Well Christmas time is here

It is the time of year when people shop till they drop or indulge until they pass out from all the food and drink. It is a time to hang out with the family even when they hate you on the other days of the year.

One of my favorite Christmas activities is watching the classic Christmas cartoon specials on TV. Most were produced in the mid to late 1960’s but even 40 years on they haven’t really become dated.

My favorite of the bunch is “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. From the lame tree Charlie buys, to the hip jazz music from Vince Guaraldi, I love the show.

There is a point near the end where a frustrated Charlie shouts about being told what the real meaning of Christmas is. He is mad at the crass commercialism of the holiday represented by Snoopy winning the decoration contest. Linus then recites the Christmas story from the Bible and peace is restored.

Actually Christmas has little to do with the birth in the manger 2000 years ago and never has. The holiday is a collection of religious and non-religious mid-winter celebrations.

You have your winter solstice – used to mark the deep of winter and hope for the coming spring which included putting evergreen trees inside your house. Then you have “Wassailing” – an early version of trick or treat, with drunken singers banging on doors, demanding food, drink, or money in exchange for going away. The part that included the birth of Jesus was added by the Romans to replace the pagan celebrations of the time.

The debauchery got so prevalent that when Puritan Oliver Cromwell became dictator of the UK, he outlawed Christmas. Puritans in Massachusetts banned Christmas observances in 1659.

It wasn’t until 1822 that the Christmas in the form that we know it was introduced. That form is Santa Claus and crass commercialism.

So Linus was wrong. Happy Xmas!

Religious Conservatives are a danger to America

I wanted to take the opportunity today to dispel a couple of persistent myths that is passed around as truth. I use a service that looks for certain keywords on various Internet pages expressing viewpoints.

One of the keywords I use is “secular humanism”.

I found an article on a “conservative” website that expressed once again the myth that secular humanists control everything.

The other myth I want to lay to rest is that Christians are 1. a minority in the US and 2. Persecuted for their beliefs.

Secular Humanism controls everything?

Here is the text in question:

While our troops try to win a world war launched by Islam, America’s Christians and Jews at home confront another religious every bit as ambitious and aggressive as Islam–secular humanism. These are the folks who wish to silence the churches, erase the Ten Commandments from the template of civilization, sexualize children, and abolish the family. In return, they offer us a new god–man. More specifically, liberal, elite man in all his implacable glory.

It does us little good to defeat Islam if we can’t defeat the immoralists, too. The only difference is that this war will be fought with ballots, not bullets.

We have an enormous amount of cleaning up to do. The humanists control higher education and the public schools; the mainstream news media and the entertainment industry; the judiciary and the Democratic Party; the scientific establishment, and even the liberal church denominations. They’ve been making inroads since the early Nineteenth Century, mostly without opposition. The roots of this poisonous tree run very deep.

http://www.bushcountry.org/news/nov_news_pages/g_111004_duigon_moral_war_continues.htm

The article is simply wrong on many points – ok all of them – and it does nothing except stoke fear mongering.

First the author has no idea what secular humanism is. In articles like that the writer typically uses the term for the bogey man effect just like conservative writers during the cold war used communism. They rarely define secular humanism and when they do they simply get it wrong. They also attribute “secular” behavior – like protecting the freedom of religion – as secular humanism when they disagree with the action.

I should know what secular humanism is since I AM a secular humanist. The Council of Secular Humanism has the following brief definition about what secular humanism is:

Secular humanists do not rely upon gods or other supernatural forces to solve their problems or provide guidance for their conduct. They rely instead upon the application of reason, the lessons of history, and personal experience to form an ethical/moral foundation and to create meaning in life. Secular humanists look to the methodology of science as the most reliable source of information about what is factual or true about the universe we all share, acknowledging that new discoveries will always alter and expand our understanding of it and perhaps change our approach to ethical issues as well.

Simply put, religion and God is not relevant to our beliefs and philosophy of life. It is our world view and nothing more. For a person to be a secular humanist they must agree with the text noted above.

For an argument to prove that secular humanists control the schools, the media, the Democratic Party, etc… then one MUST offer evidence that a majority of people who work in those area are in fact subscribe to secular humanism as defined above.

While it is possible it is not a fact and is not true. Why? Because the number of people who are secular humanists is too small to account for all the areas it is said we control.

In a survey of religious identification conducted in 2001 showed only approximately. 100,000 people identified themselves as Humanist or as Secular with no label listed as secular humanist. That’s 100,000 out of 208,000,000 people over the age of 18. If I had answered the survey I would have picked Humanist and on the survey that was 49,000 people.

http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/aris_index.htm

When the legal system is used to disentangle government from religion, it does NOTHING to the believer and their beliefs. They can still pray, go to church, or follow the 10 Commandments. We just don’t want the government to be involved with religion and I am sure most Christians would agree.

Not all secular humanists are atheists nor are they all Democrats and if the writer would actually talk to secular humanists then he would know the truth.

Christians are persecuted?

Not in the United States.

The 1st Amendment prohibits that and when cases have come before the courts, religious rights are protected. For every case that removes the 10 Commandments from a court house there is a case that allows a religious group to meet in a school building as any other community group can.

Why do religious conservatives believe that they are a minority being persecuted?

In a study published in the US News and World Report had this as a possible explanation:

Evangelicals motivate each other by thinking of themselves, much as the first Christians did as an embattled minority, marginalized at best or persecuted at worst for their religious beliefs. While other Americans may not necessarily see them in this way, what is most important is that this is how evangelical Christians see themselves. And it is their shared profound dissatisfaction with aspects of the American mainstream that gives them cause to fight to be heard by the American mainstream.

http://www.benedictionblogson.com/archives/000748.php

While those issues I care about like gay rights, abortion, and separation of church and state doesn’t impose anything on a Christian, their actions in the opposite impose their beliefs on everyone. Who is really causing the ruin of America? It isn’t secular humanists, we are the persecuted minority.

“Moral Values” cause ignorance

Here is a look at “moral values” that some continue to insist decided the 2004 Presidential Election. The first view is from the Red area with a rebuttal from a Blue state supporter:

Conservatives in rural Ohio big key in Bush victory

OTTAWA, Ohio (AP) – Glen Beutler lost his job making patio doors when his employer shut down three years ago.

He was exactly the kind of voter John Kerry was counting on to help him defeat President Bush.

Instead, Beutler and many of his neighbors across rural Ohio worried about the economy voted for Bush because they felt he shared their values on issues such as abortion, gay marriage and gun owner rights.

“Around here, family and values still comes first,” Beutler said.

“It was nice to see the rural people have the advantage this time,” said Cora Bour, the GOP chairwoman in Seneca County.

“In our area, we have a lot of farmers and people who are just down to earth,” she said. “A lot of people see that in President Bush. A lot of it had to do with his faith too. That’s the way we are around here.”

http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/news/updates/9988.html

Am I Blue?
I apologize for everything I believe in. May I go now?

By Michael Kinsley

Sunday, November 7, 2004 Washington Post

There’s just one little request I have. If it’s not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?

I mean, look at it this way. (If you don’t mind, that is.) It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same gender, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

We on my side of the great divide don’t, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don’t claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29470-2004Nov5.html

I simply find it amazing that people will vote against their best interests for the sake of “moral values”. Our government was created to protect the rights of all citizens. It is highly unamerican for a group to pass laws or support candidates who want to discriminate simply because “they” don’t like what they want to outlaw.

As Kinsley said, how arrogant is that?

The same people who voted against Kerry because he “might” want to ban guns (though he never said it) are the same ones who want to prevent a group of people from committing to the person they love in a legal union.

They are the same people who want to force women to carry unwanted babies to term yet don’t bat an eye at the government sending their children into a war that was not needed and hasn’t made the nation safer.

They are the same people who trust Bush with the economy even when they lose their jobs or savings to unethical business practices allowed and encouraged by the same administration.

A friend of mine tried to say, before the election, that the electorate was ignorant if they voted for Bush. I tried to dissuade him from saying that with no evidence. Now I am coming around to his way of thinking.

Interesting Quote from the funeral of Ronald Reagan

While browsing some of the news sites about the funeral of President Ronald Reagan, I came across the following quote contained in the transcript of the remarks from his son Ron Reagan Jr. The remarks were part of the interment ceremony held in California on Friday evening June 11th.

“Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.”

Full transcript

Mayhaps Bush Jr. will get the message, but I doubt it.

Sometimes conservatives just don’t get it and it has nothing do with liberal elitism

I read the May 19th Cal Thomas column that appeared in the May 25th Dispatch (“Marriage Massachusetts-style“)

He comments that the so-called moral and cultural boundaries have been removed since the move to consumption and pleasure replaced restraint and acting on behalf of the general welfare after World War II. He thinks that the decision to allow same sex marriage in Massachusetts was just a wave in that movement.

I have not heard a single rational objective reason, from any conservative commentator, why there should not be same sex marriages allowed in this country. Hearing them drone on one would think that if heterosexual marriage was such a load bearing pillar of civilization there would be a good reason to keep gays out of it.

Instead we get the tired slippy slope that if same sex marriage is allowed then polygamy, incest, and statutory rape would be made legal. It is these tasteless conclusions Thomas would like you to draw from giving a group of people the right to marry.

The question has been about rights and who gets to establish those rights. I don’t have to read off the groups of people who have been denied their rights over the history of the country but the argument against giving those rights seem to always include the slippery slope doom and gloom collapse of civilization if those people are granted those rights.

Thomas, like many conservatives, claims that heterosexual marriage is an immutable truth. Immutable means unchangeable. But as marriage is a social construction, that has gone through many changes since it became part of human culture, Thomas’ claim is simply hot air.

The only part of his column that I sort of agree with is his statement:

If conservative religious people wish to exert maximum influence on culture, they will redirect their attention to repairing their own cracked foundation. An improved heterosexual family structure will do more for those families and the greater good than attempts to halt the inevitable.

Hypocrisy never wins an argument and religious conservatives who champion hetero marriage while having issues with divorce are being hypocritical. Several conservative Republicans, like Newt Gingrich, who have argued against gay marriage are on their second or third marriage.

Of course the result of fight on divorce has lead to draconian measures in at least one state where couples wanting to divorce are forced to try and save the marriage.