Thursday, December 23, 2004
solve this
an uncle sends this one along:
A local toy store prices its merchandise according to the owner's whim. A doll costs $12, a kite costs $15, a skateboard costs $34, and a ring toss costs $24. According to this system, how much will a blackboard cost ?
taking the -christ- out of christmas
hmm...
In a message dated 12/23/2004 13:52:01 Eastern Standard Time, craigg@ writes:
I had a big argument with my mom lately since she's an O'Reilly listener. Lately he's been blasting off about how Christ has been removed from Christmas. I took the opinion that I'm glad the liberals are trying to keep religion out of government, it doesn't belong there. Too many times religion has been abused by people with selfish agendas. Religion is powerful because no one is allowed to question it. I tried to tell her it's these "right of religon" people who are also the anti-abortionist, prayer in school and other backwards thinking agendas. Anyway we ended up agreeing to disagree.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/17/185811/92
it's a worldview thing. i have some problems with this spiritual sanitization as well. like trying to turn classic works into gender neutral language. has "christ"mas actually hurt people ? and if we leave the baggage behind, we are left with commercialism. how's _that_ for a nasty religion ?
keeping religion out of government is a different thing. although, there's no avoiding the fact that it's been protestant values that have gotten us where we are (good? bad?). where would we have been if this had been buddhism or hindi or judaism or islam based ? it's a touchy business, this separation of church and state. an example of one possibility is what happens when the emotional centers are missing in a person. you end up not with a completely rational person, only a demotivated one, to the point where even rational thinking has been abandoned. so the religion is necessary. just how we manage it is another issue.
as for the storefronts abandoning the "c" word (hey, that's my name, dammit!), they're just responding to their perceived state of mind of their customers. if it pays, they'll continue, if not, they'll do the religion thing. that's all about money, nothing to do with government.
but no, no religious displays on public lands. if no one complained, fine. but people do. so dump it. now, if there's some grand tradition (and i mean grand) in any particular case, it may be worth having around for other, secular reasons. like the pledge of allegiance (which i find offensive because something so blatantly nationalistic should be confined to the trash heap of history; has nothing to do with the g word).
this country is only great if we do not require any sort of fervor, whether nationalistic or religious. nor should we condemn these things, if any one person wants to express it for themselves in a way not harmful to others. and we should recognize the difference between innocent expression of this type, and those truly damaging. this is christmas, after all. instead of tearing down, why not share the space ? put any number of displays on the city hall's front lawn, kwanza (which came out of the blue and always seemed artificial to me, but hey, why be biased based on newness?), hannukah, ramadan (or is that easterish?), whatever.
on the other hand, the ten commandments has no place residing in such places year-round. that would be a statement of policy, not a seasonal expression. besides, we may have started there, but no doubt we don't need to stay there.
nor are we confined to our "founding fathers" perspectives (as if we can really purport to understand them without them being around today). but their experiment did seem to show the way to an improved existence. now, our problem is figuring out just what the essence of that success is, and what is nonsense. it seems to me that no one has a complete handle on that yet, so we need to keep that in mind and cut out the extremism on all sides.
earlier post ref: discernment. looks like i need to start another category. what to call it ?