My pastor, the GlurgeMeister, he of the excitedly repeated conservative talk-radio factoids and the congenital inattention to detail, gave us the following this morning, as an illustration of how the Secular Humanists are taking over Christmas ( " :eek: " ) :
And I muttered under my breath, “No.” Which made the Better Half snicker, as he knows how I feel about Pastor’s glurge.
Anyway.
I can’t find anything on Snopes or the Web; the closest I can get is the Texas school district that said “No red or green decorations at the Christmas party” last year.
I was hoping it was Oscar Robertson and Mel Gibson.
This may be the case that they are referring to. Note the date. I found plenty of other hits for Plano + “red and green,” but that’s the first one I found that isn’t on World Net Daily or a heavily “anti-War on Christmas” type site.
Wouldn’t a town law against wearing red and green be more likely to be a law promoted and passed by fundamentalist Christians opposed to secular celebrations of commercial Santa-Claus Christmas than
Why would a bunch of atheists or sec humanists or sep-of-church-and-state folks go after red and green? That would be like banning chocolate easter bunnies from the gift shops of hospitals receiving government funding during easter season!
Yeah. But Pastor’s done this sort of thing before–his rendition of the “Teenage Romanian Martyrs” changes subtly every time he uses it in a sermon–so somehow I’m not surprised to see “school bans red and green napkins” morph into “town bans red and green clothing”.
But I’m kinda out of the loop where news items concerning “Outrages Perpetrated By The Evil Forces Of Secular Humanism” are concerned, so I thought I’d check to see if anyone had heard anything.
Why did you say “no” under your breath? Why not call him on his bullshit instead of letting him get away with it? Someone has to make a stand for common sense!
The OP was written on Sunday, and while I’m not Christian, I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk back during the church service. So that’s probably why she just said no under her breath.
Yeah, there’s no way short of James Bond super-villain mind-altering drugs that I could ever be induced to stand up in the middle of Sunday morning service and tell the pastor to quit retailing glurge. Besides, he’s basically a nice guy, salt of the earth, unpretentious, honest, kind, sincere, the works.
He just happens to believe that everything that arrives in his In box is true, that’s all.
The Bill O’Reilly factoid, then (December 9, yep, the date fits) is almost certainly what he heard, or heard about, at second- or third- or fourth-hand, marvelously morphed in his own inimitable fashion into “town bans wearing of red and green”. Thanks, Danalan.
Eve, if it makes you feel better, I did call him on one thing, but at long distance–I wrote him a letter. One morning he told us in great excitement about some atrocity being perpetrated, I don’t even remember what it was, and it was so obviously an Onion story that I was dumbfounded when it didn’t turn up on the Onion. But then I discovered that there’s a sort of Onion-For-Christians website called the holyobserver.com, and sure enough, there it was on their front page (whatever it was). So I wrote him a very polite letter, included a copy of their disclaimer, explained that it was a parody website, and left it at that.
And I also once wrote him a four-page letter telling him, very politely, exactly how his proposal to “hire ourselves a black minister in order to do outreach to black folks” was racist. He was VERY shocked and upset that anyone would think he was a racist, called me on the phone, nearly cried (and yes, he used the line “my best friend in college was black”) and the very next Sunday devoted a good part of his sermon to emotionally, and I believe sincerely, disclaiming any imputations of racism. He really does think that “they have a different culture”, etc.
And not incidentally he publicly repudiated his “neat idea” about hiring a black guy to do outreach to Black Folks, so at least that’s off the church’s plate.
So I do call him on the more egregious ones. But the rest, eh, life’s too short.
Another example of humanism trying to dictate to good Christians how they should think. I mean, really, a good Christian hate monger having to retract something merely because it is wrong?
Mr. Gibson and Mr. O’Reilly are getting a lot of mileage out of their scam, but it just isn’t true. There is no War Against Christmas. The Christian churches in the US now have more power than at any time in history, and yet some of them are howling, “Discrimination! Persecution!”
I’d think that Christians who were truly worried about Christmas would object to the display of red and green, snowmen, Christmas trees, wreathes, gift-giving and even Santa Claus, since all of this is part of the secular Christmas tradition. I’d respect someone who did, since it’s really been bastardized into a huge materialistic, commercial excess, and I’m saying that as an atheist.
