Ban all Religions Until the Test Results Come Back Positive

        

        Last week Donald Trump, in his usual inimitable fashion, again made an incendiary comment that aroused great anger, from fellow Republican presidential candidates, and almost everyone to the left of Trump. But not to his supporters; they loved it. They can’t wait to have Trump banning Muslim immigrants...actually anyone they don’t like...and ignoring established U.S. laws, policies and regulations….”Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...and turn them away."

         But as wrong as I think Trump is, he may have stumbled onto a very good idea. It just isn’t restrictive enough. Let’s run with his idea of banning a religious group. If I agreed with his position, then we shouldn’t stop there; we should go even further. Let’s not just ban Muslims from entering the U.S., let’s ban ANY religious person. Yes, ban them all… until they’ve passed a test indicating they understand the separation of church and state, that they will uphold and defend that separation, and that our Constitution supersedes ANY law that's in someone’s holy book.

        This ban would not just apply to foreigners hoping to resettle in America, but also to anyone who already lives here. For example, if Christians promote an interpretation of their God’s laws as somehow overriding the Constitution, they need to be removed to another place, say, the Vatican, until such time as they take a test proving they understand this is a secular nation and the Constitution is the ONLY law of the land. They can practice whatever religion they want in their own homes or in a place of worship (that would no longer be tax-exempt), but they cannot claim their God’s law is higher than Constitutional law.

        It doesn’t matter if the believers are Hindu, Mormon, Buddhist, Shinto, Zoroastrian, or they worship of a pile of rocks. They must show, via both written and verbal testing, that they acknowledge their religious laws stop at our border. They do not supplant any U.S. law at any time…period!

         If they are Muslim and disagree; Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, and even ISIS are all trying to implement Sharia. Let them live there and practice their faith. Or if they are Mormon and believe that what Elohim says overrides U.S. law, expel them to one of the uninhabited islands of the Alaska archipelago until testing confirms they fully understand and comply with the Constitution.

         Trump's not the first. Whether anti-British, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-black, or anti-Commie...down through history, Americans have loved vilifying and repressing others.

        

         Now, far be it for me to point out to the oh-so-wise and well-informed Trump, who clearly hasn’t studied U.S. history, we already tried banning certain groups…the Chinese in the late 1800s, the Japanese in World War Two, and Communists during the 1950s. It just doesn’t work, and won’t work, even if we turned this nation into a completely fascist dictatorship like, say, Nazi Germany. So rather than banning, the best step is to make sure everyone understands we are not bound by the religious laws of any gods, or any religious sects.  

        Trump’s pandering to squeamish, anxious white xenophobes gets great press, but it won’t get him elected president. However, if he’d go along with a test given to every religious person immigrating here, or living here, so we can get them up to speed on how the Constitution works, then he and I might have some common ground to discuss ideas.

Know your Constitution

The War on Christmas Disbelievers

         

            Is there really a war on Christmas? It appears Christians need to get thoroughly riled up at this time of year, otherwise, who would take their religion seriously? If there is a war, it’s a war on those who do NOT believe; it's a propaganda war based solely on Christian’s exaggerated indignation. It doesn’t matter that the bible doesn’t agree on the details of the Christmas stories in Matthew or Luke's accounts, which are the only ones in the four gospels (Paul doesn’t even refer to it in the books claimed written in his name and he is credited with writing his accounts BEFORE any of the gospels were written.) You have to show respect for Christian idolatry and their interpretation of Christmas, or all is lost, and the nation is doomed. With that false premise, they have made up a war and then claim they must fight against those who deny their fantasy.

Inside Florida’s capital building in Tallahassee, a festivus pole (a six foot tall stack of empty beer cans) made Fox TV national news. Commentator Bill O'Reilly lamented Florida's tolerance for such persecution of Christianity, while Gretchen Carlson and Catholic League guest Bill Donohue expressed disgust that someone would slight their beliefs by celebrating their own holiday at the same time near a Christian nativity display in a government building. Apparently the U.S. government is supposed to allow crèches and crèches ONLY between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day at any public facility. Gretchen even added to the false sense of outrage by suggesting she took her children out to view the nativity scene, but her kids couldn’t see it because a three inch wide pole stood in front of it. You drove your kids all the way from Greenwich, Connecticut looking for a crèche, didn’t see any in front of churches or private homes for 1500 miles, and when you finally found one down in Tallahassee, you couldn’t walk three feet to the left or right of the beer can pole so your kids could see it, Gretchen? Is it any wonder why few people take you seriously?

  
        Bill Donohue writes about the bloody engagements he's seen in this never-ending 'war': “There is little doubt that the anti-Christmas side is weakening. But the war is hardly over. The big battle won by the Thomas More Law Center in securing the right of a nativity scene to be erected on a public median in Warren, Michigan is evidence that we need to fight for our rights. Thanks to the Catholic League, senior citizens in Newhall, California got their Christmas tree back after management tried to ban it. Children who attend Terry Elementary School in Little Rock, Arkansas know about the War on Christmas: their planned trip to a local church to see “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was cancelled. An anti-Christmas billboard in Times Square that shows a depiction of Jesus crucified (Wait…wasn’t he?) is testimony to the vile nature of the War on Christmas. There is no shortage of such examples.”
So someone putting up a festivus pole or asking to use government property to promote another holiday is considered vile, but telling people they are going to hell for not believing like, say, Donohue, O'Reilly, or Carlson do, is not.

             In the state capital of Oklahoma, Satanists want to put up a display near the nativity in that federal building, and in Mississippi’s capital, secularists asked to exhibit a Winter Solstice sign, which would be located in the same lobby as a nearby nativity. Reacting to this news, one of Fox’s other bubble-headed bleach blondes, Megyn Kelly, announced that the war on Christmas is comparable to the Holocaust. Megyn is counting on gullible viewers to believe that Christians across the country are being rounded up, put into concentration camps, and then killed in record numbers for celebrating Christmas...because having to look past a Satanist display or a Solstice sign to see a crèche is identical to being murdered by Nazis. Who’d have guessed?

But the whole contrived mess is based on a fundamental flaw; the bible stories themselves.Those accounts are filled with problems that start with 1) the genealogies, which don't match...2) when the birth supposedly happened (was it during the reign of Herod, or Quirinius? There is a ten year span between them.)...3) an empire-wide census that required people to return to an ancestral city (There are no records to indicate the Romans, or any other civilization, ever required that.)...4) the murder of thousands of children by Herod's soldiers...and 5) the time of year it happened. For example, in the Matthew and Luke accounts the sheep are in the fields. This means the event happened in the late spring or early summer, not in winter. If it was in winter, the mangers would be filled with sheep trying to keep warm, not free for people to use as impromptu delivery rooms. Mangers were small caves hewn into a hillside for keeping a shepherd's flock safe and contained, and they were terribly unsanitary, with years of sheep and animal droppings everywhere. They were never cleaned out, so they would constantly reek of manure. If any baby were born in a manger, it would have died, or at best, suffered from some disease contracted from the waste in the wattle, or kicked up by the hem of the mother’s clothing. But why let facts get in the way if you are promoting a unsupportable ideology and fighting a phony war?

This is how Constantine's Christianity became a world religion: at the point of a spear.

        In reality, the bible's 'Christmas' stories are nothing but fairy tales made up to promote the Jewish god and his ‘savior’ son to compete with the other popular deities of the time. The reason we celebrate the holiday in December is because there were celebrations to the god Saturn, who was the god of the harvest, and Mithra, who was the god of light. The emperor of Rome in 336 CE was a Christian named Constantine, and he concluded that all the pagan rituals were detrimental to the Christian cause. But what to do since those rituals were immensely popular with the people of the Roman Empire. Solution? Proclaim December 25th as Jesus Christ's birthday, because it was right in the heart of all the pagan celebrations. That would trump all those pagan gods.
        During these pagan celebrations it was customary to give gifts, sing songs, have a feast, and decorate homes with pine boughs and greenery. Kings and clergy co-opted these traditions and rituals and claimed them as Christian in order to get the heathens to worship the god they supported, and to attend Christian services where royalty and priests would benefit from the money they could fleece and demand from the pagans. Every one of the current Christmas rituals is just an improvised version of the pagan rituals. The Christmas tree would come later when it was adapted from a Norse tradition of bringing a tree into the house and decorating it as a celebration of life in the midst of winter, not because of a baby’s birth.

Another Christian victory in the 'War on Christmas'.

      Over the intervening centuries, the Christmas stories were promoted by the priesthood (who had a vested interest in promoting them) as historically accurate because they were in the bible, and by the 1100s, if you did NOT believe it was the truth, you could be burned at the stake as a heretic. Nothing says something is the truth like the threat of death if you don't believe.
      Just for the record, Christmas hasn't always been embraced by Christians as it is today. In the 1600s, England and the American colonies outlawed Christmas because of it's pagan roots.

         George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776 took place at that time in hopes of catching the Hessian garrison in Trenton off guard because they'd be nursing severe Christmas morning hangovers. The Continental forces didn't celebrate Yuletide, and in 1776, they were busy putting boats in the river. After the Revolutionary War ended, celebrating Christmas fell out of style as most people in the new nation considered it too "British". 
        Christmas eventually came back into fashion in the 1800s, only this time around, it was given a more religious twist so it would get support from the churches. The clergy were only too happy to comply. Christians didn't bother checking whether the biblical information on the birth of Jesus was based on reality, or at least supported by some evidence. They just took it on faith that the bible got it right. That assumption became the truth, and from that, lies by the thousands have poured forth from Christianity.

     Why do Christians still adhere to the Christmas myth? Simple. People don't want to have their illusions destroyed. They've practiced them for so long, the illusions have become like a warm and fuzzy security blanket. When life becomes complicated, just fall back on stories and fables you were taught as a child, like the Christmas story, and tell yourself that all life's mysteries will be answered after you die, as long as you believe the right versions of the legends and myths. It is more comforting to accept a beautiful lie than to confront the ugly truth.
     There has never been a war on Christmas, only a make-believe war so that Christians can act morally outraged that others don’t prostrate themselves before the faithful's fairy tales. Christians are confusing ‘war’ with not getting what they want, which is everyone respecting and honoring their illusions and fantasies...and they are reacting like bratty, whiny, self-centered five year olds. Someone needs to tell them Santa Claus isn’t real too.