know (ie they’re not pushing religion down people’s throats, proselytizing at the drop of a hat, or overly God sensitive, like Una’s teacher)

[Nava]

@Nametag

Most Americans are Christians. Most celebrate Christmas in earnest piety, but they also partake of the secular celebrations that are mixed with it - the tree, the gifts, the lights, etc. Those things are not Christian things, they are European things, and I would not expect people from other cultures, or their descendants – Christian or not – to value them.

They’re not even European things, Southern Europe has been getting them via the US.