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December 8, 2005
�Eat Yuletide, You Atheistic Bastard!�
s most of you know, I'm not a Christian. I was raised one of Jehovah's Witnesses, but that lost it's hold when I was about 15 years old. So I also was raised without Christmas or any of the other "pagan" holidays. So I don't have much of a history with Christmas.
However, I like the holiday, despite the commercialization. I like the classic Christmas movies(A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life).
I like Christmas Carols and the Jesus story and the whole sentimental shibang.
And I like the fact that someone like Jonah Goldberg (the LA Times replaced the ever-idiotic Robert Scheer with Jonah...there's hope in Hollywood) can write so well railing against the idiots who want to remove Christmas from the public consciousness (That's his title above, by the way).
And for some it does seem like Christmas is under siege. Not just Christmas, of course, but religious expression generally. Traditionalists of a certain bent are at a particular disadvantage because they have a handy label to define their morality: religion. And religion has a special status in our society.Secularists, misreading history, claim that the Constitution requires that wherever government and religion intersect, religion must vanish. This is terribly wrongheaded in my opinion, but we’ve all heard those arguments before.
What I think secularists don’t appreciate is how unfair this feels to religious people who believe that the secularists have, for all intents and purposes, a moral faith of their own. For example, back in the Dark Ages when John Ashcroft ruled with an iron fist, and decent people everywhere quaked at the prospect of borrowing Catcher in the Rye from the library lest they land in the gulag under the Patriot Act, Ashcroft was unable to ban a Gay Pride Month celebration at his own Department of Justice. I don’t think that celebrating Gay Pride Month would lead to the end of civilization, but I don’t think Christian Pride Month would either. And yet we all understand that Christian pride is a nonstarter on government premises.
The idea that liberalism operates — or should operate — like a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, rites and customs, has a very old pedigree stretching from ancient Rome to such modern figures as August Comte, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Thurman Arnold, and up to the liberal philosopher Richard Rorty. Without wading out into those weeds, what I think secular liberals could work harder at understanding is that whether contemporary liberalism is a secular religion or not, for its non-adherents it might as well be one.
Liberals use the state to impose their morality all the time, and they get away with it because their faith isn’t called a religion.
Amen!...er...that's right on target!
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Posted by witnit at December 8, 2005 10:27 AM
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