Christmas is for Everybody, not Just Christians

Christmas is the only religious holiday that is also a legal federal holiday. And that’s fitting, I guess, because Christmas is for everybody. It’s especially fruitful for retailers, some of whom do a third of their annual business during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Christmas has a dichotomous nature: There is the secular side which includes Santa Claus, Christmas trees, mistletoe, and the buying and giving of presents. It has a religious side which includes special church services, nativity scenes, and the yearly obligatory chant by some Christians to “put Christ back into Christmas.”

Even the season’s music has multiple personalities. On the secular side there are “Jingle Bells,” “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” and “White Christmas.” On the religious side there are Christmas hymns like “Silent Night,” “Away in a Manger,” and “O Holy Night.”

Most of the time, the sectarian and secular personalities of Christmas get along just fine. Some people create holiday-themed music CD mixes with both religious and non-religious songs on them. People go through the hustle and bustle of shopping and gift giving and also attend midnight mass.

But sometimes the two themes of Christmas clash. Sometimes those clashes make headlines, as was the case when an atheist organization put up a placard next to a nativity scene in the Washington State Capitol building. The wording was fairly innocuous, extolling everyone to let reason prevail. And most people have let reason prevail. They understand that in a country that is based on certain basic freedoms, two of which are religion and speech, that differing religious viewpoints should be tolerated.

But others haven’t gotten the message. News commentator Bill O’Reilly, for example, has publicly condemned the atheists’ placard. He believes it is inappropriate to put up a sign promoting secular reason next to a Christian display, even if both are on public property. Has he even read the Constitution?

Christians do not own the month of December. For over a century in this country Christians have had carte blanche access to public grounds for the display of their religious symbols. Until quite recently, the nativity scene has been the default decoration, not only in church yards, but at courthouses, in parks, and on the lawns of other public buildings.

And now when people who put reason and logic above magic and mysticism want equal time, those like O’Reilly accuse them of trying to take over the season.

Christmas is for everybody, not just Christians. It is celebrated by Christians as Jesus’ birthday, but that isn’t when Jesus was born. Nobody knows when Jesus was born. Most scholars believe it was in the late spring. We celebrate it on December 25 because the early church appropriated the already-flourishing pagan holiday of Saturnalia back in the fourth century. They even took over some of the original holiday’s customs.

To their credit, most Christians simply don’t react to billboards and placards that proclaim reason over religion. They accept that, in a free country, differing viewpoints should have equal time, or space on courthouse lawns. And, thankfully, people who espouse a worldview of humanity and reason are gaining attention. That attention will eventually lead to acceptance.

And just as homosexuality is now widely accepted, with notable exceptions, as an alternate lifestyle, maybe one day humanism will be not only tolerated, but accepted as equal to the belief that having blind faith in an unseen force will grant you eternal existence.

Bush: Bible is Not Literal; Evolution is Factual

Pres. George W. Bush doesn’t take the bible literally and he believes in evolution, saying it has been proven by science. What’s this? Is this the real George W. Bush?

I have long assumed that Pres. Bush is a Christian fundamentalist. Nothing has happened lately to convince me otherwise. But in a recent television interview on ABC’s Nightline, Bush made some statements that caused me to think he might not be quite as far out in right field as I have always thought.

I mean, he’s still far too much of a fundamentalist to be a successful leader. He’s proven to almost everyone that he can’t lead this nation. And one of the most annoying, though not often publicized, aspects of his presidency has been his tendency to substitute his worldview of Christian morality for pragmatic and practical decision making. His censorship of science, even from within his own science advisory team, speaks volumes about his predilection for making policy decisions based on his religious views rather than on the facts.

He has had no qualms about referring to the war in Iraq as a “just” war and that he is carrying out God’s will in trying to spread democracy by any means necessary. He has used his personal moral compunctions to justify withholding federal research grants from institutions to fund embryonic stem cell research, despite the promise it holds to perhaps cure many genetic diseases. And he has no reservations about using federal tax dollars to fund programs run by churches and other religious organizations in faith-based initiatives that stress abstinence over contraception, leading to more proselytizing than pregnancy prevention.

He has come out in the past to support the teaching of Creationism or Intelligent Design in public science classrooms whenever evolution is taught. He said it would stimulate critical thinking. Well, maybe it would, but the place to incorporate the comparison of worldviews is within a social studies classroom, not in science. Creationism is not science, and every court that has had the opportunity to rule on it, even the most conservative of courts, has reaffirmed that fact.

So I was a bit surprised when Bush came out in the ABC interview and basically called evolution a fact of science. He said he didn’t think the biblical story of the creation was at odds with evolution and that one could believe both.

“I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution,” Bush said.

So Bush admitted publicly that there is scientific proof of evolution, even though he hedged it with the disclaimer that God had something to do with it. He also came right out and said that he doesn’t take the bible literally.

Yet, for someone who believes evolution has been scientifically proven and that the bible cannot be taken too literally, he seems to govern from a position that is just to the right of Pat Robertson.

The point is, it doesn’t matter so much what the president says about his beliefs, at least not at this juncture in his tenure in office. What matters is that he has ignored the beliefs he has recently professed and made policy based on the antiquated notions of the religious fundamentalists, his base.

They elected him in 2000 and re-elected him in 2004. Perhaps if he had come clean about his true beliefs back then, he wouldn’t have been elected. He won by a very narrow popular vote victory in 2004 and he lost in the popular vote back in 2000. So if he had lost just a few conservative Christian votes he would have lost the election.

Kowtowing to the religious right was good political strategy. But as we have seen, it has diminished how this country is perceived by the rest of the world; it has restricted the growth of progress in research and in education, and it has led us to economic ruin. It doesn’t matter what Bush really believes; it matters what he actually did. And most of what he did was to build a policy to embolden the religious zealots.

Now, it’s going to be up to our next president, Barack Obama, to clean up Bush’s mess. It will be quite a chore.

Fundamentalism Still Presents a Danger

For many years I’ve been confused as to how otherwise intelligent people can be so passionate about their beliefs in religion. They are somehow able to compartmentalize their religious beliefs so that it does not interfere with the logic and rationality they must use every day in other areas.

Religion, whatever brand, is illogical on so many levels. Its base purpose is to serve as comfort. It raises hope that, not only is there a life beyond death, but that it could be a very comfortable and eternal existence. Maybe there is an afterlife. But if there is, nobody knows about it, including what it’s like.

The fear factor of religion is that the eternal afterlife could be quite torturous. If you’re a Christian, like most Americans claim to be, you probably believe in heaven and hell. Heaven is where you aspire to go; hell is to be avoided. And the way to avoid hell is to follow the dictates of an ancient mythology as described in the bible.

But there are myriad different religious belief systems under the banner of Christianity. Some acknowledge the allegorical nature of the bible and do not attempt to interpret it literally. Others, however, believe that the bible is literal in its meaning. But even these fundamentalists don’t believe that every dictate of the bible must be followed. They pick and choose.

It’s ok to eat shrimp and ham, but it’s a mortal sin to be homosexual, even though all these are offenses punishable by death in the Book of Leviticus.

Still, those who know that they know are unswayable. And many have such a twisted view of religion’s role in society that it’s both funny and dangerous. That point started to sink in a few years ago following a debate I had with a fundamentalist about evolution.

After the debate, I stopped to chat a minute with a group of men who were supporters of my opponent. I didn’t know them, and I don’t know if my opponent in the debate knew them, but they were obviously on the side of creationism.

But the topic quickly turned from evolution and creationism toward a more generalized discussion of religion in America. Their contention was simply that this country was founded on Christianity, so it needs to be brought back into the public schools.

I quickly reminded them that this country was founded not on Christianity, but on religious freedom and tolerance of religious differences.

Then one of the gentlemen claimed that the First Amendment right to freedom of religion simply meant that we were free to choose whichever denomination of Christian church we wanted to attend. I was a little stunned at the frankness of the remark and asked him if he was, indeed, serious. He assured me he was.

I then asked him what about all the Jews or Muslims that reside in this country as citizens. Don’t they have a right to observe their religious preferences? His answer was what really sent my mind reeling.

He told me that they had a right to worship in their way, but that they should move out of the U.S. and back to the countries that have Islam or Judaism as their national religions. He said the United States is a Christian nation and there was no place for other religions here.

I told him his statement smacked of racism. He answered that he was not a racist, and that he had nothing against these people, but that he just didn’t think they should live in this country.

It then dawned on me. Although certainly not all fundamentalists believe this way, some of the most conservative of the religious fundamentalists in this country are much more than a simple annoyance to freethinkers. They may actually be dangerous.

I don’t mean to suggest they are dangerous to individuals, in the since that they might hurt or murder someone. No, the danger applies to society, and is much more insidious.

History has shown that countries who adopt a single religion, especially those who insist that their citizens subscribe to that religion, tend to be oppressive and backward. In this country, fundamentalists have lost in the courts when they tried to force their religious belief into the classroom under the guise of creation science. So they changed tactics and are now trying a backdoor approach.

They are becoming politically active, electing fundamentalist candidates to leadership positions on school boards and in state legislatures. A few years ago, they even succeeded in kicking evolution out of textbooks in Kansas, but more moderate voters replaced the fundamentalists a year later in that state. Fundamentalists are mounting campaigns in many states to infuse the public schools with their backward beliefs. A new law in Texas, for example, mandates that each school offer a course in religion with the bible as the primary source of lessons.

The elections of this year and in 2006 have pushed the fundamentalists’ views to the back burner as we grapple with economic problems, but fundamentalism is still there. And its proponents are already plotting their comeback strategies.

If they succeed, it will be only a matter of time before the U.S. will become a scientifically and technologically second-rate nation. It happened once, in the period following the “Scopes Monkey Trial” of the 1920s. But when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in the late 1950s it was a wake-up call to get our children back on track in the science class.

Now, it is being threatened again – not with a direct push, but with stealth. It is a threat that should not be taken too casually. It’s not simply about evolution; the entire school curriculum is in danger.

Winston Churchill once said, "Some people stumble over the truth, but pick themselves back up and continue on." But others don’t even stumble over it. They simply cannot be bothered with the facts when they have a country to conquer and classrooms to infiltrate.