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.

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

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.

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

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!]

Happy Xmas (War is Over)

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate from here at Skeptophilia headquarters.  As for my household, we're mostly just taking it easy.  Working in a school means the lead-up to Christmas can be kind of chaotic, and I have to say that I'm enjoying being able to sit here drinking a cup of coffee without people yelling my name at me every three seconds.  Plus, we're having a winter storm that's supposed to dump five inches of snow on us today, and comes with forty mile an hour winds (already there's a gale howling out there).  So I doubt seriously if I'll put my nose outside today.

Some of you might wonder why I, an atheist, am wishing a Merry Christmas to people.  The reason is: I am not an asshole.  I am honestly happy for people who enjoy the Christmas season, and that does not mean I'm somehow discriminating against those who don't.  Mostly, I want everyone to be happy and enjoy life, and am of the opinion that my being of the non-religious persuasion doesn't imply that I'm ill-wishing people who are believers.

This, of course, won't convince the perpetually-disgruntled types who think that someone saying "Happy holidays" is the moral equivalent of strafing Whoville.  And in fact these people have now started an ad campaign that has as its main message thanking Donald Trump for allowing us to say "Merry Christmas" again.

What I want to know is, what pretend world are these people living in?  Because, apparently, they honestly believe that President Obama outlawed saying "Merry Christmas."  My guess is that they believe he substituted a mandate that we all say "Allahu akbar" instead.  This is despite the existence of this video montage of Obama saying "Merry Christmas" over and over and over, with apparent enthusiasm and enjoyment.

But as has been demonstrated time and again, facts don't matter with these people.  Or, more to the point, you're allowed to make up the facts as you go.  Trump (and his eternally-angry pals Joe Walsh and Bill O'Reilly) have claimed for years that Obama and his family were not Christian and had general disdain for Christmas, despite the fact that the tradition of the White House Christmas Tree, the annual Christmas message, and Christmas cards went on during the eight years of Obama's presidency just as it did before and after.

And, astonishingly, their followers believe them.  Instead of watching the video of Obama saying "Merry Christmas," and concluding they were wrong, they ignore the evidence that's right before their eyes so they don't have to change their preconceived opinions.  Instead, they accept statements like that made last week by Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas about the horrorshow that would have occurred had Hillary Clinton won:

If Hillary were elected and then she replaces [Antonin] Scalia with someone who has contempt for the God we know rules the universe, and our freedom of religion would have been gone.  They consider Christians a hate group, even though it’s the one true religion based on ‘God so loved the world he gave his son.  His son so loved the world he gave his life,’ and they have turned that upside down.  They were going to be coming after Christians with the help of then a 5-4 Supreme Court. 

So on election night I said, ‘But if on the off-chance Hillary wins, sweetheart, you need to be ready.  They’ll probably have me in jail within four years,’ and I wasn’t kidding.  I really believed that if she had won, my freedom was at stake because of my Christian beliefs.

Okay, I know that Gohmert has the IQ of leftover mashed potatoes, but still.  On what basis could he possibly conclude that if Clinton had won, she would have had Christians jailed?  Because -- and it pains me to have to point this out -- Hillary Clinton is also a Christian.  Her membership in the Methodist church is well established.  Why on earth would she try to create a policy of oppressing a group that she herself belongs to?

Of course, we're not talking about logic, here.  But it still amazes me that anyone can listen to Louie Gohmert (or, frankly, Donald Trump) and just sit there nodding and saying, "Yeah, right on, that makes sense."  How do people's bullshitometers not peg?  When the little girl on the commercial says, "Thank you, President Trump, for allowing us to say, 'Merry Christmas" again," how do people not say, "What kind of horseshit is this?  The phrase 'Merry Christmas' starts appearing in stores in September.  What makes you think it was ever forbidden?"

But amazingly, they don't.

Anyhow.  Sorry for getting off on a rant, when probably what you want to be doing is opening presents and drinking eggnog and socializing with your family.  Didn't mean to put a damper on things.  And, honestly, I've found that people who continually take things the wrong way and seem to enjoy being outraged are the minority.  So to everyone else I'll say: Enjoy the day, whether you celebrate Christmas or not.  Even if you're not religious, "peace on Earth and good will toward everyone" is still a pretty good rule to live by, as is "don't be an asshole."

Merry Christmas mandate

Last week, Donald Trump addressed the "Values Voter Summit," a group of people whose Values apparently include supporting a thrice-married serial philanderer whose main claim to fame is embodying all Seven Deadly Sins in the same person.

Notwithstanding the mindblowing irony of someone like Trump addressing issues of morality, the Values Voters were wildly enthusiastic about the speech.  The part that got the most rousing round of applause was when he informed the Values Voters that he was going to make it legal to say "Merry Christmas" again:

America is a nation of believers, and together we are strengthened and sustained by the power of prayer.  George Washington said that “religion and morality are indispensable” to America’s happiness, really, prosperity and totally to its success.  It is our faith and our values that inspires us to give with charity, to act with courage, and to sacrifice for what we know is right.

The American Founders invoked our Creator four times in the Declaration of Independence -- four times.  How times have changed.  But you know what, now they're changing back again.  Just remember that...  Religious liberty is enshrined in the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights.  And we all pledge allegiance to -- very, very beautifully -- “one nation under God...”  To protect religious liberty, including protecting groups like this one, I signed a new executive action in a beautiful ceremony at the White House on our National Day of Prayer, which day we made official.

We are stopping cold the attacks on Judaeo-Christian values...   And something I've said so much during the last two years, but I'll say it again as we approach the end of the year. You know, we're getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don't talk about anymore.  They don't use the word "Christmas" because it's not politically correct.  You go to department stores, and they'll say, "Happy New Year" and they'll say other things.  And it will be red, they'll have it painted, but they don't say it.  Well, guess what?  We're saying “Merry Christmas” again.

Okay, just hang on a moment.

"People don't talk about" Christmas any more?  Then explain to me why this year the department stores started putting up Christmas decorations in September.  And I'm going to say this loudly, one more time, as plainly as possible:

I know a lot of liberals, atheists, agnostics, secularists, and what-have-you.  And not a single one of them gives a flying rat's ass if you say "Merry Christmas" or not.  The only two things I have ever heard any of them gripe about, apropos of the Christmas season, are the following:

1. Saying "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas" is polite because it's an acknowledgement that not everyone thinks like you do.  It's a way of saying, "I realize you may have a different set of beliefs, and that's okay."  It's not a slap in the face to Christians, it's not a way of belittling or eliminating Christmas from the national consciousness (hell, the retailers wouldn't let that happen anyhow), and for cryin' in the sink, it's not an "attack on Judaeo-Christian values."  It's simply saying, "I recognize that my beliefs and attitudes are not the center of the whole damn universe."
2. For the same reasons outlined in #1, Christmas displays should not be put up at the expense of taxpayers.  No one has any objection to privately-owned businesses, much less homeowners, putting up Christmas displays using their own money.  Hell, I'm about as atheist as they come, and I don't care if you want to put up a Christmas display so garish that it interferes with air traffic and then stand on your roof wearing nothing but a Santa hat shouting "Jesus is the Reason for the Season!" at the top of your lungs.  Whatever floats your boat, you know?  But if you're using tax money -- i.e. money collected from all American citizens, regardless of their beliefs -- you shouldn't be putting up displays promoting one religion (or, honestly, any religion at all).

And the whole "America is a nation of believers" thing is more than a little troubling.  What does that imply?  That by not being a believer, I'm not an American?  Or that I should just pack up and leave?  If you think that last bit is just me being alarmist, only two days ago I saw a post of a photograph of a sign in a shop window (don't know where it was taken) that said, "Here, we are ONE NATION UNDER GOD.  We say Merry Christmas.  We defend ourselves.  We salute the flag.  We worship Jesus.  And if you don't like it, LEAVE."

To which I'd respond, if I had the chance: I don't honestly care what you do.  You can live at the church and surround yourself with American flag wallpaper and salute it 24/7 with a gun in each hand, if that's what you want.  But if you imply that I'm not an American -- if, in fact, you're saying I don't have a right to live here -- because I don't do the same thing, I think you're sorely misunderstanding both the Right to Free Speech and the Separation of Church and State.

What it boils down to is that 99% of non-religious people don't object to, or even care, what others believe.  They're more concerned with not having a requirement of belief rammed down their throats. Okay, there are some asshole atheists who do disparage Christianity and Christians, and would love to see religious belief eradicated.  But you know what?  If you think that assholery is limited to the atheists, you aren't looking at other groups very carefully.

But messages of tolerance and live-and-let-live don't sell well to the perpetually outraged members of the Values Voter Summit, who think that Christianity is besieged and that Donald Trump is the Second Coming of Christ at the very least.  So if any people of that stripe are reading this, allow me to reassure you.

Relax.  Chill out.  We atheists have no intention of doing to you what you'd like to do to us.

Boldly going backwards

In the past few months, I can't escape the feeling that we here in the United States have thrown the throttle into full reverse.

I mean, consider it.  We've gone from having a president who respected and trusted scientists to one who just two days ago gave a speech about reviving the National Space Council that was so blitheringly stupid that it was somewhere in that rarefied atmosphere beyond cringe-worthy.  And he gave said speech in front of legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who stood there the entire time with a "what the fuck is wrong with you?" look on his face.  Here is a sampler:

And security is going to be a very big factor with respect to space and space exploration.   At some point in the future, we’re going to look back and say how did we do it without space?...  We know what this is, space.  That’s all it has to say, space.  There's a lot of room out there, right?  This is infinity here.  It could be infinity.  We don’t really don’t know.  But it could be.  It has to be something, but it could be infinity, right?

I defy you to listen to the whole thing without saying, "Merciful heavens, you are the most idiotic creature in the entire known universe."

If that's not enough evidence that we've gone into regress, we have the resurgence of paranoia over godlessness.  This was one of the hallmarks of the 50s -- in fact, it was the atheism of the communists, especially in Russia, that spurred our leaders to mandate the words "In God We Trust" on our currency and "One Nation Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  And now, we're once again sinking deep into fear talk -- and a consequent angry backlash -- regarding the diminishment of influence of Christianity.  Trump had something to say about this, too, this time at a "Freedom Rally" at the Kennedy Center:

My administration will always support and defend your religious liberty.  As long as I am President, no one is going to stop you from practicing your faith or from preaching what is in your heart...  Our earthly rights are given to us by God, and no force can take those rights away...  Families and churches, not government officials, know best how to create a strong and loving community.  In America, above all else, we know this; we don't worship government, we worship God.  Our religious liberty is enshrined in the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights.  The American founders invoked our creator four times in the Declaration of Independence.  Benjamin Franklin reminded his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention to begin by bowing their heads in prayer.  I remind you, we’re going to start saying Merry Christmas again.

So there you have it.  We're already talking about the "war on Christmas."

In July.

But nowhere is the rush backwards more evident than in the resurgence of "religious liberty laws," which are (one and all) designed to assure the liberty of Christians to do whatever they damn well please, at the expense of anyone they disapprove of or wish to discriminate against.  Just last week, in fact, one of them succeeded in being signed into law in the state of Florida -- House Bill 989, which allows people to object to (and exempt their children from) specific instructional materials in public schools.

And guess which two have already come up?  You'll never guess.

Climate change and evolution.

One supporter of the bill said, in some outrage, "I have witnessed students being taught evolution as fact ... rather than theory ... I have witnessed children being taught that global warming is a reality."

If you can imagine.  How dare science teachers teach science as if it were actually correct?

The success of HB 989 is empowering anti-science groups in other states to launch their own efforts to hamstring science education in public schools, thereby ensuring that yet another generation will be raised without a basic understanding of the scientific method.

Which, I suppose, plays right into the hands of Trump et al., because it's hard to see how anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of science could support someone who is so obviously a near illiterate.

I'm trying hard not to be discouraged about all of this, because despair is rarely a catalyst for anything other than curling up in a corner and sobbing.  But right now, our regression into the superstition and paranoia of our past is seeming overwhelming -- and profoundly frightening.  I can only hope that saner heads will prevail, and that the damage done in the interim will be fixable.

But at the moment, all I seem to be able to do is to watch as the daily horror show unfolds in front of me, and try not to weep.

Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's

A lot of what you hear talked about under the heading of "religious freedom" seems to me to boil down to "reasonable expectations of what a particular profession or institution's responsibilities are."

Take, for example, the kerfuffle last week over a Killeen, Texas public school administrator's choice to take down a poster of Linus (of Peanuts fame) that included the biblical quote he recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord.  That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."  Dedra Shannon, the school nurse who had put up the poster, said she was told "it had to come down because it might offend kids from other religions or those who do not have a religion" and that the administrator's decision was "a slap in the face of Christianity."

When I saw this posted on social media a few days ago, it was accompanied by a comment to the effect that diversity and tolerance are apparently all fine except when they apply to white Christians.  Todd Starnes, who wrote the Fox News article I linked above, clearly agrees.  "Those who holler about tolerance are the least tolerant of all," Starnes writes.  "Public schools are supposed to be in the education business and Ms. Shannon was simply educating students about the true meaning of Christmas."

My question is why on earth public schools should be in the role of teaching religion in the first place, except insofar as it has an impact on history and literature.  Imagine, for example, if a teacher decided to teach children the "true meaning of the holiness of the Qu'ran" and put "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet" on the door of the classroom.  My guess is the same people who flipped out about the removal of the Linus poster would flip out in the other direction (and rightly so).

Schools are not in the business of religious instruction.  And why should they be?  Don't churchgoers get enough religious instruction in their churches?  You wouldn't go to the doctor's office and object when they didn't give you advice on your investments -- it's outside of the purview of their responsibilities.  Likewise, it's not the job of a public school to give students instruction about the "true meaning of Christmas."

Then we have the story about Linda Harvey, founder of Mission: America and host of a radio show of the same name, who lamented last week that she had nowhere to shop now that so many businesses have stood up for equal treatment of LGBT individuals.  Harvey said:

For any Christian who wants to spend hard-earned dollars with family-friendly, Christian-affirming retailers, restaurants and service providers, the list is growing shorter all the time.  I stopped shopping at Macy’s in 2011 after learning about the retailer’s grossly unjust policy against women. 

Macy’s management said ‘yes’ to a transsexual young man’s demand to change in the women’s dressing room and rejected a Christian employee’s attempt to block his inappropriate access, even firing her because of her principled actions...  Then there’s Target.  Where to start?  Selling ‘gay pride’ T-shirts a few years back was bad enough, but Target is now ‘proudly standing’ with homosexuals and cross-dressers who want to change America’s 1964 Civil Rights Act to add ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’. 

Joining Target in supporting this anti-American, pro-deviance legislation are Amazon, General Mills, Google, Facebook, Paypal, Levi-Strauss and others.

Well, first, saying "I am not going to discriminate against LGBT people" is not synonymous with saying "I am anti-Christian."  No one at Target, or Macy's, or anywhere else is trying to convince anyone of anything except that you should buy what they're selling.  All they said is that they're going to make sure that the rights of their workers and customers are protected regardless of their sexual orientation.

So she, too, is expecting an institution to do something that's outside its purview -- expecting department stores to adhere to Christian values, as if retail outlets were branch offices of the local church.  The point is that the stores are saying they'll serve anyone; what Harvey wants is not only to follow her own code of ethics, but to mandate that everyone else does, too.

The same kind of thing applies to B&B and bakery owners who won't serve gays, and strict Catholic pharmacists who won't sell people birth control.  None of those people are in the business of dictating others' ethics and morals; they are in a service job and therefore should expect that under anti-discrimination statutes, they would be expected to serve any customer who comes in.  And in fact, a B&B owner, baker, or pharmacist who went into the business unaware that they would have customers who differed from them in terms of religion or sexual preference is, in a word, dumb.

C'mon, a pharmacist who didn't know he was going to be expected to sell birth control pills and condoms?  Really?

But all of this is cast as part of the more general War on Christianity, as if telling people "you can't act in a bigoted fashion" is some kind of infringement of their rights to practice their religion.

It comes down to the general rule that you are completely free to attend the church of your choice and adhere to any and all rules the religion requires, but you are not free to expect that businesses and public institutions adhere to any of it.  So honestly, Linda Harvey is completely within her rights not to patronize Target et al.; but expecting that department stores are going to be venues for "Christian values" is a little ridiculous.

So I guess if you believe that tolerance of diversity equates to intolerance of the majority, you'll never be without something to be offended by.  Me, I'd rather try to get along with the people around me than constantly harp on the fact that everyone isn't like me.  All in all, I think it's a much happier way to be.

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.

Cup of woe

Those of you who are, like me, of the atheist persuasion will no doubt be thrilled to hear that we are already ramping up the War on Christmas.

Hey, if the stores can start putting up Christmas decorations before Halloween, in the interest of fairness it should be okay for us godless heathens to start our diabolical machinations at around the same time, right?

So it's time for us to reveal our strategy for 2016.  Ready?

This year we are going to destroy Christmas and crush the hopes and dreams of little Christian children everywhere by: getting Starbucks to change the color of their coffee cups.

Mwa ha ha ha etc.  *rubs hands together maniacally*

Okay, so I admit that we atheists had nothing to do with the fact that Starbucks changed their coffee cup design.  In fact the first one, which was red, honestly had nothing to do with Baby Jesus, either.  It was just red, as are many things in life, including stop signs and the sweatshirt I'm currently wearing.  The Starbucks marketing arm decided that it was time for a change, and hired artist Shogo Ota to draw a very cool design -- a hundred faces drawn using a single pen stroke.  Ota's design, said a spokesperson for Starbucks, "represents the connections we have as a community. It's meant to be a symbol of unity, and to encourage us to be good to each other."

Which elicited an "oh, hell no" from the evangelical Christians.  Apparently to them Christianity, and Christmas in particular, has nothing to do with unity and being good to each other.  Here is just a small sampling of the outraged responses Starbucks got upon revealing the new design:

• Screw you.  My coffee should NOT (and does NOT) come with political brainwashing.  I dropped Starbucks like a hot rock.
• Frankly, the only thing that can redeem them from this whitewashing of Christmas is to print Bible verses on their cups next year.
• All Republicans boycott Starbucks.
• The giant coffee chain is calling this year’s monstrosity the “unity” cup...  Hmm, what else is unified…. ISIS!!?!  The unified caliphate of the Islamic State!
• Starbucks gets rid of Christmas colour, replaces with Islamic colour, all in the name of "unity."  Get used to this.

Yes!  Islamic green!  Same as those goddamn trees you see everywhere!  And grass!  Even the plant kingdom is trying to brainwash you to accept Shari'a law!  Buy a house plant, and the next thing you know you'll be standing on the street corner shouting "Allahu akbar" and taking pot shots at passersby!

I mean, for fuck's sake.

What strikes me about this tempest in a coffee cup is that these are, by and large, the same people who scream bloody murder about "political correctness" whenever someone objects to derogatory language being directed toward minorities, and yet they consider a change in a coffee cup design to be the moral equivalent of carpet-bombing Whoville.  So I guess their blathering about political correctness translates to "you can't take offense to anything I say, but I'm still entitled to get my panties in a twist over absolutely nothing."

So anyhow.  My feeling is that if we non-believers are going to get accused of waging a War on Christmas, we oughta at least live up to our reputations, and that as a first salvo, changing coffee cup colors kind of sucks.  Time to ramp things up.  I'm thinking of doing my part by carrying around a boombox, and every time I hear sappy Christmas music, revving up some Nirvana or Nine Inch Nails or Linkin Park.  So goodbye, "Little Drummer Boy," "Frosty the Snowman," "Sleigh Bells," and "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer."  Hello "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Closer," and "Waiting for the End to Come."

Which would be a distinct improvement, especially as regards to "Little Drummer Boy."  I freakin' hate that song.

Lying for Jesus

Keep 'em scared.  Convince people that their way of life, their very existence, is threatened.  Tell them that if they don't fight back, the Bad Guys will win, will erase every trace of their culture and belief systems from the country.

After all, fearful people do two things that are very useful.  They double down on their beliefs -- and they are easy for the unscrupulous to manipulate.

That's a lesson that evangelical preacher Jim Bakker and his pal Rick Wiles, host of the ultra-Christian radio show TruNews, have learned all too well.  Despite the fact that 83% of the citizens of the United States self-identify as Christian, Bakker and Wiles have taken it on as their mission to convince that overwhelming majority that they are a desperately embattled minority who faces persecution and eventual extinction if they don't, for god's sake, do something.

Lying For Jesus, is how I see it.

Jim Bakker [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In an interview last week on TruNews, Bakker and Wiles make it abundantly clear how this extermination plan is going to go.  Bakker said:

Be ready.  Be ready.  Are you ready to serve God if they're gonna cut your head off?  Years ago, God spoke to me, and I was supposed to start preaching it, but nobody would accept it.  How are you gonna tell people that the church needs to be ready to have their heads cut off, to say, "I'm willing to die for the gospel of Jesus Christ?"  There is such fear in the church... I mean, fear.  Not just fear of ISIS, not just fear of one thing, but fear of not being politically correct.  I tell you, you will be murdered if you preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Wiles, of course, agreed, instead of doing what I would have done, which is to point out that not only has no one been murdered in the United States for preaching the bible, but church attendance seems to be as strong as ever, and just last week the Religious Right successfully sledgehammered their views into law in North Carolina, making it legal for Christians to discriminate against LGBT individuals in the name of "religious freedom."

But people like Bakker and Wiles never let a little thing like reality interfere with their message.  Bakker goes on:

It's over, people!  The gospel is over in the United States of America!  We have turned our back on the Bible.  We can't preach the Bible anymore.  I could tell you stories that would curl your hair... If I told you what I have been through and what I go through and what I am facing, because of what we would call the old-fashioned gospel, which is simply the Bible.  Anyone who wants to stand on the absolute word of God -- you don't have much...  Everyone's talking about Donald Trump.  Who would have thought that we would have a man running for president who needed to say, "Next Christmas, we're going to say 'Merry Christmas' again?"

Well, that got lots of applause from the studio audience, given how evidently in their pretend world the 17% of us who aren't Christian are winning a war on the 83% of the United States who are.  The only possible response, of course, is to fight tooth and nail to maintain the hegemony they have had for over two hundred years, and which is showing no sign of going away any time soon.

And speaking of lying, Wiles then suggests that whenever you go to a store and have to give your name to be called for an order, you should say your name is "Merry Christmas" so the clerk has to say it over the microphone.  Because, apparently, lying outright to a clerk is exactly what Jesus wants you to do.

This idea also got lots of applause.

Seeing the support he got from that point, Bakker decided to pursue it:

How can this be a point on which to run for president?  How can it be?  How can it be almost illegal to say "Merry Christmas?"

"Almost illegal?"  Sort of like "almost pregnant?"

Rick Wiles then asks a question:

Going back to the spiritual uprising; who is telling us that we can't say "Merry Christmas?"

Exactly, Rick.  Good question.

But Bakker, of course, has a response:

[If you prayed or said "Merry Christmas" in public] they would threaten to arrest you.  They would threaten to mow you down with a machine gun. 

Even Wiles seems to realize that they're on shaky ground at that point.  He asks:

They're gonna come in with guns, into a high school graduation, and shoot you for saying the Lord's Prayer? 

But Bakker hasn't gotten where he is by backing down:

Not right now, but they will.  They will if we don't stop them. 

Ah, yes.  "They."  By whom he means, apparently, atheists like me.  Who, by the way, could not care less how much time Bakker, Wiles, or anyone else spends in church, how many times they thump the bible, or what they preach on the street corner.  We honestly don't give a rat's ass if they stand on their roofs in July, stark naked, shrieking "Merry Christmas!" at passersby all day long.  All we want is for Bakker and his ilk to keep their beliefs out of our schools, laws, and public buildings.  Beyond that, they can believe any damn fool thing they want to.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that Lying For Jesus works.  If you tell people often enough that they're embattled and besieged, they'll believe it.  Even if the messenger is a guy who resigned from his first ministerial post because of a sex scandal (in which he offered to pay $279,000 to the victim to keep silent), and in a separate incident was imprisoned for five years on fraud and conspiracy charges.

But don't let that dissuade you from believing everything he says.  Especially if what he says is "be afraid."

There's a part of this fear, though, that is very real.  And that is the fear of rational people that the rest of the citizenry is going to make decisions based in irrational fears like the ones Bakker and Wiles are peddling.  We've got an election coming up, and more than one of the candidates is capitalizing on that sense of being constantly at risk.  So ask yourself: do you want the voice of reason to be swamped by people who are accepting the fact-free scare-talk of a huckster who somehow, bafflingly, still gets people to listen to him?

Because if that comes to pass, maybe there's a reason to be afraid, after all.

Happy Xmas, the war is over

We have a lot of issues facing us as a nation.  How to keep the economy on track, including what to do about revitalizing cities with crumbling infrastructures and sky-high crime rates.  How to reform the health care system, the education system, and the prison system in a responsible and forward-thinking fashion.  What do to about the current volatile world situation, including our stance toward Russia, China, and the Middle East.

In such times, legislators have their work cut out for them.  Many of these problems are damn near intractable; any one of them would be a difficult puzzle for our best and brightest.

So it's no wonder that, given the desperate need our country has for sound leadership, last week three dozen members of the House of Representatives turned their attention to...

... the War on Christmas.

Sadly, I'm not making this up.  Representative Doug Lamborn of Colorado joined with 35 other representatives to sponsor HR 564, "Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected for use by those who celebrate Christmas."  Here, in toto, is what the resolution says:

Whereas Christmas is a national holiday celebrated on December 25; and 

Whereas the Framers intended that the First Amendment of the Constitution, in prohibiting the establishment of religion, would not prohibit any mention of religion or reference to God in civic dialog: Now, therefore, be it 

Resolved, That the House of Representatives— 

(1) recognizes the importance of the symbols and traditions of Christmas; 

(2) strongly disapproves of attempts to ban references to Christmas; and

(3) expresses support for the use of these symbols and traditions by those who celebrate Christmas.

Yup.  That's how I want our government leaders spending their taxpayer-funded time on the job.

You know, maybe I and others of my stripe have not made this clear enough.  So if anyone who believes in the "War on Christmas" is reading this, put on your glasses and get right up close to your monitor, 'cuz I'm gonna make this as clear as I know how.

THERE IS NO WAR ON CHRISTMAS, YOU NIMROD.  WE ATHEISTS DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS WHAT YOU DO ON DECEMBER 25.  AS FAR AS WE CARE, YOU CAN STAND ON YOUR ROOF WEARING NOTHING BUT A SANTA HAT AND SHRIEK "MERRY CHRISTMAS" AT PASSERSBY ALL DAY LONG.  YOU CAN HAVE A DISPLAY OF CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS IN YOUR FRONT YARD SO BRIGHT THAT IT DISRUPTS FLYOVER JET TRAFFIC.  YOU CAN HAVE A NATIVITY SCENE ACTED OUT BY LIVE HUMANS, FEATURING REAL BARNYARD ANIMALS AND GENUINE GOLD, FRANKINCENSE, AND MYRRH.

WHATEVER THE HELL MYRRH IS.

WHAT YOU CAN'T DO IS TO DO ALL OF THIS AT PUBLIC EXPENSE, NOR HOST IT IN A PUBLIC SPACE.  "PUBLIC" MEANS FOR EVERYONE, CHRISTIAN AND NON-CHRISTIAN ALIKE.

GET IT NOW?

Okay, I'll stop yelling.  But really.  This is getting idiotic.  From the way these people talk, you'd swear that we atheists are proposing carpet-bombing Whoville.  Okay, there may exist atheists who would make a big deal out of being told "Merry Christmas," insisting that everyone telepathically absorb the information about what greeting they prefer without being told, and taking horrific offense if people don't do so.

[image courtesy of photographer David Singleton and the Wikimedia Commons]

But you know what?  These people (1) are few in number, and (2) are not doing this because they are atheists, they are doing this because they are assholes.  These people would still be assholes if they were devout Christians.  If they were Christians, they would be the type of people...

... who think that everyone who is different than they are is waging a "War on Christmas."

The point is, most people, atheist and religious alike, are perfectly content to live and let live, and only get twitchy when important little pieces of the Constitution like "separation of church and state" are openly flouted.

So there you have it: congressional priorities.  My own opinion is that instead of worrying about a War on Christmas, we as a nation should be more concerned about the War on Intelligence, in which, to judge by the majority of our leaders, Intelligence appears to be losing.  All of which brings to mind the quote by Joseph de Maistre:  "A democracy is the form of government in which everyone has a voice, and therefore in which the people get exactly the government they deserve."

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."

Sarah Palin vs. Joe McScrooge

Sarah Palin, who is determined for some reason Not To Go Gentle Into That Good Night, is once again winning accolades from the Religious Right.  This time, it's for a book about the alleged "War on Christmas," called Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas.

(photograph courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)

The book alleges that "joyless atheists," presumably including myself, are trying to "abort Christ from Christmas."  She collectively refers to people like this as "Joe McScrooge."  "Joe McScrooge," Palin opines, "armed with an attorney, is really dangerous."

"We were founded as written in our charters of liberty, in the documents that created America," Palin said, in an interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network.  "We're founded on a Judeo-Christian faith that would allow forever the right to express or respect for faith in America...  The road that we are on today is too many of those angry atheists armed with attorneys would try to take away that freedom to express faith. It's going to end in ruin unless we do something about it.  I want this book to be a call to action, to take steps for school districts, for communities, for business owners, for families to understand they don't have to hide their faith.  They don't have to be embarrassed by it.  This war on Christmas is really the tip of the spear when it comes to a greater battle that's brewing.  And that battle that's brewing is those who would want to take God out of our society, out of our culture, which will lead to ruin as history has proven."

Well, wiser heads than my own have addressed her contention that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation;" but I will point out that one of the most staunchly Christian governments this continent has ever seen was the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which a man was placed in the stocks for an hour for "indecency," because he kissed his wife in public after having been away for three months.   This was the home of floggings for heresy, and hangings not only for witchcraft, but for being the wrong kind of Christian.

Whatever your belief system, I don't think that leaving that sort of thing behind could be construed as "leading to ruin as history has proven."

My central problem with Palin's contention, though, is that the "War on Christmas" that she and her pals at Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network like to whinge about really doesn't exist.  No, we Joes McScrooge don't want taxpayer money paying for Christian displays; we don't want Christian messages in our public schools, courthouses, and government offices.  To do so would be exclusionary to the one in four Americans who are not Christian.

But as far as what people do on private property?  No atheist I know gives a damn.  You can erect a crucifix so high it obstructs light plane traffic, as far as I care.  You can put up signs, as a member of my community has, saying, "Who does not accept Jesus Christ will be cast into the fiery furnace" and "The wages of sin are death!"  You can have a Christmas tree in every window and a statue of Santa Claus on your roof.

Because that's what private property means.  As opposed to public property, which implies paid for, and therefore endorsed by, the government.  A distinction that Ms. Palin apparently doesn't understand.

Oh, and for the most part, the atheists I know don't really care whether someone says "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays" to them, because besides operating under the assumption that there is no god, we also have a general rule for behavior, namely, "Don't be a dick."  And like anyone who is not being a dick, we generally respond to the intent of the person we're speaking to, not just the words, and will repay kind intent with kind response.  Of all of the atheists I know -- and I know plenty -- I can only think of one who might get pissy if someone said "Merry Christmas" to him, and launch into a diatribe about how that was making an assumption about his beliefs.  And even he probably would only do that if he was already having a bad day.

So, Ms. Palin, sorry to take the wind out of your sails, not to mention your sales; whatever you and your book may claim, the "War on Christmas" really doesn't exist.  We atheists have bigger things to worry about, like the fact that a good many of your buddies are still trying to get Young-Earth Creationism taught in public school science classrooms, are still trying to make sure that religious-based homophobia is cast into law, are still trying to use the bible to argue that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening.  Given all of the bigger issues we face, the last thing most of us care about is whether you put up a "Jesus Is The Reason For The Season" banner in the local laundromat.

And I'd like to think that's that, but of course, that is never that with these people.  The alleged "War on Christmas" has been going on for years, with the Call to Arms being issued on Fox News before the Thanksgiving turkey carcass is even cold.  And each year, pretty much nothing happens, which you would think would eventually convince them that the "War on Christmas" is a figment of their imagination.

But no.  In that way, they're a little like my dog, who enjoys protecting our house from Evil Farm Machinery.  The difficulty is, we live across the road from a farm, so he barks pretty much constantly.  And each time a tractor goes by, and he barks -- the tractor goes away.  So he thinks that he has accomplished something, something vital, and that without his barking, the tractor would have come straight through the wall, and the farmer would have stolen his rawhide bone.

So he keeps barking.  Because you never know.  You have to keep vigilant.  Never let your guard down for a moment.  Because that farmer, he's a wily guy.

Just like we "Joes McScrooge."