You could put it that way. And yes. Many Jewish communities would not accept anyone who had a Christmas tree, or otherwise did their own celebration of Christmas.
(Showing up at the office party to fulfill secular social obligations is okay, though. But less awkward if they call it a holiday party. Which most employers do.)
I wonder if this may help you understand why people are talking about how steeped in Cultural Christianity you are.
No Jewish person would get baptized because everyone else is doing it.
I feel my ignorance has been somewhat fought in this thread. Since my atheist half Jewish half “Lutheran” (mother’s family, also not practicing) family celebrated Christmas and Easter without any reference to Jesus whatsoever, I imagined other secular families were rather similar. Sometimes gelt would show up in our stockings, I thought nothing of it.
Some of my Jewish friends didn’t celebrate Christmas but I thought nothing of that either. They were doing their own thing, so what. It didn’t strike me that Christmas would be seen as oppressive to people who weren’t Christians. But I guess for some it really does.
I find modern Christmas oppressive but it’s the capitalism and yucky schmaltz. I loathe Christmas music except hymns, which are sung in church, period.
In which Kimstu actually said:
That is in no way comparing slavery to trinkets. That is comparing the iconography of Christian angels to the iconography of the Founding Fathers; and comparing the historic oppression of Black people to the historic oppression of Jews. Which is not remotely the same thing.
You appear to be arguing that the holiday is secular because the holiday is secular.
MrDibble appears to me to be arguing that it’s not a day of deep religious significance for much of anybody anywhere in the world, except maybe for a minority so tiny that they can be considered not to matter.
Which appears to rest on your argument that nearly all Christians aren’t celebrating a religious holiday, but only a commercial one.
It is increasingly less and less so, except for Federal employees. Many stores and places of recreation are now open on Christmas; though there’s recently been some backlash against this.
See posts 81 and 87. 67% celebrate it as a religious holiday, which is a strong majority; 35% as strongly so, which is a minority but quite a large chunk of people; 46% of voters think it should be more strongly emphasized as a religious holiday.
Whether it’s a federal holiday or not affects whether it’s a day off or not only for Federal workers.
As I believe @Babale also said: that quote’s correct, but it’s incomplete, and the full quote changes the meaning:
I’m arguing that technically it shouldn’t be, as it’s a Federal recognition of one religion to the exclusion of all others (and to the lack of any); but I’ve also been saying, quite clearly, that it’s utterly impractical to call for its abolition as a Federal holiday in anything resembling the current situation.
Those who are saying ‘but everybody should get the day off!’ are also, presumably, in favor of all private businesses including stores, restaurants, and places of entertainment being closed. Currently some of them close, some of them don’t.
That’s a fair argument.
Some school districts etc. deal with Good Friday by calling it “spring break”. Spring break, every year, mysteriously coincides with Good Friday, though it may be a bit longer than just the one day.
That solution also works for Christmas for schools, which generally take off the whole stretch from around Dec 24 until around January 2nd, and can (and often do) just call it “winter break”; but while I’d personally be happy to live in a society in which everything but emergency services shut down for that long, the society as a whole wouldn’t work well with that at all.
He’s not a Christian.
– well, wait a minute.
That reads to me as if MrDibble was raised in a non-religious fashion in a society so imbued with background Christianity that even the Muslims got Christmas presents.
What’s missing here is any recognition of the extent to which the background assumptions of Christianity can permeate a society. It’s really hard to see one’s own back-of-the-head assumptions – until one sees them, at which point they can be as glaringly obvious as they often are to those who don’t share them.
The only sense I can make out of this is either:
\ you were so soaked in not-consciously-recognized Christianity it seemed utterly normal to be baptized
or
/ you grew up in an atmosphere of thinking that almost nobody really believes their religion, it’s all just a batch of tsotchkes that don’t mean anything in particular.
If it’s the latter, that might explain a lot of this thread.
Nobody has said that it doesn’t happen.
But it’s really strange to see you saying “Your experience being limited/constrained is kind of why this thread exists” as if it weren’t you that this applies to.
Claiming the holiday is not “about” religion for most people is a dramatic goalpost move from the OP, which claimed that the holiday is “entirely secular”.
If you’re going to be derisive and snarky about this . . . well, I can’t respond appropriately in GD.
Also, you seem to be wildly focused on your personal feelings as an atheist as somehow representative of how “everyone” thinks about Christmas.
For reals? What a coink-y-dink! 
Anyway, to add an anecdote: I belong to a volunteer organization. In advocating for some non-Christian members, I was participating in a discussion about whether we were excluding/othering Jews and others by always turning December into a Christmas-centered month with events that many of the non-Christians don’t feel comfortable participating in (while also not recognizing religious holidays of any of the rest of our membership/community).
The upset pushback I got from otherwise welcoming and secular/cultural Christians about the fact that there is nothing religious about it, anyone was allowed to join in and secularly sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory To The Newborn King” or “Christ the Savior is Born”, and it’s just about the “season”, and everybody celebrates Christmas (even though I was representing people who explicitly did not) was shocking, and so we shouldn’t listen to anybody or change anything, even if some of the Jews in the organization are feeling left out (and we found one who says he doesn’t care, so I guess that’s definitive).
Christmas is “just secular background noise” until you call any piece of it into question. Then it suddenly becomes the most important and sacred tradition.
Plenty of hymns are played outside of church, period.
Speaking from my experience only I worked for 40 years in businesses that were, on average about 80% Jewish in terms of the make-up of employees and customers , in a city with a large Jewish population.
I have had dozens, if not hundreds, of Jewish coworkers and clients. Once, one of them celebrated Christmas - because his brother married a Christian woman that was really into Christmas.
We had a sort of amusing discussion about it afterwards, I laughed at his puzzlement over the “hanging socks over the fireplace thing”, but it is sort of an odd thing if you’re completely unfamiliar with Christmas. And he was completely unfamiliar with Christmas, to an extent that surprised me.
But that was it for Christmas celebrations. I do not know any other Jewish person that ever celebrated Christmas in any way, shape or form other than to take off work on the federal holiday. They didn’t put up Christmas trees or hand out presents on the morning of December 25th. They didn’t tell their kids about Santa. They didn’t celebrate Christmas, period. None of them. Ever. If you wished them Merry Christmas they would politely inform you that they were Jewish and didn’t celebrate Christmas.
Maybe it’s different for Jewish people living in primarily Christian environments, but my experience is that while there are secular elements, people of all faiths actually don’t come together to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
In this day and age, it means that they’ve been raised with little education about Judaism and are therefore ignorant of its doctrinate boundaries. “Apostate” would seem to imply a deliberate, knowledgeable rejection of the religion, which I don’t think is a category that the huge majority of tree-decorating Jews fall into.
The Jewish term for this is “tinok shenishba” - a Jewish infant who was kidnapped by non-Jews. Such an individual worshipping the religion he/she was raised in is not considered a sinner.
Something that happened when I was a few weeks old has zero bearing on my actual life.
I’ve also fasted for a full Ramadan, doesn’t make me steeped in Islam.
I wouldn’t compare fasting for one full Ramadan to be akin to participating in the Christian entrance rite, but that’s just me. Cultural Christianity doesn’t necessarily mean you are actively believing in it, but that you exist in a society so steeped in Christianity that you can be baptized “because everyone else was doing it”.
But the fact that your family would include you in an inherently religious and extremely significant Christian event speaks against the idea that your environment wasn’t impacted heavily by religion.
Yeah, I’ve known plenty of Jews who did those things - and every single one of them is married to a non-Jew who celebrates Christmas. I say “non-Jew who celebrates Christmas” rather than Christian because plenty of these spouses are not Christian ( not even by background) but instead come from cultural backgrounds where it is common for people to “mix and match” religious rituals and practices and it is not seen as inconsistent to have a Christian wedding and a Buddhist funeral. The people I’m talking about are not Japanese but this article kind of explains what I am talking about - but I do not know of a non-Asian culture/religion that has that attitude.
The paraphrase was exactly a one-for-one substitution.
I’m arguing that the holiday is secular because the majority of its practices are secular.
So entirely unlike arguing that the holiday is religious because it started out religious.
Again, making up bullshit that I have not said.
Which tells me you don’t actually have a counterargument to what I’ve actually said.
More bullshit I didn’t say.
Many large companies line up with many federal holidays too, though… sure, not President’s Day , and (ironically) mostly not Columbus Day, but Memorial Day, Labor Day, and yeah, Christmas.
We’ve already established your reading needs work, given the things you’ve apparently thought I posted that I have not.
I was raised in a society where Christmas is so secularized that even some Muslims have no problem participating in it.
Or the excluded middle of : I grew up in an atmosphere of recognizing when people are practicing their religion and when they’re just doing non-religious things, and also knowing that some people can do things that are religious to others but not to themselves. That things and acts aren’t magically religious in-and-of-themselves, but only what the humans involved do with them.
As opposed to the people whose culture and religion are so entwined they project that on everyone else, and can’t conceive how it’s possible to partition the religious from the secular. And then project that failure of conception onto everyone in society.
Did I say anyone had said it didn’t happen?
I’m not the one projecting from the parochial to the masses. I’m the one looking at how the masses actually celebrate the holiday.
Christmas, as the majority of society celebrates it, is now entirely secular
The Pit’s right there, knock yourself out. →
I’m not an atheist.
My “participation” was probably limited to crying and pissing in the font. I participated way more in the fast than I did in my own baptism.
Have I indicated that my wider environment was religion-free, in some way? I’m pretty sure I indicated quite the opposite. What it wasn’t, was “culturally Christian”. Broader Western society is, but not the part I was raised in. And when we get to broader society, well, then we’re back to that also being the same for Jews.
Also, there was no significance for us in my being baptized, never mind “extremely”. My mom didn’t even keep the certificate.
Hence the being deeply embedded in Christian culture as your mother, who you say was atheist, felt like she should do it since everyone else was.
So why do it? It is literally a Christian entrance rite. Was it because others would talk if you weren’t? Was it because it was just something that was done? Because it definitely speaks to being culturally Christian more so than anything else you’ve said in this entire thread.
Did I say anything about “should”? She did it because she could, not because she felt pressure to. As a fucking lark.
I’m getting pretty fucking sick and tired of people making up shit they think I said.
Like I actually fucking said in plain fucking English - for a lark.
That’s just the kind of person my Mom was.
This makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Why would one participate in a Christian entrance rite as a lark?
Your lack of a sense of fun is not my concern. I bet your Mom never dyed her hair pink for a year in 1978, either.
What, was she snickering to herself when promising to raise you in the Christian faith and when the priest/pastor proclaimed that you now belong to Christ? Do people who aren’t religious generally consider a baptism worship service a fun occasion?
Not where I live. I guess I live in a weird part of the USA. You’d never hear Hark the Angels in a store or something. No Lo A Rose or O Come All Ye Faithful. I think they scrub all the overtly Christian stuff to forestall complaints such as the ones in this thread. It’s all White Christmas and Santa Baby.
Quite probably, knowing my Mom.
Possibly just my mom, really. And my dad, of course, he did go along with it. Although to hear him tell it now, he had to be talked into it.
I know I wouldn’t treat a religious rite like that quite that cavalierly. I’m not religious, but I’m not a dick, either. My mom could be a colossal dick. Fun people often are.