It’s Christmas time! That means all the Leftists have to come out hating Christmas!
Dumbass of the Day
https://www.yourtango.com/heartbreak/single-mom-hates-christmas-not-giving-gifts-kids
Ruin Your Kids to Save the World
From the Creator:
Now we have another joy of life that progressives are targeting in the name of combating global warming: Christmas gifts. Many progressives have long opposed giving Christmas gifts in the name of combating “consumerism” (to be fair, some religious conservatives share that ascetic view). But climate change will soon constitute the greater moral reason.
In the Daily Mail this week, a woman wrote an article making this case.
“Last year,” she wrote, “surrounded by wrapping paper and abandoned gifts, I suggested to my husband Chris that next time we shouldn’t buy anything — for each other or the children.
“Not buying anything for my husband is trivial because he can buy for himself. But not buying presents for our two girls, aged six and three, is a trickier proposition…
“We’re increasingly aware of the global impact of our purchases. Everything we buy the kids will go into landfill…
“With the planet on fire and plastics everywhere it seems like we are at a moment of reckoning and have been for some time…
“I’ve forced this rule on the family, telling my mother, in-laws and the brothers and sisters not to buy the girls anything.
“My sister was appalled and very cross that she will be thought of as the mean old aunt. Just because I want to strip the joy out of Christmas, why should she have to?”
This woman’s article encapsulates much of the darkness the Left represents and creates.
Tis the Season
According to Fox News:
A church in Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, is receiving attention for its decision to redesign its Christmas nativity scene to reflect the impact of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
Just weeks before Christmas, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, located in the West Bank, unveiled a new display of the nativity scene that shows baby Jesus lying in a manger amid rubble. The imagery symbolizes the destroyed Palestinian communities in Gaza and the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas terror group, a church official said.
“Church families met last week and built it together. It was a moving experience for our families. During the service on Sunday, some people were in tears,” Reverend Doctor Munther Isaac, the church’s pastor, told The New Arab. “We are pleased our message has reached the world. This is what Christmas looks like in Palestine this year, the origin of Christmas.”
Bethlehem is historically recognized as the birthplace of Jesus and his birth is celebrated by Christians and others on Christmas, Dec. 25. The nativity scene often depicts Jesus as a baby, alongside his mother Mary, often regarded by Catholics as a saint; as well as his father Joseph, wise men and their respective gifts, shepherds, angels and various animals, including donkeys and sheep.
I have some problems:
- The baby in the rubble is representing people who want to kill Jews.
- Jesus was Jewish.
- Palestine was a Roman territory taken from the Jews by the Romans. They were the same people who killed Jesus.
- The Romans were the colonizers.
- The Romans enslaved the Jews.
This is pure blasphemy in order to adhere to Leftist ideology. I know this is the Lutheran church which is a very Leftist church, but the Catholic church under Pope Francis is migrating to this level.
I Wonder If They’s Do This with Ramadan Decorations?
According to the Post Millennial:
On Friday, bus drivers with the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District in Delaware County, Pennsylvania were informed that they had to remove any Christmas-themed decorations on their buses and were prohibited from wearing clothing referring to any religious holiday.
A memo sent to all Drivers and Aides that was obtained by Fox 29 stated that the district “has been receiving complaints from parents concerning District employees displaying ‘Christmas’ themed decorations and/or wearing clothing of the same nature.”
“If you have decorated your bus with anything specific to the Christmas holiday or any other decorations relating to a specific religion, please remove them immediately,” it continued. “In addition, employees are instructed not to wear clothing related to Christmas or any other religious holiday.”
The memo notes at the end that the policy is not specific to one department, but that “it applies to all District employees.”
After the memo was posted to social media, users slammed the district for its policy. Parents rights advocate Meg Brock asked, “Did they also tell them not to Smile?”
Tis the Real Season
According to Forbes:
Over the past few years, the Supreme Court has been steadily busting holes in the wall between church and state, particularly where that wall runs past the school yard. Now a flap over a satanic display in the Iowa state capitol shows the dangers that arise when the wall is destroyed.
The Iowa State Capital accepts displays from the public during the holiday season, so the Satanic Temple of Iowa accepted the invitation and set up an altar. People are upset.
But proposed solutions are a reminder of why the wall was there in the first place.
Rep. Brad Sherman wants to see “clarifying legislation” to be adopted that will make it clear that satanic displays are prohibited in the capitol and other state-owned property. He would also like to see legislation adopted make it legal to display the Ten Commandments in government buildings and public schools.
In other words, he would like to see legislation explaining which religions the state of Iowa endorses and which it opposes.
GOP candidate Ron DeSantis went one step further. In trying to pin the controversy on the Trump administration, in a CNN town hall with Jake Tapper, DeSantis pointed to the IRS ruling that gave the Satanic Temple “a legal leg to stand on.” He added that this was not “the religion that the founding fathers were trying to create.” After Tapper clarified that the IRS did grant status, but that doesn’t mean that they support it, DeSantis replies:
Yeah, exactly, but they recognized it as a religion because otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to do it. I don’t think that was the right decision. We’re going to recognize Satan as a religion? That’s wrong.
In other words, DeSantis saw a role for the federal government in deciding which religions are “legitimate” and which are not.
This is an inevitable result of tearing down the wall between church and state. Oklahoma has advanced the idea of a religious public charter school funded by the state but pursuing the mission of the church. Supporters seem to imagine that this will only ever mean taxpayer funding for Christian religious schools, but the inevitable result would be a wide variety of religions lining up for a chance at government funding for their religious school. Who will decide which religions are “legitimate” and deserving of taxpayer funding?
Advocates of public funding for religious schools may point at the Satanic Templer and say, “Well, obviously not them!” But there is nothing obvious about it. One need not search hard to find antisemitic or anti-Islamic sentiment in this country, and one can still find a strain of Protestants who believe that the Vatican is the “whore of Babylon” of the Book of Revelations.
If the state or federal governments decide that religious schools should receive taxpayer dollars, who exactly will decide where the line is drawn? The situation in Iowa shows as that some people are more than willing to step in to draw that line, serving as a reminder of that old saying—when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesfarrell/2023/12/13/why-a-satanic-holiday-display-at-the-iowa-capitol-building-has-been-allowed-to-stay-up-despite-backlash/?sh=4ef171ea5bac
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2023/12/13/iowa-demonstrates-why-the-wall-between-church-and-state-must-stand/?sh=2762d0b7657d
He Knew 80 Years ago
According to CS Lewis:
When I was asked to write a Christmas sermon for pagans, I accepted the job light-heartedly enough, but now that I sit down to tackle it, I discover a difficulty: are there any pagans in England for me to write to? I know that people keep on telling us that this country is relapsing into paganism; but they only mean that it is ceasing to be Christian, and is that at all the same thing?
Let us remember what a pagan or heathen (I use the words interchangably) really was. A heathen was a man who lived out on the heath, out in the wilds. A pagan was a man who lived in a “pagus” or small village. Both words in fact meant a rustic or yokel. They date from the time when the larger towns of the Roman Empire were already Christianised, but the old nature religions still lingered in the country. Pagans or heathens were the backward people in the remote districts who had not yet been converted, who were still pre-Christians. To say that modern people who have drifted away from Christianity are pagans is to suggest that a post-Christian man is the same as a pre-Christian man. But that is like thinking that a woman who has lost her husband is the same sort of person as an unmarried girl. Or that a street where the houses have been knocked down is the same as a field where no house has yet been built.
The ruined street and the unbuilt field are alike in one respect, namely that neither will keep you dry if it rains, but they are different in every other respect: rubble, dust, broken bottles, old bedsteads, and stray cats are very different from grass, thyme, clover, buttercups, and the lark singing overhead.
The real pagan differed from the post-Christian in the following ways. Firstly, he was religious. From the Christian point of view, he was indeed too religious by half. He was full of reverence. For him the earth was holy, the woods and waters were alive. His agriculture was a ritual as well as a technique. And secondly, he believed in what we now call “an objective right and wrong”. That is, he thought the distinction between pious and impious acts was something that existed independently of human opinions: something like the multiplication table, which man had not invented, but had found to be true, and which he had better take notice of. The gods would punish him if he did not.
To be sure, by Christian standards his list of right and wrong acts was rather a muddled one. He thought (and the Christians agreed) that the gods would punish him for setting the dogs on a beggar who came to his door, or for striking his father. But he also thought they would punish him for turning his face to the wrong point of the compass when he began ploughing. Though his code included some fantastic sins and duties, it got in most of the real ones.
This leads us to the third great difference between a pagan and a post-Christian man. Believing in a real right and wrong means finding out that you are not very good. The pagan code may have been on some points a low one, but it was too high for the pagan to live up to. Hence a pagan, though in many ways merrier than a modern, had a deep sadness. When he asked himself what was wrong with the world, he did not immediately reply “the social system” or “our allies” or “education”. It occurred to him that he – himself – might be one of the things that was wrong with the world. He knew he had sinned. And the terrible thing was he thought the gods made no difference between voluntary and involuntary sins. You might get into their bad books by mere accident. And once in, it was very hard to get out of them. The pagan dealt with this situation in a rather silly way. His religion was a mass of ceremonies, sacrifices, purifications, et cetera, which were supposed to take away guilt, but they never quite succeeded. His conscience was not at ease.
Now, the post-Christian view which is gradually coming into existence (it is complete already in some people, and still incomplete in others) is quite different. According to it, nature is not a living thing to be reverenced. It is a kind of machine for us to exploit. There is no objective right or wrong. Each race or class can invent its own code or ideology just as it pleases. And whatever may be amiss with the world, it is certainly not we the ordinary people. It is up to God, if after all he should happen to exist, or to government, or to education, to give us what we want. They are the shop, we are the customer, and the customer is always right.
Now if the post-Christian view is the correct one then we have indeed woken from a nightmare. The old fear, the old reverence, the old restraints… how delightful to have woken up into freedom, to be responsible to no one, to be utterly and absolutely our own masters! We have, of course, lost some fun. A universe of colourless electrons (which is presently going to run down and annihilate all organic life everywhere and forever) is, perhaps, a little dreary compared with the earth-mother and the sky-father, the wood nymphs and the water nymphs, chaste Diana riding the night sky and homely Vesta flickering on the hearth. But one can’t have everything, and there are always the flicks and the radio: if the new view is correct, it has very solid advantages.
But is it? And if so, why are things not going better? What do you make of the present threat of world famine? We know now it is not entirely due to the war. From country after country comes the same story of failing harvests. Even the whales have less oil. Can it be that nature, or something behind nature, is not simply a machine that we can do what we like with? That she is hitting back? Waive the point. Suppose she is only a machine, and that we are free to master her at our pleasure. Have you not begun to see that man’s conquest of nature is really man’s conquest of man? That every power wrested from nature is used by some men over other men? Men are the victims, not the conquerors in this struggle. Each new victory over nature yields new means of propaganda to enslave them, new weapons to kill them, new power for the state, and new weakness for the citizen. New contraceptives to keep man from being born at all.
As for ideologies, does no one see the catch? If there is no real wrong and right – nothing good or bad in itself – none of these ideologies can be better or worse than another. For a better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code. One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to. If there is no objective standard then our choice between one ideology and another becomes a matter of arbitrary taste. Our battle for democratic ideals against Nazi ideals has been a waste of time, because the one is no better than the other. Nor can there ever be any real improvement or deterioration. If there is no real goal, we can’t get any nearer to it, or farther from it. In fact there is no real reason for doing anything at all.
It looks to me, neighbours, as though we shall have to set about becoming true pagans, if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians. I don’t mean that we should begin leaving little bits of bread under the tree at the end of the garden as an offering to the dryad. I don’t mean that we should dance to Dionysus across Hampstead Heath, though perhaps a little more solemn or ecstatic gaity and a little less commercialised amusement might make our holidays better than they now are. I don’t even mean (though I do very much wish) that we should recover that sympathy with nature, that religious attitude to the family, and that appetite for beauty which the better pagans had. Perhaps what I do mean is best put like this: if the modern post-Christian view is wrong (and every day I find it harder to think it right) then there are three kinds of people in the world. 1) Those who are sick and don’t know it: the post-Christians. 2) Those who are sick and know it: the pagans. 3) Those who have found the cure.
And if you start in the first class, you must go through the second to reach the third. For (in a sense) all that Christianity adds to paganism is the cure. It confirms the old belief that in this universe we are up against Living Power: that there is a real Right and that we have failed to obey it: that existence is beautiful and terrifying. It adds a wonder of which paganism had not distinctly heard: that the Mighty One has come down to help us, to remove our guilt, to reconcile us. All over the world, even in Japan, even in Russia, men and women will meet on December the 25th to do a very old-fashioned and very pagan thing: to sing and feast because God has been born.
You are uncertain whether it is more than a myth. Well, if it is only a myth then our last hope is gone. But is the opposite explanation not worth trying? Who knows but that here – and here alone – lies your way back? Not only to heaven, but to earth too, and to the great human family whose oldest hopes are confirmed by this story that does not die.