11.21.2005

[Antidisestablishmentarianism] I am current on my salon reading

An excellent article about the non-war over xmas(a battle not-fought between the secular and the religious)

from the mind of Pernox at 14:41

1 comment:

AllThingsSpring said...

How the secular humanist grinch

As a secular humanist, I think I am in an interesting position to comment on this article.

John Birch Society

I'll start off with an ad hominem attack. The JBS is batshit fucking loco. Virtually every word that has oozed onto their gilded press releases has been straight out of the DSM-IV.

Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations."

LOL! UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations?! What were these folks smoking?

"part of a much broader plan, not only to promote the UN, but to destroy all religious beliefs and customs."

So the UN, a bunch of sqabbling delegates from lots of member nations, all with their own agendas, managed to get past the fact that most of the people on earth followed one religious practice or another and got together and formed a coherent policy to destroy all religious beliefs and customs on Earth. Okey-doeky. How exactly? Portraying the UN of the late 1950's as a slick, organized cospiratorial body instead of a barely functioning and messy rabble is not likely to add any credence to your arguments.

The John Birch Society was generally regarded as a crank, far-right outfit whose paranoid conspiracy theories put it outside the pale of reasonable discourse.

And why should that assessment be any different now?

But a lot has changed since then.

I fear the author is correct in this regard.

"Christmas Under Siege." "All over the country, Christmas is taking flak,"

Really. Do you see anyone cancelling their Christmas this year? Does he think there is a danger of it not happening? Or is that he's just a gasbag demagogue with a love of playing the victim even when he's part of a very powerful majority?

the malign phrase "Happy Holidays."

Yeah, even I think "Happy Holidays" is a pretty dumb phrase.

Noting this, Pat Buchanan wrote, "What we are witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity."

Will someone inform Pat Buchanan that secularism is not the same as antireligious sentiment. The absence of official opinion is not an attack.

"It is embedded in the secular 'Humanist Manifesto' (in its three iterations from the American Humanist Association),

As a signatory of the Humanist Manifesto II, I'm just amazed. Section 9 talks about a separation of church and state to keep anyone's religious rights from getting trampled on, but I challenge you to find exactly where it says we are trying to ban Christmas. They make reasoned arguments, but I don't see anything in there about banning Christmas.

in the rulings of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Often overturned.

launched a short-lived boycott of Wal-Mart,

Too bad it was short-lived.

Liberty Counsel's "Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign,"

"You are either with us, or you are against us." How very Christian of them. How very love thy neighbor of them.

"It's a sad day in America when you have to retain a lawyer to wish someone a merry Christmas," says Mike Johnson, senior legal counsel for ADF.

Are you fucking kidding me? Grow up.

Despite Johnson's lamentations, one can in fact offer Christmas greetings without legal counsel.

Really, I never would have guessed!

are allowed to distribute religious holiday cards and literature in school.

OT, a coworker handed me a Jack Chick tract today. Boy, those are funny.

and increasingly organized hostility to the American Civil Liberties Union.

You know, its not the bs victim posturing that bothers me most about this, its the bashing of the ACLU. Here is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the constitution and the rights of ALL people under that constitution. They are one of the only really decent organizations in the country, and well deserving of support.

It's a myth that can be self-fulfilling, as school board members and local politicians believe the false conservative claim that they can't celebrate Christmas without getting sued by the ACLU

The ACLU doesn't have enough money to do that, even if they wanted to., which they don't. In fact, if your religious rights are being trampled on, the ACLU will be one of the first organizations lining up to help you.

charges that department stores are trying to replace the celebration of Jesus' birthday with some secularized, universal winter holiday season,

Ah, well here we might have a point. See, as a secular humanist, I don't want to be part of Christmas, because I'm not Christian and it is an insult to those with faith to pretend otherwise, and I also don't want to be part of Xmas, the two month shopping binge and worship of credit card debt because it is a collosal waste. The ACLU didn't invent Xmas, secular humanists didn't invent Xmas, liberal jurists didn't invent Xmas: WALL STREET DID. And let me tell you, the true believers in the church of American Enterprise are just as influenced by blind faith as the Christian devout are. I would like nothing more than to let you have your religious holiday back untarnished by capitalist exuberence.

Rather, they are purveyors of a conspiracy theory that repeatedly crops up in America. The malefactors change -- Jews, the U.N., the ACLU -- but the outlines stay the same. The scheme is always massive, reaching up to the highest levels of power.

"In every age, the bigot's rage
requires another focus,
Another devil forced on stage
By hatred's hocus-pocus:
The devil used to be the Jew
And then it was the witches;
And then it was the Negroes who
Were digging in the ditches.
The devil once was colored pink
And labeled communistic;
Now all at once, in just a blink,
The devil's humanistic."
-- Curt Sytsma

vast secular-humanist conspiracy.

LOL. The American Humanist Association has never had more than 5000 members. Virtually any single charismatic megachurch in this country would have more money, power, and influence. They flatter the power of secular humanism as an idea to the point of absurdity.

Federated wrote, "Our stores recognize and celebrate Christmas in a variety of ways, including Christmas decorations, Christmas music, Christmas-themed merchandise and Christmas trim-a-tree shops.

Christianity as branding identity. Even I think this is just stupid. There isn't much about the virtues of conspicuous consumption in the bible. Seems it was more of a "easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle" sort of thing. I don't know what is dumber, that they think corporations can worship Jesus or that they refuse to shop at corporate entities that inadequately fake worshipping Jesus via symbolism and code words to the degree to which it appeases and patronizes the devout.

(If anything, they demonstrate that American business, hardly a bastion of godless communism or secular humanism, always plays it safe.)

Or, that if you have money and a willingness to spend it, expect to be catered to.

But it's not there in terms of the government imposing religion or sponsoring it, and that bothers some people on the right. They miss the good old days when public schools were semi-established Protestant schools."

So it seems that the agenda is not just an attack on secularism, but the hegemony of theocratic flavored government bias toward their favorite sects. Like many of the first pilgrims to this country, there were kicked out of Europe not so much because they were being religiously persecuted, but because they were not happy being unable to persecute others for failure to follow their particular doctrines.

the government can neither promote nor restrict religious speech.

I fail to see what they expect the government to do regarding department store policies regarding "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays", vs "Thank you, come again."

Mike Johnson ... says, the ACLU's "ultimate and underlying agenda is to silence people of faith.

Bull.

They do not want God mentioned in the public square.

They don't want the government to take sides. That is not the same as silencing speaking about God in the public square.

If they could completely censor that out, they would ... The ACLU has a pretty sordid past. They were founded by a guy, Roger Baldwin, who was an avowed atheist,

You say that like it is a bad thing.

and he had a certain agenda.

Unlike you, motherfucker!? We all have agendas. Don't kid yourself.

He wrote about being a socialist

So?

, and communism was his goal."

Ah, red baiting. Never has gone out of style. Perhaps he should read this

"terrorize local communities on an almost daily basis with letters, e-mails and telephone calls to silence Christmas and other religious activity."

Really. Yeah, I bet they send pipe bombs too.

But the terrorists

When you describe volunteer lawyers for the ACLU as terrorists, you undermine your whole argument. Also, you show yourself as the batshit nutbag that you are...

"You can only push the American people so far, and then there's a backlash,"

I can only hope the same goes for your radical jackass agenda.

A few years ago I tried to opt out of all Christmas related stuff. Guess what, it didn't work. I'm still innundated with ads and prostetyzing and the same thirty damn songs over and over for two months. My mother still thinks I'm a selfish little shit if I don't buy gifts for everyone and and even more selfish little shit for returning the gifts I was given but did not ask for because it is for a holiday for a religion I do not practice (I've been openly agnostic since I was 12). Am I supposed to just stop seeing my family for two months at the end of each year? It seems society goes out of its way to make sure you cannot get around it, and when you try to tone down or opt out, they accuse you of destroying their religion or something, when all you really wanted was to be left alone.

You want to know what it feels like to be a religious minority? You want to know what it feels like? Try telling people for six months that you are an atheist, or a jew, or a muslim, and see how people treat you differently. Pretend what it is like to be one of these things and then imagine what it is like to be constantly barraged with religious Christmas and and Wall Street Xmas for two months straight and see if you don't end up like me, wanting to just hop on a plane to Vermont and go skiing by yourself for a couple weeks, or rent a cabin in the Yukon Territories with no people, and no family, and no salesmen around. And no TV. And no All-Christmas-All-the-Time radio.

On the upside, my family agreed, at least in theory, to limit all spending to $100 per person this year, which is a hell of a lot less than it has been in the past. Debt should not be part of the Xmas tradition, and certainly not of the Christmas one. Personally, I want no part in either. Mostly, I just see too much fatty food and too many pointless gifts and too much stress and too much credit card debt and too much crap like this every damn year and I want the whole damn exercise to last a hell of a lot less time than two months. At what point did the "Holidays" begin in late October? I'm more than happy to have Christmas return to the Christians, and away from department stores and malls. Just leave me out of all of it, please.

Oh, except you can save me some cookies. I like cookies, no matter the holiday.

Monday, November 21, 2005 11:17:00 PM

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