[Note: this is a repost as I had to move this from where it was originally published long ago]
This comes to us from the “Well, I guess you gotta have goals” file:
Christopher Hitchens wrote:
“…My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same…”
Considering that he is an adherent of the anti-theist sect of atheism, this is not surprising.
Neither was I surprised that I agreed with his distaste of “identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations…cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer.” I too have had it up to here with virtual idolatry in the form of carven images and doxologies to trees, snow, and the rangifer tarandus tarundus who fly a calorically well endowed lacto-cookieholic around the globe. However, I would imagine that we agree for different reasons. For me, the tinsel obscures the reason for the season. Christopher Hitchens seems to think that people are celebrating holidays just to bother him personally, as if any public display of theism is meant to personally offend his atheist sensibilities.
Christopher Hitchens’ ambition included the following core:
“…The core objection, which I restate every December at about this time, is that for almost a whole month, the United States—a country constitutionally based on a separation between church and state—turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.”
If I said it once, I said it one thousand times: some atheists think that they understand Thomas Jefferson better than Thomas Jefferson understood Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson, theist, deist or whateverist, attended Christian church services in the Capitol Building—something over which, today, the ACLU would connipt.
Do the math—that is all. True story: before I became a believer I too was angry every December and I too felt underrepresented. However, one day I grew up and realized that in a country where the overwhelming majority celebrates Christmas overrepresentation is to be expected and accepted (“grew up” is the term that I have long applied to myself in that situation). By the way: how many anti-Christmas atheists out there refuse to accept filthy lucre in the form of Christmas presents given them by their ignorant and superstitious friends, families and co-workers?
Christopher Hitchens likens Christmas in the USA to a totalitarian regime’s ubiquitous Dear Leader promulgations and displays. Yet, he gets the totalitarian upper hand by declaring, “can they not at least arrange to hold their ceremonies in private?” Yes, sir: how about in our basements, under a blanket with the lights out? Actually, many Christians around the world are forced to do just that.
Of interest may be that Christopher Hitchens, perhaps reading too much Richard Dawkins and not enough fact, referred to “monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism.” As it has been oft pointed out, although perhaps not oft enough, certain atheist expend much time and energy criticizing caricatures rather than criticizing that which proceeds forth from the horse’s mouth. Granted, this may be too much irrelevant information for an anti-theist but Mormonism is not monotheistic—it is henotheistic (Richard Dawkins committed the same misrepresentation).
Overall, I agree that rampant commercialization can be too much to bare but do grin and bare it or do as many of us do and change things within your personal abode. But to utilize that as a soap box for expressing prejudice is just about as old, tired, unwelcomed, been there-done that, and played out as cheesy-made in China-Christmas-décor.
See my Book review: J. P. Holding “Christmas is Pagan and Other Myths
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