The power of ritual

I was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic home, but after spending my teenage years with question after question bubbling up inside me, I left Catholicism, never to return.  In my twenties I tried more than once to find a faith community that seemed right -- that made sense of the universe for me -- attending first a Quaker meeting, then a Unitarian church, and finally a Methodist church, and each time I ended up faced with the same questions I'd had, questions that no one seemed to be able to answer.

The prime question was "How do you know all this is true?"  

In other realms, that one was usually easier to answer.  Science, of course, is cut-and-dried; factual truth in science is measurable, quantifiable, observable.  But even with situations that aren't exactly rational, there's usually a way to approach the question.  How do I know that my family and friends love me?  Because they demonstrate it in a tangible way, every day.

But the claims of religion seemed to me to be outside even that, and I never was able to get answers that satisfied.  Most of the responses I did get boiled down to "I've had a personal experience of God" or "the existence of God gives meaning to my day-to-day experience," neither of which was particularly convincing for me.  I have never had anything like a transcendent spiritual experience of an omnipresent deity.  And something imbuing meaning into your life doesn't make it true.  I'd read plenty of meaningful fiction, after all.  And as far as my wanting it to be true, if there was one thing I'd learned by that point, it was that the universe is under no compulsion to behave in a way that makes me comfortable.

So ultimately, I left religion behind entirely.  I have no quarrels with anyone who has found a spiritual home that works for them, as long as they're not forcing it on anyone else; in fact, I've sometimes envied people who can find reason to believe, wholeheartedly, in a greater power.  I just never seemed to be able to manage it myself.

That's not to say I'm unhappy as an atheist.  Perhaps I can't access the reassurance and comfort that someone has who is deeply religious, but there are a lot of the petty rules and pointless, often harmful, restrictions that I wish I'd abandoned many years earlier.  (The chief of which is my years of shame over my bisexuality.  The damage done to the queer community by the largely religiously-motivated bigotry of our society is staggering and heartbreaking -- and given who just got elected to run the United States, it's far from over.)

But there's something about being part of a religion that I do miss, and it isn't only the sense of community.  You can find community in a book group or weekly sewing night or runners' club, after all.  What I find I miss most, strangely enough, is the ritual.

There's something compelling about the ritual of religion.  The Roman Catholicism of my youth is one of the most thoroughly ritualistic religions I know of; the idea is that any believer should be able to walk into any Catholic church in the world on Sunday morning and know what to do and what to say.  (Giving rise to the old joke, "How do you recognize a Catholic Star Wars fan?"  "If you say to them, 'May the Force be with you,' they respond, 'And also with you.'")  The vestments of the priests, the statuary and stained glass windows, the incense and candles and hymns and organ music -- it all comes together into something that, to the believer, is balm to the soul, leaving them connected to other believers around the world and back, literally millennia, in time.

Window in the Church of St. Oswald, Durham, England  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tom Parnell, Church of St Oswald - stained glass window, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The reason this comes up is twofold.  First, we're approaching the Christmas season, and I always associate this time of year with rituals that, for the most part, I no longer participate in -- Advent, Christmas music, decorating trees, Midnight Mass.  The result is that for me, the holiday season is largely a time of wistful sadness.  I look on all this as a very mixed bag, of course; it's hard to imagine my having a sufficient change of heart to stay up until the wee hours on Christmas Eve so I can get in my car and go take in a church service.

But seeing others participate in these things makes me realize what I've lost -- or, more accurately, what I've voluntarily given up.  And I can't help but feel some sense of grief about that.

The other reason is more upbeat -- a paper this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about an archaeological site deep in a cave in Israel that shows signs of having been used for the purposes of rituals...

... thirty-five thousand years ago.

The cave was occupied before that; the upper levels has evidence of inhabitants fifty thousand years ago, including a partial skull that shows evidence of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.  But there are deeper parts of the cave, places of perpetual darkness, where nevertheless people congregated.  There's art on the walls, and evidence of the soot from torch fires.

The authors write:

Identifying communal rituals in the Paleolithic is of scientific importance, as it reflects the expression of collective identity and the maintenance of group cohesion.  This study provides evidence indicating the practice of deep cave collective rituals in the Levant during the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) period.  It is demonstrated that these gatherings occurred within a distinct ritual compound and were centered around an engraved object in the deepest part of Manot Cave, a pivotal EUP site in southwest Asia.  The ritual compound, segregated from the living areas, encompasses a large gallery partitioned by a cluster of remarkable speleothems [water-deposited minerals].  Within this gallery, an engraved boulder stands out, displaying geometric signs suggesting a unique representation of a tortoise.  Isotopic analysis of calcite crusts on the boulder’s grooves revealed alignment with values found in speleothems from the cave dated to ~37 to 35 ka BP.  Additionally, meticulous shape analysis of the grooves’ cross-section and the discernible presence of microlinear scratches on the grooves’ walls confirmed their anthropogenic origin.  Examination of stalagmite laminae (36 ka BP) near the engraved boulder revealed a significant presence of wood ash particles within.  This finding provides evidence for using fire to illuminate the dark, deep part of the cave during rituals.  Acoustic tests conducted in various cave areas indicate that the ritual compound was well suited for communal gatherings, facilitating conversations, speeches, and hearing.  Our results underscore the critical role of collective practices centered around a symbolic object in fostering a functional social network within the regional EUP communities.

I find this absolutely fascinating.  The drive to create and participate in rituals is deep-seated, powerful, and has a very long history.  Its role in cultural cohesion is obvious.  Of course, the same force generates negative consequences; the us-versus-them attitudes that have driven the lion's share of the world's conflicts, both on the small scale and the global.  Rituals bind communities together, but also identify outsiders and keep them excluded.  (And the rituals often were guarded fiercely down to the level of minute details.  Consider that people were burned at the stake in England for such transgressions as translating the Bible into English.)

So it's complex.  But so is everything.  My yearning for participation in rituals celebrating a belief system I no longer belong to is, honestly, self-contradictory.  But all I can say is that we've been creatures of ceremony for over thirty thousand years, so I shouldn't expect myself to be exempt, somehow.

As Walt Whitman put it, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself.  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

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He sees you when you're sleeping

Ever heard of a tulpa?

I wrote about this (alleged) phenomenon a while back, so long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that it is when a bunch of people believe in a fictional character with sufficient fervor that said character becomes real.

Well, in some sense.  Even most true believers don't think they end up as flesh-and-blood, more that they can appear in spirit form (whatever that means when applied to a character that is fictional in the first place).  It all sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me, although as a fiction writer, I can say with some certainty that I would very much rather the characters in my books not come to life.  There are a few I'd like to have a beer with, sure.  But most of them?  Nope.

Lydia Moreton from In the Midst of Lions, for example, can stay safely in the realm of the unreal, thank you very much.

Be that as it may, apparently there are now people who think that there's a tulpa who is around mostly at this time of year.  So I'm sure you can predict that who I'm talking about is...

... Santa Claus.

No, I'm not making this up.  In an article over at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer tells us about a number of alleged sightings of Jolly Old Saint Nick.  And not to beat the point unto death, but these people do not believe that they're seeing someone dressed up as Santa Claus; they think they've actually had a close encounter with the real guy.

The word real, of course, being used advisedly.  Here's one such account, just so you can get the flavor of it.  A woman named Ana says she saw Santa when she was five years old, and the encounter was not exactly heartwarming:

He must have felt my presence because he turned around and looked at me.  He didn’t look jolly or kind and happy like you would expect Santa Claus to look.  He looked kind of eerie like he was staring into my soul.  Automatically, I ran into my parents’ room and hid under the covers.  I don’t know why I was so scared at the time, but I wrote it off as a dream for a while before I forgot about it completely.  Years later, I remembered it.  I thought it could have been a burglar, but when I asked my parents, nothing was ever missing from that apartment.  The only time we were ever robbed was when we moved later on.  The only explanation I have now is that it was some kind of apparition.

Of course, that's not the only explanation, but you knew I'd say that.

His eyes, how they twinkled!  His dimples, how merry!  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jackie, Evil clown Santa Claus, CC BY 2.0]

Loyd Auerbach, a "professor of parapsychology" over at Atlantic University, used similar verbiage to describe the accounts:

I’ve never even heard of people seeing Santa.  The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa.  The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa.  We can’t investigate that.  There’s nothing we can do with that.

Um.  We could investigate it if it was the Grim Reaper, but not if it's Santa?  Or if it's not actually Santa, our only options are that it's an alien or a ghost impersonating Santa?

I think these people need to review the concept of "only possibility."

So anyhow, I think the main issue here is that if it were true, it doesn't exactly paint a reassuring picture of Santa Claus.  In fact, it gives sinister overtones to lines like "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake," not to mention, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."  It also gives me pause when I hear the stanza from "Up on the Housetop" that goes:

Next comes the stocking of Little Will
Oh, just see what a glorious fill
Here is a hammer and lots of tacks
Also a ball and a whip that cracks.

Is it just me, or does it sound like Little Will made his Christmas list to fill out the equipment in his My Very Own Li'l Tots BDSM Dungeon?

Myself, I find the whole thing vaguely terrifying.  It's a good thing I think it's all a myth.  On the other hand, even if I'm wrong and Sinister Santa is real, he's still better than Krampus or the Giant Icelandic Christmas Cat, the Jólakötturinn, who comes out on Christmas Eve and eats bad children.

Which, for the record, I also didn't make up.

So I'd like to wish a lovely Christmas season to all who celebrate, and best of luck avoiding evil Santas or humongous child-eating cats.  Also the Grim Reaper, for what it's worth.

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Getting into the spirit

So it's Black Friday, wherein we Americans follow up a day set aside to give thanks for everything we have with a day set aside to trample each other to death trying to save money on overhyped garbage we really don't need.

Me, I stay right the hell away from stores on Black Friday.  I hate shopping in any case, and the rabid crowds only make it worse.  Plus, today marks the first day of the Little Drummer Boy Challenge, a yearly contest in which participants see how long they can make it into the Christmas season without hearing "The Little Drummer Boy," which ranks right up there with "Frosty the Snowman" and "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" as the most annoying Christmas carol ever written.  This song not only is irritating as hell, it also has what must be the most ridiculous plot line ever dreamed up, involving a kid who comes up to a pair of new parents with a peacefully sleeping newborn baby, and the kid thinks, "You know what these people need?  A drum solo."

Frankly, I'm surprised Joseph didn't smack him.  Pah-rum-puh-pum-POW, you odious little twerp.

I've participated in this contest for nine years, and haven't made it to Christmas Day undefeated yet.  My most ignominious loss occurred a few years ago, when I was taken out of the competition by a clerk in a hardware store who didn't even know all of the freakin' words, and kept having to la-la bits of it:

Come they LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
A newborn LA LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
Our LA LA gifts we bring pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA before the king pah-rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum

And so on and so forth.  He was singing it with hearty good cheer, so I felt kind of guilty when I realized that he'd knocked me out of the game and blurted out, "Are you fucking kidding me?" a little louder than I intended, eliciting a shocked look from the clerk and a significant diminishment in the general Christmas spirit amongst those around me.

Thomas Couture, The Drummer Boy (1857) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And of course, the Christmas season wouldn't be complete without the Fox News types ramping up the whole imaginary War on Christmas thing.  We atheists have allegedly been waging this war for what, now... twenty years?  Twenty-five?  And yet if you'll look around you, just like the Grinch's attempt at banishing Christmas from Whoville, the holiday season still goes right on, pretty much exactly as it did before.

Oops!  Shouldn't say "holiday," because that's part of the War on Christmas, too, even though the word "holiday" comes from "holy day" and therefore is also religious.  This is a point that seems to escape a lot of the Fox News and Newsmax commentators and their ilk, but to be fair, "grip on reality" has never been their forte anyhow.  This year, for example, the rage-of-the-season has been triggered by we Godless Liberal Democratic Unpatriotic Snowflakes somehow inducing Starbucks to put out holiday cups that have designs of hearts and stars instead of having Christmas trees or presents or whatnot, a decision which apparently is Very Naughty In God's Sight.  One furious ex-customer shrieked, "Starbucks REMOVED CHRISTMAS from their cups because they hate Jesus!!!", because apparently all it takes to defeat their all-powerful and omnipotent God is to change the design on some disposable paper cups.

What is wryly amusing about all of this is that I'm one of the aforementioned liberal atheists, and I love the holidays.  We had a nice turkey-and-stuffing dinner yesterday with my brother-in-law and his family for Thanksgiving, and I'm already putting together some gifts for friends and family for Christmas and looking forward to putting up a tree.  So it might come as a surprise to Fox News et al. that in December I tell people "Merry Christmas" at least as often as I say "Happy Holidays." Basically, if someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, I say it back to them; if they say, "Happy Holidays," I say that.  Likewise "Happy Hanukkah," "Happy Kwanzaa," "Blessed Solstice," "Merry Festivus," or "Have A Nice Day."

You know why?  If people speak kindly to me, I reciprocate, because I may be a liberal and an atheist, but I am not an asshole.  So I guess that's three ways in which I differ from the commentators over at Fox News.

Basically, be nice to me, I'll be nice to you.  Unless you're singing "The Little Drummer Boy."  I'm sorry, but my tolerance does have its limits.

In any case, mostly what I plan to do today is to sit around recovering from the food-and-wine-induced coma in which I spent most of yesterday evening.  So however you choose to observe the day and the season, I hope you enjoy it, whether you get into the spirit of it or pretty much ignore the whole thing.

Pah-rum-puh-pum-pum.

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Christmas cheer

It sometimes comes as a shock to my friends and acquaintances when they find out that even though I'm a staunch unbeliever in anything even resembling organized religion, I love Christmas music.

Well, some Christmas music.  There are modern Christmas songs that make me want to stick any available objects in my ears, even if those objects are fondue forks.  Abominations like "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" leave me leery of entering any public spaces with ambient music from November 15 to December 25.  In my opinion, there should be jail time associated with writing lines like, "Little tin horns and little toy drums, rooty-toot-toot and rummy-tum-tum," and whoever wrote "Let It Snow" should be pitched, bare-ass naked, head-first into a snowdrift.

Each year I participate in something called the Little Drummer Boy Challenge, which is a contest to see if you can make it from Thanksgiving to Christmas without once hearing "The Little Drummer Boy."  So far, I'm still in the game this year, although it must be said that I've done this for nine years and have hardly ever survived.  I've never been taken out as ignominiously, though, as I was a few years ago, when I made it all the way to the week before Christmas, and stopped by a hardware store to pick some stuff up.  And while I was waiting to check out, a stock clerk walked by jauntily singing the following:

Come, they LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
A newborn LA LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA LA gifts we bring pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA before the king pah-rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum

Dude didn't even know all the damn lyrics, but I had to play fair and admit I'd been felled by the Boy one more time.  Before I could stop myself, I glared at him and said, "Are you fucking kidding me right now?" in a furious voice, which led to a significant diminishment of the Christmas cheer in the store, but I maintain to this day I had ample justification.  The alarmed stock clerk scurried off, clearly afraid that if he stuck around much longer, the Batshit Crazy Scruffy Blond Customer was going to Deck his Halls but good.

I know this makes me sound like a grumpy curmudgeon.  I can accept that, because I am a grumpy curmudgeon.  But even so, I absolutely love a lot of Christmas music.  I think "O Holy Night" is a stunning piece of music, and "Angels We Have Heard On High" is incredible fun to sing (as long as it's not sung like a dirge, but as the expression of joy consistent with the lyrics).  Speaking of doing things the right way, check out Annie Lennox's stupendous music video of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen:"

Despite the impression I probably gave at the start of this post, the list of Christmas songs I like is way longer than the list of ones I don't.  I grew up singing wonderful French carols like "Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant" and "Un Flambeau, Jeanette Isabella," and to this day hearing those songs makes me smile.

And I can include not only seasonal religious music, but religious music in general, in this discussion; one of my favorite genres of music is Renaissance and Baroque religious music, especially the works of William Byrd, Henry Purcell, J. S. Bach, William Cornysh, Giovanni de Palestrina, and Thomas Tallis.  If you want to hear something truly transcendent, listen to this incredible performance of Tallis's Spem in Alium ("Hope in Another"), a forty-part motet here sung by seven hundred people:

I know it might seem like a contradiction for a non-religious person to thoroughly enjoy such explicitly religious music, but in my opinion, beauty is beauty wherever you find it.  I can be moved to tears by Bach's Mass in B Minor without necessarily believing the story it tells.  And it also pleases me that it gives me common ground with my friends who do believe, for whom the lovely "Mary's Boy Child" isn't just a cool calypso tune, but a joyous expression of something near and dear to them.

I guess I'm a bit of a contradiction in terms sometimes, but that's okay.  I still deeply resent any attempt to force belief on others (or lack of belief, for that matter), and my anger runs deep at the damage done, and still being done, by the religious to members of the LGBTQ community.  The likelihood of my ending up back in church is minuscule at best.

Even so, I still love the holiday season.  It's a chance to give gifts and express my appreciation for my friends and family, and to enjoy the pretty decorations and sweet music.  Honestly, I think a lot of us godless heathens feel the same way, which is why I'm glad to see that this year -- so far, at least -- the Religious Right has backed off on the whole idiotic "War On Christmas" nonsense.  After all, it's been what, fifteen years or so? -- since Bill O'Reilly gave the clarion call that the Atheists Were Comin' For Your Christmas Trees, and if you'll look around you'll notice that everyone's still saying "Merry Christmas" and giving gifts and everything else just like they've always done, so the whole trope has finally fallen a little flat.  It couldn't have gone any other way, honestly.  A great many of us atheistic types are also pretty dedicated to live-and-let-live, and most of us don't care if you have Christmas displays in your front yard so bright they disrupt nearby air traffic, as long as you're not going to pull out your AR-15 when a non-believer says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

I do, however, draw the line at piping in "The Little Drummer Boy" over mall loudspeakers.  That's just a bridge too far.  I mean, what kind of stupid song is that, anyhow?  It's about a kid who sees a mom and dad with a quietly sleeping newborn baby, and thinks, "You know what these people need?  A drum solo."

In my opinion, Mary would have been well in her rights to smack him over the head with the frankincense.  Pah-rum-puh-pum-pow, you odious little twerp.

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It's the most wonderful war of the year

Welp, I guess it's time to dust off my camo and flak jacket and helmet and guns.

The War on Christmas is starting early this year.

I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not.  It's not even Halloween and already the right-wing religious nutcakes are bringing back the claims that we non-religious types, and the Democrats in general, are planning to carpet-bomb Whoville or something.  This time it's started with the House Republican Caucus, which tweeted a photo of President Biden a couple of days ago along with the message, "This is the guys [sic] who is trying to steal Christmas.  Americans are NOT going to let that happen."

This year the gist of it seems to revolve around the (genuine) supply-chain problems that have been plaguing the United States for months, and which will probably result in raised prices and some items being delayed in shipping, if not outright unavailable.  I can understand the frustration with this.  On the other hand, complex problems rarely have one cause, and saying "This is Joe Biden's fault!" is just plain idiotic.  How much of it has to do with the current administration's policies, how much of it with leftovers from the previous administration's policies, and how much of it is pure circumstance (e.g. the pandemic) is not a simple question.

Much easier just do say "Biden did it!" and whip up some nice, Christmas-y outrage, despite the fact that Biden himself is a staunch Catholic and would hardly be likely to have secret aspirations to take over the Grinch's job now that the latter's heart grew three sizes.

Of course, "in touch with reality" is not a phrase that is generally associated with these people.  The whole War-on-Christmas trope goes back to 2005, when right-wing radio host John Gibson published a book called, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.  This was sixteen years ago, and every single year since then Fox News has spent inordinate amounts of time screeching about how we secular-minded types are secretly trying to ban Christian holidays, prevent anyone from saying "merry Christmas," and jail people who attend holiday services.

Now, I don't know if you've noticed, but if you'll think back carefully, you may recall that in every single one of those sixteen years, Christmas has happened, right on schedule.  People still say "merry Christmas" all they want with no repercussions, and no one has been arrested coming out of church on Christmas morning.

For a "liberal plot that's worse than you thought," odd that it's had zero discernible effect.

This would be honestly be hilarious if these people didn't have so much power over the American psyche.  The mystifying part, though, is that all you have to do is look around to realize that they're either delusional or lying outright.  Merely driving through any random town in America in December should be sufficient to convince you that Christmas is alive and well.  Around here, we have lots of folks who put up holiday displays in their yards with giant inflatable Santas, reindeer with glowing noses, various takes on nativity scenes, and enough lights to disrupt air traffic.  All the local stores start putting out Christmas-related stuff in November or earlier, so the capitalist side of the celebration is still as lucrative as ever.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Achim Raschka / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons), 13-12-16 Christmas house decoration, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What is ironic about all this is that I, and a great many non-religious folks I know, all celebrate Christmas.  If I really harbored deep-seated anti-Christian rancor you'd think that avoiding Christmas entirely would be an easy choice for me; not only am I not religious, my wife is Jewish.  Built-in excuse, right there.  Despite that, we put up a Christmas tree most years, always exchange gifts, and send out holiday cards when we can get our act together sufficiently to write them before Christmas Eve.  I do this mainly because (1) I think Christmas trees are pretty, and (2) I love giving people stuff.  I may not believe all the religious side of the holiday, but it's pretty obvious I'm not hostile to it.

The bottom line is -- and I've said this enough times that you'd think the point would be made -- 99% of secular folks, myself included, do not give a flying rat's ass what exactly you choose to believe, nor how you express those beliefs.  You can believe that your life's path is being directed by the divine influence of a magical bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy if you want to.  You can wear a bunny suit everywhere you go, wiggle your nose when you're annoyed, and eat nothing but carrots.  I honestly do not give a damn.

What I object to is when you start saying that the rest of us have to believe in the magical bunny, and want to open all public meetings with bunny-prayers, and demand that public school science classes include a unit on the Theory of Young-Earth Bunnyism.  Then you're gonna have a fight on your hands.

But this isn't being driven by logic and evidence, and never has been.  The people who make a huge deal out of the War on Christmas every year seem to fall into two categories: (1) partisan yahoos who want to stir up outrage against the other side and don't mind lying through their teeth to do it, and (2) truly religious types who also have a wide streak of paranoia and the gullibility to believe what they hear on Fox News.  The rest of us, religious and non-religious alike, usually all get along pretty well.

But I guess that's all beside the point.  Tiresome though it is, if you're an atheist, duty is duty.  Uncle Sam Wants YOU.  (Not that Uncle Sam, I'm talking about Sam Harris.)  I guess when you're called up, you don't really have a choice in the matter.  So, into the breach, may Dawkins protect us, and all that sort of thing.  I'm not optimistic about winning this year, given that we're 0-and-16, but you never know.  If we're lucky, maybe we'll get some supernatural assistance from the ghost of Christopher Hitchens.

Failing that, it'll be up to the magical bunny from Andromeda, and his track record ain't that great, either.

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My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Getting into the spirit

So it's Black Friday, wherein we Americans follow up a day set aside to give thanks for everything we have with a day set aside to trample each other to death trying to save money on overhyped garbage we really don't need.

Me, I stay right the hell away from stores on Black Friday.  I hate shopping in any case, and the rabid crowds only make it worse.  Plus, today marks the first day of the Little Drummer Boy Challenge, a yearly contest in which participants see how long they can make it into the Christmas season without hearing "The Little Drummer Boy," which ranks right up there with "Frosty the Snowman" and "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" as the most annoying Christmas carol ever written.  I've participated in this contest for six years, and haven't made it to Christmas Day undefeated yet.  Last year, I was taken out of the competition by a clerk in a hardware store who didn't even know all of the freakin' words, and kept having to la-la bits of it:

Come they LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
A newborn LA LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
Our LA LA gifts we bring pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA before the king pah-rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum

And so on and so forth.  He was singing it with hearty good cheer, so I felt kind of guilty when I realized that he'd knocked me out of the game and blurted out, "Are you fucking kidding me?" a little louder than I intended, eliciting a shocked look from the clerk and a significant diminishment in the general Christmas cheer amongst those around me.

Thomas Couture, The Drummer Boy (1857) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, the Christmas season wouldn't be complete without the Fox News types ramping up the whole imaginary War on Christmas thing.  We atheists have allegedly been waging this war for what, now... ten years?  Eleven?  And yet if you'll look around you, just like the Grinch's attempt at banishing Christmas from Whoville, the holiday season still goes right on, pretty much exactly as it did before.

Oops!  Shouldn't say "holiday," because that's part of the War on Christmas, too, even though the word "holiday" comes from "holy day" and therefore is also religious.  This is a point that seems to escape a lot of the Fox News and OAN commentators and their ilk, but to be fair "grip on reality" has never been their forte anyhow.  And since the War on Christmas is getting to be old hat, this year they decided that we Godless Liberal Democratic Unpatriotic Snowflakes are just not coming across as evil enough, so we must also be conducting a War on Thanksgiving.

Take, for example, Matt Walsh, of Daily Wire, who said last week, "We’ve been worried about the War on Christmas but the Dems just snuck in the side entrance and canceled Thanksgiving instead," presumably because of our unreasonable and anti-American desire to keep everyone who's here at Thanksgiving still alive by Christmas.  Not to be outdone, a headline in Breitbart warned, "Be Prepared for Democrats to Cancel Christmas," prompting a church in Colorado to publish a bulletin titled, "Ten Top Reasons Why Liberals Hate the Holidays." 

What is wryly amusing about all of this is that I'm one of the aforementioned liberal atheists, and I love the holidays.  We had a nice turkey-and-stuffing dinner yesterday for Thanksgiving, and I'm already putting together some gifts for friends and family for Christmas and looking forward to putting up a tree.  So it might come as a surprise to Matt Walsh et al. that in December I tell people "Merry Christmas" at least as often as I say "Happy Holidays."  Basically, if someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, I say it back to them; if they say, "Happy Holidays," I say that.  Likewise "Happy Hanukkah," "Blessed Solstice," "Merry Festivus," or "Have A Nice Day."

You know why?  If people speak kindly to me, I reciprocate, because I may be a liberal and an atheist, but I am not an asshole.  So I guess that's three ways in which I differ from Matt Walsh.

Basically, be nice to me, I'll be nice to you.  Unless you're singing "The Little Drummer Boy."  I'm sorry, but my tolerance does have its limits.

In any case, mostly what I plan to do today is to sit around home, recovering from the food-and-wine-induced coma in which I spent most of yesterday evening.  So however you choose to observe the day and the season, I hope you enjoy it, whether you get into the spirit of it or pretty much ignore the whole thing.

Pah-rum-puh-pum-pum.

**************************************

I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

He sees you when you're sleeping

Dear Readers,

I'll be taking next week off to spend some time with family, so there'll be a brief hiatus here at Skeptophilia HQ.  Posts will resume Monday, December 31, but I'll still be happy to receive any suggestions for topics while I'm on break!

So happy holidays to all who celebrate.  See you on New Year's Eve.

cheers,

Gordon

*****************************************

Ever heard of a tulpa?

I wrote about this (alleged) phenomenon a while back, so long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that it is when a bunch of people believe in a fictional character with sufficient fervor that said character becomes real.

Well, in some sense.  Even most true believers don't think they end up as flesh-and-blood, more that they can appear in spirit form (whatever that means when applied to a character that is fictional in the first place).  It all sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me, although as a fiction writer, I can say with some certainty that I would very much rather the characters in my books not come to life.  There are a few I'd like to have a beer with, sure.  But most of them?

They can stay safely in the realm of the unreal, thank you very much.

Be that as it may, apparently there are now people who think that there's a tulpa who is around mostly at this time of year.  So I'm sure you can predict that who I'm talking about is...

... Santa Claus.

No, I'm not making this up.  In an article over at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer tells us about a number of alleged sightings of Jolly Old Saint Nick.  And not to beat the point unto death, these people do not believe that they're seeing someone dressed up as Santa Claus; they think they've actually had a close encounter with the real guy.

The word real, of course, being used advisedly.  I don't want to steal Swancer's thunder, because his article is well worth reading in its entirety, but here's one such account, just so you can get the flavor of it.  A woman named Ana says she saw Santa when she was five years old, and the encounter was not exactly heartwarming:

He must have felt my presence because he turned around and looked at me.  He didn’t look jolly or kind and happy like you would expect Santa Claus to look.  He looked kind of eerie like he was staring into my soul.  Automatically, I ran into my parents’ room and hid under the covers.  I don’t know why I was so scared at the time, but I wrote it off as a dream for a while before I forgot about it completely.  Years later, I remembered it.  I thought it could have been a burglar, but when I asked my parents, nothing was ever missing from that apartment.  The only time we were ever robbed was when we moved later on.  The only explanation I have now is that it was some kind of apparition.

Of course, that's not the only explanation, but you knew I'd say that.

His eyes, how they twinkled!  His dimples, how merry!  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jackie, Evil clown Santa Claus, CC BY 2.0]

Loyd Auerbach, a "professor of parapsychology" over at Atlantic University, used the same verbiage to describe the accounts:

I’ve never even heard of people seeing Santa.  The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa.  The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa.  We can’t investigate that.  There’s nothing we can do with that.

Um.  We could investigate it if it was the Grim Reaper, but not if it's Santa?  Or if it's not actually Santa, our only options are that it's an alien or a ghost impersonating Santa?

 I think these people need to review the concept of "only possibility."

So anyhow, I think the main issue here is that if it were true, it doesn't exactly paint a reassuring picture of Santa Claus.  In fact, it gives kind of sinister overtones to lines like "He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake," not to mention, "I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."  It also gives me pause when I hear the stanza from "Up on the Housetop" that goes:

Next comes the stocking of Little Will
Oh, just see what a glorious fill
Here is a hammer and lots of tacks
Also a ball and a whip that cracks.

Is it just me, or does it sound like Little Will made his Christmas list to fill out the equipment in his My Very Own Li'l Tots S & M Dungeon?

Myself, I find the whole thing vaguely terrifying.  It's a good thing I think it's all a myth.  On the other hand, even if Sinister Santa is a real thing, he's still better than Krampus or the Giant Icelandic Christmas Cat, the Jólakötturinn, who comes out on Christmas Eve and eats bad children.

Which, for the record, I didn't make up.

So a lovely Christmas to all who celebrate, and best of luck avoiding evil Santas or humongous child-eating cats.  Also the Grim Reaper, for what it's worth.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Making the world safe for meerkats

This past weekend my wife and I put up our Christmas tree.  It's always a special moment for me -- we have ornaments collected from years ago (including one given to my son Lucas on his first Christmas), ornaments we've made, ornaments we've collected on trips to various places.  We went a little crazy on the lights this year, but I think it's pretty doggone festive.

In case you're wondering, yes, that is a stuffed meerkat on the top of the tree.  The one thing we've never been able to agree upon is a good tree-topper, so we've started the tradition of using our stuffed meerkat in the place of the traditional star.  Unfortunately, in the tiny, underdeveloped brain of our hound, Lena, the search parameters "fuzzy" + "in a tree" results in the answer "squirrel," so she spends an average of two hours a day staring at the meerkat waiting for it to move.

At least it gives her an alternative hobby to going outside followed by going inside followed by going outside followed by going inside, which is her other favorite thing to do.

Anyhow, this all comes up because a couple of days ago, Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump's former campaign manager, was interviewed on Fox News by Sean Hannity, and said, "America is in store for a great Christmas, which you can say again, ‘Merry Christmas,’ because Donald Trump is now the president, you can say it again, it’s okay to say, it’s not a pejorative word anymore."  This hit the news at almost the same time as did a Pew Research Group poll that found that half of all Americans say that discrimination against Christians is as bad as that against minorities; this number rises to 75% if you just poll Trump supporters, and 80% if you only count white evangelical Christians.

My first question upon hearing this was to wonder what the hell these people are smoking.  Then I amended that to wondering if any of the people who answered that way have ever actually talked to a minority about what they experience on a daily basis -- the kind of prejudice and bigotry, explicit or implicit, minorities live with every day of every year.

My guess is no.  Because that would require peeking outside their comforting shell of Being Right About Everything, which apparently comes with the added feature of Fearing Anyone Different.  These people are mistaking their no longer having unquestioned hegemony with discrimination, a difference that pretty much any member of any minority would be happy to explain.

The problem is, the white Protestant Christians have for two hundred years run damn near everything, to the point where if you weren't a white Protestant Christian, your chance of being elected to public office was just about zero.  (An exception is my home region of southern Louisiana.  There, you could also be elected if you were Catholic.)  Thankfully, things are changing, albeit slowly -- even in some of the most conservative parts of the country, there are minorities and people of other religious beliefs (and no religion at all, although that's still uncommon) being elected.

But this is profoundly terrifying to some people.  (Not all, as I hasten to point out, and upon which I will elaborate in a moment.)  But there are people for whom this is so frightening that they invented some convenient myths -- that liberals in general and atheists in particular are trying to outlaw saying Merry Christmas, that electing non-Christians means that the first thing they'll do is tear down the churches and make saying "Jesus" a capital offense.  Of course, this is ridiculous; even the most atheistic of atheists (me, for example) couldn't care less if you say Merry Christmas, have Christmas displays in your yard so bright they disrupt air traffic, and go to church twice a day every day of the year.  We don't care what you do with your life, we only care when you start telling others what they have to do with their lives, and also when you use taxpayer dollars to fund religion.

Odd, isn't it, that it's not generally the atheists who have problems with how people greet each other during the holiday season -- we're usually content to respond in kind, and take a friendly greeting as friendly instead of as some kind of insult to the core of our beliefs.  100% of the squealing I've seen about who says what to whom, holiday-wise, has come from staunch Christians.

I'm overgeneralizing, of course, because there are obnoxious atheists just as there are obnoxious people of every other stripe.  Also, some of my Christian friends are outspokenly in favor of everyone following their own star regarding what they believe and how they observe it.  But people like Lewandowski make everyone look bad -- he makes the evangelicals seem like they're only content when they're running the show, and the atheists sound like they'd be thrilled to turn Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer into venison cutlets.

Which explains the results of the poll.  The sad part is that this sort of rhetoric will do nothing but reinforce the rifts we already have -- especially awful given that it's based on a falsehood.

So that's pretty depressing.  Me, I think I'm going to go try to cheer myself up.  Maybe I'll sit on the floor next to Lena and stare at the Christmas Meerkat.  It certainly seems to make her happy.

Getting into the spirit

So it's Black Friday, in which we Americans follow up a day set aside to give thanks for everything we have, with a day set aside to trample each other to death trying to save money on overhyped garbage we really don't need.

Me, I stay right the hell away from stores on Black Friday.  I hate shopping in any case, and the rabid crowds only make it worse.  Plus, today marks the first day of the Little Drummer Boy Challenge, a yearly contest in which participants see how long they can make it into the Christmas season without hearing "The Little Drummer Boy," which ranks right up there with "Frosty the Snowman" as the most annoying Christmas carol ever written.   I've participated in this contest for three years, and haven't made it to Christmas Day undefeated yet.  Last year, I was taken out of the competition by a clerk in a hardware store who didn't even know all of the freakin' words, and kept having to la-la bits of it:

Come they LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
A newborn LA LA LA pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
Our LA LA gifts we bring pah-rum-puh-pum-pum
LA LA before the king pah-rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum, rum-puh-pum-pum

And so on and so forth.  He was singing it with hearty good cheer, so I felt kind of guilty when I realized that he'd knocked me out of the game and blurted out, "Are you fucking kidding me?" a little louder than I intended, eliciting a shocked look from the clerk and a significant diminishment in the general Christmas spirit amongst those around me.

Thomas Couture, The Drummer Boy (1857) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And of course, the Christmas season wouldn't be complete without the hyperreligious types ramping up the whole imaginary War on Christmas thing.  We atheists have allegedly been waging this war for what, now... six years?  Seven?  And yet if you'll look around you, just like the Grinch's attempt at banishing Christmas from Whoville, the holiday season still goes right on, pretty much exactly as it did before.

Oops!  Shouldn't say "holiday," because that's part of the War on Christmas, too, even though the word "holiday" comes from "holy day" and therefore is also religious.  Some people feel really strongly about this even so, including Harris County (Georgia) Sheriff Mike Jolley, who is so determined to bash everyone over the head with Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward Men that he posted a sign at the border of Harris County that says:

Welcome to Harris County, Georgia!  WARNING: Harris County is politically incorrect.  We say: Merry Christmas, God Bless America and In God We Trust; we salute our troops and our flag.  If this offends you…LEAVE!

Because nothing communicates god's love like telling everyone who is different than you are to bugger off.

What is wryly amusing about all of this, at least in my local community, is that I'm known to be one of the more outspoken atheists in the area, and in December I tell people "Merry Christmas" at least as often as I say "Happy Holidays."  Basically, if someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, I say it back to them; if they say, "Happy Holidays," I say that.  Likewise "Happy Hanukkah," "Blessed Solstice," "Merry Festivus," or "Have A Nice Day."

You know why?  If people speak kindly to me, I reciprocate, because I may be an atheist, but I am not an asshole.  So I guess that's three ways in which I am different from Sheriff Mike Jolley of Harris County, Georgia.

Basically, be nice to me, I'll be nice to you.  Unless you're singing "The Little Drummer Boy."  I'm sorry, but my tolerance does have its limits.

In any case, mostly what I plan to do today is to sit around home, recovering from the food-and-wine-induced coma in which I spent most of yesterday evening.  So however you choose to observe the day and the season, I hope you enjoy it, whether you get into the spirit of it or pretty much ignore the whole thing.

Pah-rum-puh-pum-pum.

Cup of woe

So it's a bright time in the calendar year here in the United States, despite the shortening of days and cooling of the weather.  Thanksgiving approaches, with its promise of good meals and family together-time.  And after that, of course, we have the Christmas season, a time of gift-giving, religious observance, and atheists declaring war on happiness, tradition, and little children's hopes and dreams.

At least that's the contention of a certain cadre of über-Christians, who every year trot out the whole tired "War on Christmas" trope.  Can we just get one thing out of the way, right from the beginning?

I am an outspoken atheist blogger, and I put up a Christmas tree every year.  I think they're beautiful. I love getting gifts for my family and friends, even though my gift-wrapping abilities are such that the presents I give usually look like they were wrapped either by a four-year-old or an unusually artistic gorilla.  I like a lot of Christmas music -- "O Holy Night" and "What Child is This?" are two particular favorites.  (I do have to admit, though, that I find "Frosty the Snowman" and "The Little Drummer Boy" so annoying that I nearly break my index finger turning the car radio off when they start playing.)

And most of my atheist friends are the same way.  We have no problem with anyone celebrating Christmas, or not, as they see fit -- as long as (1) it's not forced on anyone, and (2) Christmas displays aren't paid for at public expense.  If you follow those two rules, you can have a Christmas scene out on your lawn with lights so bright that it disrupts flyover jet traffic, as far as I'm concerned.

But that hasn't stopped the idiotic rhetoric from starting.  And this year, it's directed at none other than Starbucks, because they changed their holiday cup design from having reindeer and snowflakes to a simple red-and-green.

Well.  You'd think they were proposing terrorist attacks on Whoville, from the reaction that got.  Here's a smattering of responses:

From conservative British MP David Burrowes: "The Starbucks coffee cup change smells more of political correctness than a consumer-led change." 

From Christian Institute's spokesperson Simon Calvert: "What is it about Christmas that Starbucks are [sic] afraid of celebrating?  Haven’t they heard it’s the most wonderful time of the year, and the season of good will to ALL men?" 

From social media commentator Chuck Nellis: "My Christmas mentality: if a store won't promote Christmas re Starbucks, I'm not spending my hard-earned money there." 

From a poster on Twitter, in response to the story about the change on Breitbart News: "Since you're running away from Christianity, I'm running away from you.  Just exercising my financial choice." 

From Christian radio personality Joshua Feuerstein: "Starbucks has removed Christmas from their cups because they hate Jesus...  The Christian majority in this country has awakened and are demanding that our voice be heard."

Trust me, Joshua, we never have problems hearing the Christians of your stripe. given that they always seem to be screaming with outrage over something even though they are, as you point out, still the majority in this country and in control of damn near everything.

It seems like people of this mindset would not be content until every business, everywhere, plasters their walls with "Merry Christmas" and "Jesus Is The Reason For The Season," and blares Christmas carols from their speakers 24/7.  Anything less is a deliberate and personal attack against everything holy.

What makes this wryly funny is that one of Starbucks' most popular seasonal coffees is called "Christmas Blend."  ("Just right for the season," the description says.)

I wonder if the people who are screeching about this realize how rapidly this sort of behavior makes you lose your credibility.  Take for example Colorado pastor Kevin Swanson, who at the National Religious Liberties Conference last week had a complete meltdown in public and said that god was going to wreak destruction on the United States because of Harry Potter, despite the fact that the books were written by a British author, are set in Britain, and generated a movie series wherein the parts were played by British actors.

God, evidently, is not known for his accurate aim while exercising his "smite" option.

So anyway.  It's doubtful that Starbucks is anti-Christmas, given that the cups are still red and green, and a business deliberately cutting itself out of sales during the Christmas season would be kind of stupid financially.  Baby Jesus is unlikely to be upset if his image isn't broadcast everywhere; we all know that Christmas is coming, okay?

Let me end with an admonition from the War-on-Christmas cadre's favorite book, specifically Matthew 6:6: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

Big Brother on the shelf

I'm probably in the minority here, but I think "Elf on the Shelf" is freakin' creepy.

Maybe I'm just not much into whimsy.  Or maybe I've watched too many horror movies.  But I find that little face, with the wide eyes and the fixed grin, a tad... sinister.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, there's more than just the resemblance to Chucky that's a problem, here.  Its creators, mother/daughter team Carol Aebersold and Chandra Bell, thought it up in 2004, and wrote a children's book that rocketed into the number one bestseller spot in 2008.  Since then it has only increased in popularity; in 2012 the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade featured an Elf on the Shelf balloon.  This has led to its face appearing damn near everywhere.  The Atlantic writer Kate Tuttle says that The Elf on the Shelf is "a marketing juggernaut dressed up as a tradition," and that the idea is basically to "bully your child into thinking that good behavior equals gifts."  I think that's pretty accurate.  The whole thing seems more about selling stuff than it is about having fun, but maybe I'm a curmudgeon.

Okay, I'm definitely a curmudgeon.  But still.

However, there are people who go even further than I do.  Just a couple of days ago, an article appeared over at Education Action Group News about Professor Laura Pinto of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, who claims that the purpose of The Elf on the Shelf is to get children to "accept the surveillance state."

She calls the Elf "an external form of non-familial surveillance," which I suppose would be correct if the Elf was actually real.  "If you grow up thinking it’s cool for the elves to watch me and report back to Santa," Pinto writes, "well, then it’s cool for the NSA to watch me and report back to the government."

Isn't that a bit of a leap?  This takes the Slippery-Slope Fallacy and elevates it to the level of the Falling-Off-A-Cliff Fallacy.  It takes more than a silly doll to condition children to let themselves be browbeaten by authority.

And of course, it's not like we haven't been doing this sort of thing for years.  Many perfectly rational people were raised on "He knows when you've been sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows when you've been bad or good, so be good, for goodness sake!"

Which, I have to admit, is kind of sketchy in and of itself.  In terms of creepiness, those lines are right up there with "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, in which Sting informs his girlfriend, "Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you," which I hear gets played a lot at weddings, despite sounding more like a reason for a restraining order than a marriage license.

But I digress.

My general opinion is that Elf on a Shelf is just the latest in a long line of marketing ploys designed to make parents completely crazy around the holidays, and that other than that, it's pretty harmless.  I'll be surprised it's turning kids into Sheeple.  But you never know.  Subtexts and subliminal messages are always possible.  Personally, I'm still a little suspicious of My Little Pony, which I'm convinced was created to give kids the impression that talking in a high-pitched grating whine is "cute."

And to judge by the little children I've seen lately, it seems to be working.

Subordinate Clauses

Well, it's only a couple of weeks out from Christmas, so I expect a lot of you are excitedly trimming trees and buying presents for friends and family and listening to Christmas music.  Despite being an atheist, I love this holiday.  I think a nicely-decorated Christmas tree is lovely; we'd have a tree this year if I could get out of my own way long enough to go get one (which, with luck, will happen this weekend).  Plus, I really enjoy giving presents to friends, so having an excuse to get stuff for people I care about is awesome.

I even like most Christmas music, especially the older carols.  For example, I grew up singing the lovely French carol "Il Est Né, Le Divine Enfant" and still feel nostalgic every time I hear it, and I think that "O Holy Night" and "Angels We Have Heard On High" are absolutely gorgeous.

Some of the newer ones, on the other hand, bring "annoying" to new heights.  For instance, I doubt there's been a more banal set of lyrics ever written than "Little tin horns and little toy drums, rooty-toot-toot and rummy-tum-tum."  And my considered opinion is that whoever wrote "Let It Snow" should be pitched, bare-ass naked, headfirst into a snow drift.

Still and all, I like this holiday and a lot of its traditions.  Which is why I was alarmed to find out that Santa, the Jolly Old Elf, is actually...

... Satan.

Or at least, so says James L. Melton, of the Bible Baptist Church of Sharon, Tennessee.  Melton is virulently against Santa, and not just because of the usual "put Christ back into Christmas" stuff you hear, exhorting Christians to focus more on the religious traditions than the secular ones.  No, Melton thinks it's worse than that.  He says that Santa is literally Satan, and that you shouldn't put out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve, you should put out devil's-food cake.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What are his arguments, you may ask?  I was thinking of just giving a summarized list, but some of his reasoning (if I can dignify it by that name) needs to be seen in the original.  So here are a few examples.

SANTA LIVES IN THE NORTH 

Tradition holds that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, a place ABOVE the rest of us.  

JESUS CHRIST LIVES IN THE NORTH 

"Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King." (Psa. 48:2)

I don't think Psalm 48 was referring to the North Pole, but what do I know?  I'm no biblical scholar, of course.  Maybe the bears that god sent to the Prophet Elisha to eat the children who had teased him for being bald were polar bears, I dunno.

SANTA WEARS RED CLOTHING  

Santa wears a red furry suit.  

JESUS CHRIST WEARS RED CLOTHING 

"And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God." (Rev. 19:13)

Well, there were lots of guys on Star Trek who wore red, and as I recall, they weren't all-powerful.  In fact, nearly every episode, several Red Shirts ended up dying in nasty ways.

SANTA IS OMNISCIENT  

Children are taught that Santa "knows when you've been good, and he knows when you've been bad".  

JESUS CHRIST IS OMNISCIENT 

"The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good." (Pro. 15:3) "And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?" (Mat. 9:4) 

Is it just me, or is the idea of an omniscient being spying on you at all times a little... creepy?  I don't care whether it's Santa or Jesus, I'd rather not have someone watching me in the bathroom.

SANTA FLIES AROUND GIVING GIFTS 

Santa has the ability to defy the laws of gravity and fly around giving gifts to people.  

JESUS CHRIST ASCENDED AND GAVE GIFTS UNTO MEN 

"But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men." (Eph. 4:7-8) 

So, what are you saying, Reverend Melton?  That if I'm good this year, Jesus will bring me a Little Tin Horn and a Little Toy Drum?

There are plenty of others, including Santa's elves being evil spirits, and Santa and Jesus both having white hair.

Then he ends by saying that because Santa is sometimes called "Saint Nick," and an old slang for the devil is "Old Nick," that proves it.  And that was when this linguistics geek sat up and said, "Hey now.  You've left the realm of goofy pseudo-theology and started to mess with false etymology. Them's fightin' words."  Because I happen to know that "Old Nick" is the devil because the German word for demon is nickel (yes, it's a cognate to the name of the metal, which was called kupfernickel, or "copper demon," because its ore looked like copper ore but it didn't produce any copper).  "Saint Nick," on the other hand, comes from the name Nicholas, which means "victory of the people" (from the Greek nike, victory + laos, people).

Of course, Reverend Melton would still think the similarity was significant.  He even says that it's no coincidence that "Santa" and "Satan" are spelled from the same letters, something that was pointed out twenty years ago by the "Church Lady" on Saturday Night Live.

So we're not talking about someone who's rational, here. If you look at other things Melton's written about, you find out on his home page that he's also against Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and rednecks, that he's all for capital punishment, and he thinks kids need to be spanked regularly.

He also said that he doesn't believe in evolution, which is no great shocker.  He says that you can't use biochemistry to support evolution, because biochemistry is "where scientists mix genes and chromosomes in their effort to prove relation between man and animal."

So it's not like Melton has that firm a grasp on reality.

And I doubt whether his message is going to have much impact.  Too many people like Christmas and get into the traditions, whether they approach it from a religious or a secular stance.  I'm thinking that very few of us are going to give up giving holiday gifts because "Santa is a COUNTERFEIT GOD" (the stuck caps lock courtesy of Reverend Melton).

As for me, I hope to get my tree up this weekend.  I've also gotta get cracking with getting gifts for people.  I might even play some Christmas music today.  Time to get ready, 'cuz Satan Claus is comin' to town.

Um.  Santa Claus.  My bad.

Rooty-toot-toot.