Of how practicing Christians celebrate Christmas inescapable permeates the USA celebration? In that statement (which I do not fully disagree with, mind) does the pagan origins to a greenery tradition which has been adopted by Christians to celebrate Christmas in the US matter? If the celebrants just have a tree and presents does the pagan roots have relevance to your statement if it has been tied to a Christian festival for the last few centuries?
I don’t know what the respondents meant by “somewhat religious” and neither do you. But it is definitely a misrepresentation to claim that “somewhat religious” is the same as “not religious.”
It has relevance to the fact that the background assumption of Christianity frequently dismisses, ignores, or makes incorrect assumptions about other traditions.
And how is any of this relevant to a discussion of whether church property should be taxed, or of whether “bless you” is a religious statement? Both of those things have been discussed in this thread. The thread’s 582 pages long, and has covered a lot of territory.
To sum up the initial question:
Why do non-religious people have to put up with religious people? Because the latter vastly outnumber the former.
The rest is details.
You don’t get to say that. People can belive what they want to believe. If we don’t follow that line of thinking, we’re as bad as everyone else who tells you what to think. You can’t change their minds.
All of them have to do with how ubiquitous religion is or should be in society and how much does it matter if atheists participate in religious rituals like saying bless you (or Insh’allah) or celebrating Christmas without Christ.
Yes. And so does what Broomstick’s been saying.
The thread has diverted somewhat into how ubiquitous Christianity is in USA society, because that appears to be where most of the people participating in the thread are living, and that is the religion that’s background ubiquitous here; to the point at which some of the posters appear to take it so much for granted that they can’t see when it’s manifesting.
Acknowledging reality is not “telling people what to think”. The non-religious have to deal with the religious because the religious vastly outnumber the non-religious. That says nothing about what anyone does, or should, think or believe. It has nothing to do with changing anyone’s mind. It’s the world we live in. Those who are not in the mainstream or the majority are forced to deal with the mainstream and the majority because that’s the way the world currently is.
You are welcome to work towards a world you would like better.
Yes, indeed we do get to say that, since the majority wrote the Bill of Rights, and it is Constitutional Law that in the USA, you have to put up with religious people. (and non-religious people too!)
It is the law.
It is the will of the majority.
It is the Right thing to do.
So I’m confused. How does indicating the roots of the current Christian festival of Christmas is pagan say anything about that? Regardless of roots, Christianity has repurposed them with Christian elements and that’s how the vast majority of people interact with them in the US.
And on this forum and other places in the internet the vast majority of the time the folks pointing out pagan roots aren’t neo-pagans or Wicca. They are atheists who believe it de-legitimizes the holiday.
(There is the other thing that Christmas didn’t become the big Christian holiday until the last century or so - the biggest day has always traditionally been Easter/Pascha)
In this case, the person pointing it out on this forum is a NeoPagan. Or did you think my username referred to a fondness for housecleaning and pristine floors?
I haven’t met atheists who use either Christian or Pagan roots as a reason to NOT celebrate should they desire to. I have met atheists who speak of “winter holiday” celebrations, or “solstice parties”, or something similar, but they are probably very much the minority at this point.
I don’t know what or how they celebrate, though perhaps it’s something to ask in the yearly thread on this that pops up in December. If I were to guess they want a non-supernatural Christmas with presents and decorated trees saying this stuff used to be religious but we know better now, while still having fun.
So what you’re saying is, you want to go on a religious crusade to spread atheism. Irony much?
I’m atheist (or at least seriously agnostic) myself, and would agree with the general sentiment that the #1 principle in play is Don’t Be A Jerk. The #2 principle, not being an entirely different principle but more of an extension or reminder, is: Even If Other People Are Jerks.
As for “millions have died over religion”, well millions have died over politics, resources, ethnicity, etc. Yes these are all often intertwined into one big ball of Reasons It’s OK To Kill These People, but I strongly suspect that subtracting religion from the ball would not really make the ball smaller (in that it’d happen less often), the other components of the ball would just expand to fill the empty space.
Besides, per your observation, it’s clear that the religious instinct - for good or bad - is a very strong component of what makes us human. We are by default not rational beings, though we are capable of rationality; we are associative beings. And there is an evolutionary reason for that - as a species, over time, associative, jump-to-first-conclusions thinking patterns have kept us alive better than “really? we gotta see more evidence and do double-blind tests to factor out inherent biases” thinking.
Inasmuch as the latter kind of thinking has led to things like medical and technological advances, you might be thinking that in another 10,000 or so years maybe more logical or analytical thinking patterns will begin to dominate in the human population. Don’t bet on it. Plenty of brilliant mathematicians and scientists “believe in stuff”, in an orthodox religious way or otherwise (Isaac Newton devoting as much or more mental energy in his life to applying numerology to decode the Book of Revelations as to writing Principia Mathematica).
And it’s not like we haven’t had examples of large-scale, top-down, institutionalized atheism promoted by the state over a long period of time. The Soviet Union officially deemed, and taught, that religious practices were at best cultural and historical theater, and at worst (or at bottom) a dangerous delusion, the Marxist “opiate of the masses”.
It didn’t exactly “take”, did it?
On the other hand, in Western Europe religiosity has (except for incoming immigrants) largely declined in that same span of time. So whatever factors lead to increasing “secular reproduction”, it’s not due to a program to spread it. (On the other hand, you can argue that the void of organized religion has partially or largely been filled by informal religious expressions, such as belief or interest in the “paranormal”, “supernatural”, or woo-woo “cosmic vibes” type stuff)
What I am saying are the words I type, no more and no less, and I am most assuredly not advocating for any atheistic “religious crusade”(whatever the fuck that means.
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Well said. But the same can be said if we substitute “violence” for “religion”.
Overall humanity has recognized that our instinct to violence has more down- than up-side. We accept it’s not going to be bred out of us for millennia, if ever. So we mostly proscribe it, admittedly with much less than total success, and suffer the residual harms.
Conversely, as to religion … at a societal level we presently happily wallow in it, largely oblivious to the many obvious downsides.
In solving any problem, the first step is recognizing we have a problem. The second step is harm reduction.
In the opinion of many atheists, including me, it’s time to put religious sentiment in the same category as desire for violence and begin the harm reduction.
As to the assertion that the Soviet Union proved that religion can’t be stopped I’ll argue BS. Or more specifically that that’s argumental overreach.
The existence of, e.g. the Tutsi/Hutu massacre of 26 years ago in what had been mostly a tribally / racially harmonious society shows that when a society backs off on the proscription of violence it will quickly rear its ugly head again. Especially in the presence of official incitement. Many other “failed states” in all eras also prove this reality.
The same is what we see in post-Soviet Russia. When the proscription drops away the weed re-grows. OK. But that doesn’t alter the fact it’s a weed.
Viewed from a high level of abstraction, Civilization is an artificial human construct where we garden our collective plot to help it help us to live happier, longer, better lives. Weeds are a bug, not a feature.
I think that’s part of the point. USA Christianity is so ubiquitous that even the symbols of other religions are likely to be co-opted by it.
There may well be some place on the internet where that’s so. I haven’t noticed people on these forums claiming that it de-legitimizes the holiday. Maybe I’ve missed it – do you have some links?
[quote=“robardin, post:594, topic:917474”
How on earth are you getting that out of a suggestion that reads to me clearly as recommending that both religious people and atheists don’t try to convert each other?
[I can’t seem to figure out how to fix this quote function in the time alloted for edit. That was to robardin, if it wasn’t clear.]
As a practical matter, yes, of course.
But we also need to deal with the religious for the same reason that the religious have to deal with the non-religious: because trying to do anything else doesn’t lead to a nice peaceful society in which everybody believes/non-believes the same thing: it leads to chaos and destruction and murder and societies coming apart.
There is plenty of evidence from history that it’s not possible to legislate or argue people out of belief, that large groups of people will not for extended periods of time all believe the same thing, and that humans as we are presently constituted will, indeed, go in for religion: not all of us, but most of us. And even a lot of atheists have chunks of the wiring.
If you want to reduce the influence of religion on public policy: the evidence seems to indicate that in the long run the way to do that isn’t to threaten religion, but to protect it – protect it in multiple manifestations as long as they don’t try to prevent the existence of other manifestations or of atheism.
D’you like Chinese lantern in your garden? A lot of people do. In the strawberry patch, it’s a weed.
And wild strawberry is a weed in the bean planting.
There’s no such thing as a category of things that are “weeds”, there are only things growing where some human doesn’t want them to. And often the weeds are bringing up minerals from deep in the soil where the cultivated plants can’t get at them, and making them available to the plants you’re trying to grow.
The problem with the Soviet Model is the Totalitarian Model. It assumes there is a Right Thinking, that people can be held accountable to (as by Commissars), that Wrong Thinking can and should be suppressed or eliminated and monitored against recrudesence.
That way lieth an Orwellian dystopia, does it not?
Despite being an atheist, I find religion fascinating. It’s been noted that oftentimes, atheists are far more knowledgeable about religious tenets and history than most religious believers, because we’ve actually READ the texts and know the evolution of beliefs behind them, the patterns of cross-pollenization, and so on.
I’ve come to realize that religion is extremely human. Essentially human, even. As Terry Pratchett observed, in a Ha Ha Only Serious way, it’s quite arrogant to designate ourselves Homo Sapiens, the Wise Man, the thinking person, as the defining attribute of our species. Closer to the truth would be Pan Narrans, the storytelling ape, with the title of “Homo Sapiens” being an aspirational “very good idea”.
We deeply crave causality, a narrative, a reason for things to have happened, to be happening, to be “going somewhere”. Even as an atheist (and this is where I paint myself as “possibly a strong agnostic”), I feel that pull, the desire for that, even as I say there is no narrative that can be verified against any other narrative posited by any religion.
It’s pointless to try to “weed out” religious expression. Instead, we should focus on curtailing negative bleedover effects, while enforcing a “rules of the playground” context of respect for others.
Huh. I don’t know if this is worth a mention or missing the point entirely, but I’m genuinely curious: consider a little kid who celebrates Christmas for Santa: his December involves writing a letter to Santa, and leaving cookies out for Santa, and putting up ‘Santa’ decorations, and singing along to songs about Santa and so on while sincerely believing that, with help from some flying reindeer, there’s a supernatural entity who travels around the globe delivering elf-crafted toys and the occasional lump of coal.
Let’s say that kid, having grown up and discarded those beliefs, is now raising a kid who, y’know, is big on writing letters to, and singing songs about, someone he believes exists; if the parent who used to believe now plays along, then how would we describe the way they’re celebrating?
Arguably I did it in this very thread:
My point wasn’t so much that the Christmas holiday is illegitimate, but that Xians who naively believe it to be a purely Xian holiday invented from whole cloth of, by, and for Xian believers are simply ignorant of the actual factual history of this multi-cultural, millennia old, world-spanning holiday.
Is that an example of what @Isiddiqui was referring to? I’ll let him comment yeah or nay.
The vast majority of these traditions were gathered into and appropriated hundreds of years prior to the US being founded. Heck, even then original American religious colonists (radical Protestants generally) had their views on Christmas completely overpowered by future European immigrants (more establishment Protestants or Catholics). And I think this matters quite a bit - US & Canadian Christianity did not engage in much appropriation of Native faiths, in stark contrast to European Christians with pagans - whether in the Roman Empire, Germany, or the British Isles (as opposed to Central American and South American Christianity - but that may be a difference in POV between Catholicism and Protestant denominations).
Well ‘de-legitimize’ was just my WAG, because I did not know the intent. Though, on this site there aren’t a lot of Christians who think it spawned whole cloth out of the early Church (who didn’t even celebrate the day). It strikes me that it may be a reaction to the “Put the Christ in Christmas” folks or the “War on Christmas” folks which are fairly rare here from what I’ve seen.
But I do have a question, while you are here. What is the end desire for the holiday? Personally I’d like to see it be de-commericialized and I have no desire in it continuing to be a federal holiday. Just a time for Church, getting together with family, and exchanging small meaningful gifts. Though I realize that’s a complete pipe dream. Do you want it to become like Thanksgiving (which has been pretty stripped of any religiousness)?