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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWell, almost made it through Christmas without a political fight.
Lasted right up until the end of Christmas dinner last night. My family and my sister & her husband's friend's had been drinking pretty much all afternoon and had gone through a number of bottles of wine at dinner so they were pretty loaded by the end of dinner. My dad brought up the "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" argument and how angry he was at "those people" who were never going to let it go unless they were stopped and my sister's husband and the husband of my sister's friend all jumped on the band wagon. They are all Fox News garbage heads - totally brainwashed. FYI, they are all educated, otherwise decent people, but they amount of hate and vitriol they were spewing toward the "Happy Holidays" people was disgusting"
They were saying things like "This is a Christian Country (none of them are particularly Christian)" and "Our Founding Father's were Christian (not true)" and "If someone said 'Happy Hannukah to me I wouldn't be offended (probably not true)'" and "I have never heard about "Happy Holidays up until a few years ago (also not true)", blah, blah blah - the usual Fox News talking points. I tried to argue with them and even my RW-ish sister chimed in and said "Hey, we all have different opinions, let's not spoil things" (I have a feeling she's not a true believer, just influenced by my brother-in-law" and the friend's wife also said "Look, in the corporate world, it is really not acceptable to say anything but Happy Holidays or Season's greetings because you really don't know what religion people are".
But the men just went on their Fox News inspired rant and eventually, I just said I was going to bed. I didn't want to deal with them anymore because they just disgusted me.
It makes me really sad that this is what Fox has turned them into. I have completely lost respect for them. They sounded like complete idiots.
Doodley
(9,156 posts)dhol82
(9,353 posts)Happy Holidays was a great song.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)dhol82
(9,353 posts)I mean, we are talking about Bing Crosby - Mr. Straight Arrow religious purity.
The Genealogist
(4,723 posts)I'm an atheist, I don't care if someone says merry Christmas happy holidays, festive festivus or what. I care whether the gesture is sincere. And I return the greeting in kind. I cannot name a single person I I know personally who has declared war on Christmas. It's a made up issue to keep the wingnut Christians fretting about how persecuted they are,.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)situation where I am almost certain that the person/people I am saying it to are Christian. But as I told them, since I have graduated from college, I have always lived in large multi-cultural cities where it has made more sense to just say Happy Holidays so as not to offend anybody. It just seemed like the logical choice of greeting. They are so childish about their insistence that this is a PC backlash against Christianity. No assholes, it's just about being kind and inclusive.
Caliman73
(11,755 posts)To state the matter accurately (which right wingers will never do), would be to call it a "shift away from the primacy of Christianity as society becomes more diverse and sensitive to the experience of other people".
Obviously, that is a mouthful, but the reality is that Christianity has been the dominant religious force in the US since the beginning and some Christians are scared to see the changing society where their story isn't THE STORY, so they feel there is a "war" on them.
In the same way, the White, rich, Male, (mainly Protestant) experience has been the cultural norm in the US and any challenge to that hegemony is seen as a "genocide against the White race" which makes no sense since there is not "White" race, there are people with lighter skin that come from various European countries, but who were once seen as outsiders facing discrimination, but are now part of this idea or "Whiteness" because they are not clearly identifiable as Black, Asian, or Latino.
Anything that goes against the absolute dominance of Christianity in society is seen as an attempt to destroy Christianity itself.
UnTied
(58 posts)ALL HOLIDAYS MATTER. If that excuse works for anti- the Black Lives Matter crowd, it has to work for this argument. Drop Mic. Go to bed.
SoCalMusicLover
(3,194 posts)It's because of people like yourself, that Christmas is slowly dying as a holiday.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)back! lol!
tavernier
(12,410 posts)Best part was that anything that starts with the R or T word was not a part of our conversation at all, much like following the old polite rule, that discussions of feces and vomit do not belong at the dinner table.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)this time. Usually the women behave themselves, even though we have strong opinions. We value harmony more. The men get too many drinks in them and just start going at it. It depends upon who is in attendance - we have a mixed bag of far right and far left in our family.
renate
(13,776 posts)Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)New Years Eve is the high feast day of St. Sylvester, New Year's day we celebrate the solemnity of Mary. January eighth is Little Christmas, the ephiphany. Tell them you are Catholic and there are multiple holidays between Christmas Eve and January eighth. Christmas is just one of them.
Raster
(20,998 posts)Drahthaardogs
(6,843 posts)😀
Raster
(20,998 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)meant all "holy days" up to and including New Year's Eve and Day. I considered it a catch all. They wouldn't listen. The thing is that they are Catholic but none of them are religious. They are just spouting right-wing, Fox news talking points. It's all about hating liberal PC "bullshit" to them. It has nothing to do with their convictions. They just want to hate on liberals. It's so stupid!
maxsolomon
(33,432 posts)"did someone actually stop you from saying Merry Christmas?"
they're so scared.
sinkingfeeling
(51,484 posts)They say "Happy Holidays" in glitter across the Santa sleigh on the front.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)So has "Season's Greetings". This is nothing new. I am so tired of the right making this into a political issue when it is not.
Orange Free State
(611 posts)My 86 year old father and his wife are the only two Trumpists, everyone else fairly liberal Democrats. Watched the Steelers annihilate the Texans, went home.
I decided some time ago that if family holidays turned into unpleasant battles, and I have had a few in the past, I would not go to them any more. I have a favorite nice warm quiet place in The Bahamas that I can go to in a few hours. Id just start spending my holidays there.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)gotten out of hand, but the one thing I have noticed about republicans is that they are always champing at the bit - just looking for an opportunity, drunk or sober, to start spewing their hateful message. Yes, they were drunk, but I think it was just an excuse. I honestly think that they had been waiting for this opportunity all day.
Orange Free State
(611 posts)....except make sure they have enough alcohol that they doze off. Maybe bring a bottle of something more powerful next time. Absinthe ought to anesthetize them pretty well.
No one in my family is much of a drinker, the two who lean to the right do so sober, which is, maybe, worse.
gopiscrap
(23,766 posts)with a right winger no matter how close of a relative they are to me...if you're a right winger your only use to me is to fertalize the ground you're buried in
Duppers
(28,127 posts)RW brother stomped off after sis & I grilled GW deniers in front of him.
Eliot Rosewater
(31,131 posts)WE have become what we once were in the 1950's.
Sophia4
(3,515 posts)this letter from Jefferson to Adams dated April 14, 1823.
The wishes expressed, in your last favor, that I may continue in life and health until I become a Calvinist, at least in his exclamation of mon Dieu! jusque à quand! would make me immortal. I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. he was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Dæmonism. if ever man worshipped a false god, he did. the being described in his 5. points is not the God whom you and I acknolege and adore, the Creator and benevolent governor of the world; but a dæmon of malignant spirit. it would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. indeed I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to Atheism by their general dogma that, without a revelation, there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a god. now one sixth of mankind only are supposed to be Christians: the other five sixths then, who do not believe in the Jewish and Christian revelation, are without a knolege of the existence of a god! this gives compleatly a gain de cause to the disciples of Ocellus, Timaeus, Spinosa, Diderot and DHolbach. the argument which they rest on as triumphant and unanswerable is that, in every hypothesis of Cosmogony you must admit an eternal pre-existence of something; and according to the rule of sound philosophy, you are never to employ two principles to solve a difficulty when one will suffice. they say then that it is more simple to believe at once in the eternal pre-existence of the world, as it is now going on, and may for ever go on by the principle of reproduction which we see and witness, than to believe in the eternal pre-existence of an ulterior cause, or Creator of the world, a being whom we see not, and know not, of whose form substance and mode or place of existence, or of action no sense informs us, no power of the mind enables us to delineate or comprehend. on the contrary I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to percieve and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition. the movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is , in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. we see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. so irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable than that of the few in the other hypothesis some early Christians indeed have believed in the coeternal pre-existance of both the Creator and the world, without changing their relation of cause & effect. that this was the opinion of St Thomas, we are informed by Cardinal Toleto, in these words Deus ab æterno fuit jam omnipotens, sicut cum produxit mundum. ab æterno potuit producere mundum.si sol ab æterno esset, lumen an æterno esset; et si pes, similiter vestigium. at lumen et vestigium effectus sunt efficientis solis et pedis; potuit ergo cum causâ æterna effectus coæterna esse. cujus sententiæ est S. Thomas Theologorum primus. Cardinal Toleta.
Of the nature of this being we know nothing. Jesus tells us that God is a Spirit. 4. John 24. but without defining what a spirit is ?????? ὁ ????. down to the 3d century we know that it was still deemed material; but of a lighter subtler matter than then our gross bodies. so says Origen. Deus igitur, cui anima similis est, juxta Originem, reapte corporalis est; sed graviorum tantum ratione corporum incorporeus. these are the words of Huet in his commentary on Origen. Origen himself says appellatio ???????? apud nostros scriptores est inusitata et incognita. so also Tertullian quis autem negabit Deum esse corpus, etsi deus spiritus? spiritus etiam corporis sui generis, in suâ effigie. Tertullian. these two fathers were of the 3d century. Calvins character of this supreme being seems chiefly copied from that of the Jews. but the reformation of these blasphemous attributes, and substitution of those more worthy, pure and sublime, seems to have been the chief object of Jesus in his discources to the Jews: and his doctrine of the Cosmogony of the world is very clearly laid down in the 3 first verses of the 1st chapter of John, in these words, ?? ???? ?? ὁ ?????, ??? ὁ ????? ?? ???? ??? ???? ??? ???? ?? ὁ ?????. ?ὑ??? ?? ?? ???? ???? ??? ????. ????? ?? ????? ???????, ??? ????? ????? ??????? ???? ἑ? ὁ ???????. which truly translated means in the beginning God existed, and reason [or mind] was with God, and that mind was God. this was in the beginning with God. all things were created by it, and without it was made not one thing which was made. yet this text, so plainly declaring the doctrine of Jesus that the world was created by the supreme, intelligent being, has been perverted by modern Christians to build up a second person of their tritheism by a mistranslation of the word ?????. one of its legitimate meanings indeed is a word. but, in that sense, it makes an unmeaning jargon: while the other meaning reason, equally legitimate, explains rationally the eternal preexistence of God, and his creation of the world. knowing how incomprehensible it was that a word, the mere action or articulation of the voice and organs of speech could create a world, they undertake to make of this articulation a second preexisting being, and ascribe to him, and not to God, the creation of the universe. the Atheist here plumes himself on the uselessness of such a God, and the simpler hypothesis of a self-existent universe. the truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. and the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. but we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.
So much for your quotation of Calvins mon dieu! jusqua quand in which, when addressed to the God of Jesus, and our God, I join you cordially, and await his time and will with more readiness than reluctance. may we meet there again, in Congress, with our antient Colleagues, and recieve with them the seal of approbation Well done, good and faithful servants.
Th: Jefferson
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-3446
Jefferson was a deist. He believed in a god, but not in the God as Christians define Him.
Jefferson was perhaps the leading intellect and the guiding light of the thought and the ideas upon which our nation, America, was founded.
I believed the story of the virgin birth to be mythology, to be symbolic but not "true."
Some of our Founding Fathers were Christians. Some were not. Some Americans today were Christians. Many, increasing in number, are not.
So Be It. That's the truth. Read Jefferson's letter.
We are a nation born of the Enlightenment. Let's never forget that.