The War on Christmas or Sometimes You Can’t Tell the Enemies
Posted: December 15th, 2006, 12:42 pm
<center>(originally published byOpEdNews)</center>
The Bible, with its inconsistencies, its violence, the heartless manner in which the God in which most people believe is portrayed is still referred to as the “good book” by many people and they somehow extract a serious meaning of life from its pages.
Even science, when it gets to a point, needs to have faith in hypotheses which lead them to create theories. One thing about the Bible is it stops. The book was written and it stopped. No more miracles, no more burning bushes, no more turning water into wine. It just stopped
This article is not about the Bible per se, but I must share one thought about the Bible before I get to my main point.
During one of the many times that God saw that His experiment was failing, He decided take care of the sinners by flooding the earth.
There were infants and animals not destined for the ark that died horrible deaths because some people were sinning. What sin did these little ones commit to deserve such an awful fate?
I’ve been told that I have a lot of nerve trying to figure out why God does stuff. Who am I to try to second guess God? Do I think that I’m as powerful as He is?
As I don’t believe that a god exists, I can’t rightly answer that question.
However, if there is a God, He has endowed me with a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s the gift of a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong that God, Himself, embedded within me that gives me the right to question Him. If He exists, He knows that I can read The Bible, which I have several times, and look upon some of the things that He does as horrific and unnecessarily cruel. The sense He gave me tells me so.
Sometimes I think that atheists feel as though they must know The Bible better than Jews or Christians because they must know what it is they don’t accept.
To the point.
Have you heard? There’s a war on Christmas.
That’s right. The right wing is fighting the politically correct left to keep Christmas and its spirit alive and well in The Former United States of America. After all, everyone who lives in The FUSA is Christian, right? And, if they’re not, they should be.
The laws of The FUSA, so they say, come right out of The Bible. More specifically, the laws are based upon the Ten Commandments, are they not?
For example, most people I know follow that all important commandment, “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.” (Exodus 34:26).
The so called religious right must someday explain why they don’t refer to the only set of laws in the Bible which is specifically called the “ten commandments” when they speak about displaying The Ten Commandments. If the laws of The FUSA are based upon The Ten Commandments, it would be nice to know which ten commandments they’re based upon.
Many atheists are open minded enough to consider that there may have been a man who lived about 2000 years ago who was not unlike Henry David Thoreau, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King. If this man did exist, we can celebrate his being here among us as we celebrate Joan Of Arc's being here among us.
However, the people who are on the war path to smite those who would repeal the flaunted celebration of Christmas may, in fact, be the real enemies of that holiday.
This group may consist of, but may not be limited to, Robert Eckert, CEO of Mattel, Alfred J. Verrecchia, CEO of Hasbro and H. Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart.
If someone like Jesus of Nazareth did exist, the above inordinately wealthy people have seen to it that much of our good, Christian population has made a travesty of his existence.
In the FUSA of 2006, as in past years, his existence is about getting the latest, over commercialized toy or electronic gadget. In recent years, “believers” have been known to stand in line, some actually getting into arguments and fist fights to make sure they get the last available golden calf. Corporations in their greedy quest for consumers’ dollars fuel this ferocity.
If one Googles “The Origin of the Christmas Tree”, one will receive lots of hits. Many, if not most of the hits, will talk about how celebrating holidays by decorating trees began long before the advent of Christianity.
However, in today’s FUSA, keeping Christmas “sacred” is about who can kill the largest evergreen and adorn it with more trinkets than their friends can place on their trees. Ornaments such as flying reindeer, a non existent creature, and Santa Claus, also non existent, adorn the kidnapped and relocated trees. Some people place ornaments on their trees that are of a religious nature, but, in truth, what does evergreen mutilation have to do with a man who practiced civil disobedience 2000 years ago?
We mustn’t forget the thoughtless waste of electricity. People risk life and limb climbing on their roofs to make sure they waste more of a precious resource than their neighbors waste. Though some of the trashing of fossil fuel generated energy is done on behalf of religion, most of it celebrates Santa and those freak reindeer.
Maybe on Gandhi’s birthday Hasbro should produce and sell Gandhi dolls which fast when you wind them up.
To friendship,
Michael
“I’m a born again atheist” – Gore Vidal
World Conditions and Action Items
Speak Your Mind And Read Mine
CDs
“Flameland”
The Bible, with its inconsistencies, its violence, the heartless manner in which the God in which most people believe is portrayed is still referred to as the “good book” by many people and they somehow extract a serious meaning of life from its pages.
Even science, when it gets to a point, needs to have faith in hypotheses which lead them to create theories. One thing about the Bible is it stops. The book was written and it stopped. No more miracles, no more burning bushes, no more turning water into wine. It just stopped
This article is not about the Bible per se, but I must share one thought about the Bible before I get to my main point.
During one of the many times that God saw that His experiment was failing, He decided take care of the sinners by flooding the earth.
There were infants and animals not destined for the ark that died horrible deaths because some people were sinning. What sin did these little ones commit to deserve such an awful fate?
I’ve been told that I have a lot of nerve trying to figure out why God does stuff. Who am I to try to second guess God? Do I think that I’m as powerful as He is?
As I don’t believe that a god exists, I can’t rightly answer that question.
However, if there is a God, He has endowed me with a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s the gift of a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong that God, Himself, embedded within me that gives me the right to question Him. If He exists, He knows that I can read The Bible, which I have several times, and look upon some of the things that He does as horrific and unnecessarily cruel. The sense He gave me tells me so.
Sometimes I think that atheists feel as though they must know The Bible better than Jews or Christians because they must know what it is they don’t accept.
To the point.
Have you heard? There’s a war on Christmas.
That’s right. The right wing is fighting the politically correct left to keep Christmas and its spirit alive and well in The Former United States of America. After all, everyone who lives in The FUSA is Christian, right? And, if they’re not, they should be.
The laws of The FUSA, so they say, come right out of The Bible. More specifically, the laws are based upon the Ten Commandments, are they not?
For example, most people I know follow that all important commandment, “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.” (Exodus 34:26).
The so called religious right must someday explain why they don’t refer to the only set of laws in the Bible which is specifically called the “ten commandments” when they speak about displaying The Ten Commandments. If the laws of The FUSA are based upon The Ten Commandments, it would be nice to know which ten commandments they’re based upon.
Many atheists are open minded enough to consider that there may have been a man who lived about 2000 years ago who was not unlike Henry David Thoreau, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King. If this man did exist, we can celebrate his being here among us as we celebrate Joan Of Arc's being here among us.
However, the people who are on the war path to smite those who would repeal the flaunted celebration of Christmas may, in fact, be the real enemies of that holiday.
This group may consist of, but may not be limited to, Robert Eckert, CEO of Mattel, Alfred J. Verrecchia, CEO of Hasbro and H. Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart.
If someone like Jesus of Nazareth did exist, the above inordinately wealthy people have seen to it that much of our good, Christian population has made a travesty of his existence.
In the FUSA of 2006, as in past years, his existence is about getting the latest, over commercialized toy or electronic gadget. In recent years, “believers” have been known to stand in line, some actually getting into arguments and fist fights to make sure they get the last available golden calf. Corporations in their greedy quest for consumers’ dollars fuel this ferocity.
If one Googles “The Origin of the Christmas Tree”, one will receive lots of hits. Many, if not most of the hits, will talk about how celebrating holidays by decorating trees began long before the advent of Christianity.
However, in today’s FUSA, keeping Christmas “sacred” is about who can kill the largest evergreen and adorn it with more trinkets than their friends can place on their trees. Ornaments such as flying reindeer, a non existent creature, and Santa Claus, also non existent, adorn the kidnapped and relocated trees. Some people place ornaments on their trees that are of a religious nature, but, in truth, what does evergreen mutilation have to do with a man who practiced civil disobedience 2000 years ago?
We mustn’t forget the thoughtless waste of electricity. People risk life and limb climbing on their roofs to make sure they waste more of a precious resource than their neighbors waste. Though some of the trashing of fossil fuel generated energy is done on behalf of religion, most of it celebrates Santa and those freak reindeer.
Maybe on Gandhi’s birthday Hasbro should produce and sell Gandhi dolls which fast when you wind them up.
To friendship,
Michael
“I’m a born again atheist” – Gore Vidal
World Conditions and Action Items
Speak Your Mind And Read Mine
CDs
“Flameland”