All day yesterday as I helped prepare for our annual heathen get together, I repeatededly muttered, “Jesus Fucking Christ!!!” over and over again. As I struggled getting the table leaf in, “Jesus Fucking Christ!!!” As I moved heavy furniture, “Jesus Fucking Christ!!!”
All to set up my gf asking me why I was talking that way. “Keeping Christ in Christmas, dear”.
And prr, if I have to work December twentyfifth next year, I will hunt you down!
If you have to work next Dec. 25th AND you don’t get a compensating day off, I will hunt me down–and I have a pretty good idea where to find me.
And you would be wrong. I have already pointed out two things–#1, “establishment of religion” is not a question of which religion, but rather which Christian denomination, and #2, the same people who passed the First Amendment showed clearly and unequivocally by their actions that a great many things which YOU think violate the First Amendment are in fact not violations at all.
I don’t know why you persist in thinking that you know more about what the First Amendment means than the people who wrote it and passed it.
First of all, “Pagan” isn’t a religion. It’s defined by what it’s not, not what it is. And New Year’s day is celebrated because of a calendar quirk, not a religious event.
Christmas, while incorrectly marking the birthday of Jesus, still is meant as a celebration of that event. It doesn’t matter how much secular bullshit has been piled onto it. It’s still the 2nd most important holiday on the Christian calendar, and by singling that Christian Holiday out, the federal government is favoring one religion over another.
Certainly know more than you do about it, that’s clear enough.
Not really. That may have been true a hundred years ago or more, but I have clearly outlined exactly what the established clause means today, in a few posts upthread. The SCOTUS does not concern itself with just which flavor of Christianity a law might favor, but with weather it has a primary effect of advancing religion, in general.
For instance, if Congress passed a law that said anyone who goes to Church/Temple/Mosque/whatever at least 5 times per year (in any religion at all) gets a tax break, that would violate the 1st amendment.
The fact that they feel the need to say that, I take as evidence that Christmas has largely, though not completely, lost its religiosity.
It’s lost its religiosity through a variety of causes: a decline in Christianity in general, a decline in the percentage of believing Christians among people who self-identify as cultural Christians, a decline in the percentage of Christians in the US population, an empowerment on the part of minorities to assert their religious beliefs without fear of persecution by the Christian powers, a similar empowerment on the part of atheists to speak out, and on and on. We’re still far from the point of the courts recognizing the essential hypocrisy in sanctioning Christmas as a legal holiday, however.
If you make something a holiday, chances are it’s going to acquire traditions not associated with the original purpose of that holiday. People have to do something to fill the free time they have. Labor day picnics are more about getting out with the family at the end of summer than about advocating for workers rights. Memorial day, too, is more a celebration of the beginning of summer.
So I think some here are confusing cause and effect when it comes to Christmas. It was a holiday in many states before it became a federal holiday. But then, the 1st amendment hadn’t been incorporated yet, so no biggie. The states could do whatever they wanted, including actually establishing a religion– which some did.
Imagine if Christmas wasn’t a holiday, and Congress proposed making it one, don’t you think there would be considerably more push back than we’re seeing in this thread?
Yes, there is a secular purpose: many citizens (including government employees) are going to want to abstain from government business because they will be travelling or otherwise celebrating the holiday at home with their families. So, the government makes a virtue out of an HR necessity and declares the government closed for business on this day. Not because they want people to go to Mass, but because it wouldn’t be cost-effective to keep the government open for business on this day.
So far so good. But you argue that this is insufficient because the reason why those people want to abstain from government business is their own religious beliefs. Without conceding that this isn’t entirely accurate (many people celebrate the holiday as a purely secular matter), I fail to see why the private, non-governmental motivations of these citizens/employees somehow transfer a religious motivation to the government.
The government is neither approving or disapproving of the motivations of its citizens and employees. Rather it is acknowledging that a lot of citizens and employees will be at home and it doesn’t make sense to stay open.
It probably wouldn’t run afoul of the First Amendment to keep the government open on Christmas. After all, Easter Sunday, Ascension (Thursday), Epiphany (Jan. 6) as well as the High Holy Days or Islamic feasts aren’t days off without any constitutionality problem. However, if Christmas were stricken precisely in an effort to discourage its wide celebration, that could potentially be found to burden Free Exercise. It would be a pretty close case in such an instance, I think.
There’s are thousands of Pagan Churches right here in the uSA
http://thepaganchurchoftherisingsun.org
http://www.americanpaganchurch.org
(this last plays music)
And the ancient Romans would disagree with you about why we pick New Years.
I notice you had no reply to my proofs that Christmas is a secular event in the USA.
The only sense that New Year is a religious holiday in the US is that it’s also the Feast of the Circumcision in the RCC. But that’s just a coincidence. I’ll stick by my statement that not only is “Pagan” not a specific religion, but in 1870, when the holiday was proclaimed, there were effectively ZERO pagans in the US, other than Amerindians, and they certainly had no tradition of celebrating Jan 1. Every day on the calendar can be associated with some RCC saint or event or whatever. “New Year” is not a religious holiday in the US and never has been. The holiday was not proclaimed in order to facilitate the celebration of a religious holiday, unlike “Christmas”.
I dismiss it, because it doesn’t matter. It’s both secular and religious. That doesn’t make it not religious.
Just as a hypothetical question, what if the secularists won some major court battles and we somehow got some generic winter solstice type federal holiday in place of Christmas? Let’s say December 21st. What would happen if Christians just collectively said screw it, we don’t know when Jesus was born so that one works as well as any other and they moved holiday to coincide with the new date just out of convience? In a few years, we would have this holiday on December 21st that is a hybrid of all kinds of different traditions including economic ones but private Christian groups now say that it is holy day as well. Would that be preferable to the current situation?
SCAdian has an interesting OP, wanting to know why the observance of Christmas as a Federal holiday is not in violation of the First Amendment.
If s/he really believes it is, why doesn’t s/he do something about it? How about starting a lawsuit, so that it’s off the list of Federal days?
That’s the problem with people who complain about such things, they want to complain but won’t do anything about it.
And if they did do something I would predict that the real world would give them a swift slap upside the head. Even taking religion out of it, think about that scene in the judge’s chambers in the original Miracle on 34th Street, the one where the judge’s political manager tells him about the career consequences of ruling that Kris is not Santa Claus.
Pretty much, SCOTUS has already ruled:
*The Court ruled that the crèche has a legitimate secular purpose within a larger holiday display to celebrate the season and the origins of Christmas which has long been a part of Western culture. The Federal “Government has long recognized—-indeed it has subsidized-—holidays with religious significance.” *
First off, your hypothetical isn’t going to happen. Catholics, for one, would not change observance of Christmas and that’s 25% of Americans right there.
But if we look at this just for the sake of argument, I think the SCOTUS would look at this like we look at parking laws. If your time is up in the parking lot, you don’t get to move your car over two spaces and start the clock over again. 
IOW, I think the new holiday would have to be sufficiently far removed from Dec 25 so as not to be confused with it. What constitutes “sufficiently far”? That’s what they get paid the big bucks to figure out. Maybe they could develop another 3-point test.
Fine with me. I have no objection to days off work–in fact, I think we ought to have a whole lot more vacation-time in this country. If Christians want to prostrate themselves, or beat themselves with birch branches, or chant in Latin, or beat their chests raw and bloody, or give each other stupid gifts that they don’t want and can’t afford, or eat all sorts of awful and unhealthy food, or contemplate unlikely fairy stories of dubious provenance, or stay up until midnight to sit on hard benches, or drink themselves into a stupor among relatives they despise, it’s no skin off my ass what they do on their day off work. If they would do this sort of shit to themselves more often, in fact, I’d be even happier to have regular demonstrations that there’s something abundantly wrong with them.
Of course it has some religious significance. But the very large preponderance of non Jesus themed “top” Xmas Movies and songs makes it clear it is no longer even close to be mainly religious. In fact based upon that, it seems it’s about 10% religious at most.
I’d probably agree that the Christmas season is about 10% religious, if not less*. Christmas day? No, not buying that. There is a 50% jump in church attendance on Christmas day vs your random Sunday.
*In the US, the Christmas season is effectively the entire month of Dec. Or the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
John Mace (and anyone else in this thread arguing that Christmas is obviously a religious holiday and therefore making it a legal holiday is obviously a violation of the separation of church and state), you seem to be making the following two assumptions:
Any word used in legal arguments must be exactly and precisely defined.
Any legal distinction must be precise or it can’t be used.
These are both wrong. The first is wrong because language doesn’t work that way (and the human mind doesn’t work that way). I recommend that you read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind by George Lakoff. The categories created by words in natural languages are always imprecise. In this case, it means that there’s no simple category of religious holidays. Some holidays are more typically religious than others, but that’s all you can say.
The second is wrong because a great deal of legal distinctions are about categories with no precise boundaries. For instance, what does it mean that a jury is supposed to declare a defendent guilty only if there is no reasonable doubt? I remember my one time on a jury. The judge carefully instructed the jury that this didn’t mean that we could only convict if there was no possible logical doubt. He didn’t define what the boundary was for a reasonable doubt, since we were expected to decide that for ourselves. A lot of the law works like this. No state establishment of religion is considered another case of something with no precise boundaries. If there is no significant effect of a law in establishing religion, then it’s considered to be legal. There is no legal definition of what significant effects are.
I know that this is hard for some of us to accept. Hey, I’m a mathematician and a trivia expert, and I’ve tried to make precise, incredibly picky distinctions my whole life. But language doesn’t work that way and law doesn’t work that way. Sorry about that.