Season's Greetings from an Old Friend

Here's to a great 2020

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.

A 'righteous' response that is just wrong

            City Magazine, a local Central Florida publication, recently printed a letter from Dr.Terry Pooler who is the Lead Pastor of the Sabbath Grace Fellowship Church in Apopka, Fl. in response to a CNN iReport’s article Why I Raise My Children without God by Deborah Mitchell. Her article was a mother’s response to the way religion, particularly Christianity, justified certain actions and was used to shape people’s thinking in a manner that she realized was wrong.

            I sensed before reading it that Dr. Pooler probably had a vested interest in ‘debunking” Deborah Mitchell’s story as it could have a long term effect on any possible growth at his church, and bottom-line, his paycheck. So he had to find ways to dissect and disembowel her article in a way that makes it appeared she just didn’t truly understand the living god and that’s why she was raising her children free of religion.(How he knows…actually knows...the living god, and by what means he confirms this is never addressed.) But he makes the same errors that all other theists make when they try to defend their version of Christianity. They fall back on the Bible and what God and Jesus supposedly said (actually, what Dr. Pooler interprets as he reads the Bible)…by cherry-picking the verses they believe will bolster their view. That is not a wise direction in which to go because, as any ‘True Christian’ will tell you, you have to take the whole Bible into consideration, not just the parts you like.

            In the second sentence of his article, Dr. Pooler starts by stating that Mitchell ‘brushed aside a grieving parent’s plea that taking God out of our public schools was partially to blame.’ As if, up until the removal of all things Christian, our schools were models of Christian morality, thought, and conscience. Sorry Doctor Pooler, but you have to be able to prove God was actually there to begin with. You can’t just say ‘because I believe so’, or ‘because the bible says it is written’. You wouldn’t give that latitude to Muslims or Hindus and their ‘holy’ books. You have to provide evidence. And you can’t. So don’t take her to task because she dismisses a grieving parent who falls back on an emotional plea about the supposed presence, or lack of presence, of a god as an explanation for why a mass murder occurred. Does that grieving parent really believe that, if only the Ten Commandments were placed in the school, if only teacher-led Christian prayers were allowed, and if only every child had a bible on their desk, that somehow, that would have thwarted the gunman from entering the school and killing twenty students and six teachers? It didn’t stop Charles Roberts in Lancaster Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006 from killing five little Amish girls in the West Nickel Mines School. Oh, but they didn’t practice the right kind of Christianity, did they? When the God Dr. Pooler believes in has fixed the child abuse that routinely occurs in His churches, eliminates starvation that occurs all over the world, stops creating “natural” disasters that kill and maim and leave children orphaned, and ceases creating agonizing diseases that disfigure and kill, then He, or those who claim to speak for him, can come back and ask us about schools.

            Dr. Pooler then comes up with a strange non-sequitur. Mrs. Mitchell states she is not campaigning for the elimination of religion, but wants it kept at home like a toothbrush or a pair of shoes. From that statement, Dr. Pooler indicates that what she meant, without any explanation, was, religion ‘should be quarantined.’ Last time I checked, no one’s toothbrush or shoes were quarantined from the public. How do you go from something taught at home (and is practiced in numerous churches and religious institutions that vastly outnumber schools across the country) to, it is being quarantined? Dr. Pooler simply uses outrageous and disingenuous hyperbole to cast Mitchell’s intent in as negative a light as possible.

            He goes on to claim she is a victim of erroneous indoctrination, missing the irony of making such a claim himself. He chastises her for writing that ‘a child should make moral choices for the right reasons’, and not feel as though he or she is being watched over by a heavenly policeman who is much like Santa Claus looking to see who’s naughty or nice. But that is exactly how the bible portrays God. Believe He is watching you, and you’d better believe in him and return that love. Because he loves you SO MUCH, that he created a special place called Hell to send you to if you don’t love him back. I found it quite amazing that Dr. Pooler would use the imaginary Santa character as a contrast to convince readers of the legitimacy of the god character. There is not a shred of evidence that either one exists. Why should we believe in one and not the other? Doctor?

            The God’s Desire versus the God’s Plan comparison argument he makes is a mountain of nonsense piled on an even bigger mountain of nonsense. How do you know God’s Desire OR God’s plan, Doctor? If you draw it from the Bible, how do you know it is accurate? If you claim God talks with you, how do you know it is the Christian God, or any god supposedly responding to you? How do you assess that you are not just making up the conversation in your mind and reading into it?

The rest of his article is filled with one a priori assumption after another. All fall back on ‘God is’, ‘it is from the Bible’, ‘God’s plan’, God’s desire’, ‘eternal God’, yet he offers no proof or evidence that ANY of those are accurate or reliable. He simply believes them because, most likely, he was taught as a young child to believe them. In his later adult years, he sought out and studied books and texts which adhered with what he was taught as a child. If I wrote ‘Allah says’,’ the Koran is explicit’, ‘Vishnu is eternal’, ‘the book of Mormon states’, Zeus is all-knowing’, would Dr. Pooler give them the same weight and credence as he does in his world view seen solely through the prism of Christianity?

                                        
    He ends his article with a paragraph that begins with, “I wonder if the number of school shootings and child abusers will dramatically decrease if the next generation, flushed with the belief that they are insignificant parts of a big machine, can successfully squelch the current religious fever in our country that promotes God’s moral values…” If Dr. Pooler recalls his bible reading, God requires that unruly children be stoned to death. The same sentence is also mandatory for homosexuality, witches, and even picking up sticks on Sunday. Or how about when a woman is raped; the rapist has to marry that woman and pay her father fifty pieces of silver? Does that sound fair? Are those the moral values he is referring to? They are all God’s; it says so right in the Bible. Read it yourself and see if it is correct. How many slaves does Dr. Pooler own? Because neither God nor Jesus condemn slavery. If a tree doesn’t produce fruit, even when it is not in season, would Dr. Pooler demand it be cut down? Jesus condemned a fig tree for the same reason, and it follows that Jesus was only reflecting God’s values and morals.

                           According to the Bible, that fig tree has only a few moments left to live

Dr. Pooler has a right to express his views about Mrs. Mitchell’s article. What concerns me is his attitude that she is wrong because the God he believes in says it is wrong. But he offers nothing at all to prove his belief is correct, accurate, or true. He simply believes it because he wants it to be true. As I stated earlier, would Dr. Pooler give that same latitude to someone of a different faith, or even a different denomination within Christianity? If they stated they believed it because they want it to be true, would that make it true? If Deborah Mitchell rejects it, does that make her belief or lack of belief false? As Stephen Roberts once wrote: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Dr. Pooler, I dismiss yours.