The Secret Truth Behind the "War on Christmas"

The Truth Behind the “War on Christmas”

Of course, you know there is no war on Christmas and never was. The folks who claim otherwise are the slice of America that bemoans the Most Favored Religion status that Christianity had half a century ago. You know, religious pageants by all the kids at the PUBLIC school (including the kids whose parents were trying to teach them a different religion, or wanted their kids to have only science as their guide to life. The latter is sad, but certainly it is every parent’s right to not have a religion shoved down their children’s throats.). Christian religious decorations all over the schools. Christian religious symbols all over public, paid for by your tax dollars, government buildings, where the whole community needs to enter to receive a dog license, contest an easement or just go to work. Easter (not Spring) Break, which followed a Christian religious holiday.

Eventually, when enough new Justices were added, people who revered the Constitution and its hallowed separation of Church and State, the Supremes decided that it was all too egregiously unconstitutional. Hallelujah, said the vast majority of devout Christians, who could see the dangers to their religion in becoming a de-facto State Faith. Religion is irredeemably damaged when it gets wrapped around political power. Examples abound, both today and in previous centuries. [Email me PRIVATELY for details.]

The reason you can say Merry Christmas to someone and that someone has no idea what you really mean is because Dec 25 is a secular, civil holiday for the entire nation of citizens, as well as a religious holiday for a slice of those citizens, and the word “Christmas” has been appended to BOTH of them. If you say Merry Christmas you could be wishing someone a happy secular, civil holiday – or you could be greeting a co-religionist. You could be greeting a co-religionist and wishing them a happy BOTH holidays. Is this crazy? Ya sure, you betcha.

HOW did we get to this crazy state of affairs? The way we get to most messes: a cabal of people tried to get ascendency by grabbing power, not by earning respect. In this case, a group of Christian lawmakers thought of a clever way to make their religious holiday a national holiday – establishing their religion as the State Faith without being so overt about it that even a conservative Supreme Court couldn’t stomach it. The law establishing Dec 25th as a national, civic – secular! – holiday stated that Christmas was a holiday that was about family (not religion) and as such was embraced by all corners and segments of American society. It wasn’t true then, but the law made it so!

And that, dear devout and religious Christians, is why you can’t “Put Christ in Christmas” unless you are talking about your private religious celebrations, where he’s pretty well entrenched, you’ll have to admit. No, you can’t get Christ into a secular, civil holiday because – establishing your religion is unconstitutional in the USA. The national shopping, eating, visiting-family, commercial holiday with Frosty and Rudolph belongs to We the People. It’s a civic holiday and capitalism and customers can do whatever we like with it. THAT is the result of your co-religionists trying to pull a fast one with the US Constitution a century ago. Let that lesson sink in, really, really deeply. The reason that Christmas is no longer exclusively a day that a religious leader was born is 100% your own damn fault. 100%. You created this mess. It’s all on you. And this is one genie you will never, ever get back into the bottle.

You COULD repeal the designation of Dec 25 as a national holiday and have it return to just being a personal-choice day that religiously-inclined people can ASK their employers for [no guarantees, and it is close to the end of most companies’ fiscal year, so – good luck with that], but neither you nor the rest of us will get a paid holiday. Much less Dec 24th, Dec 26th or any other day prior to New Year’s. Wanna start using your personal vacation time to have a day or two off and skip the whole family travel thing? Hmm? Didn’t think so.

Neither will the rest of the overworked, exhausted 350 million rest of us who look forward to the only long Federally-encouraged family time off from work.

Because of the confusion with both holidays using the same words, people who are not aggressively trying to get back those halcyon days of unconstitutionality – which includes Christians who want to protect their religion as well as those of other, or no, faith tradition – coined the respectful Happy Holidays, to acknowledge that civil holiday, as well as Yule (Wiccans & other Neo-Pagans), Solstice (everyone), Hanukkah (Jews) and Bodhi Day (Buddhists). Respect is the foundation of a law-based, justice-focused democratic society. Respect is good.

And why do I say “Christians who want to protect their religion”? Well, if a holiday is purely religious, you have control of it. If you allow the name and the date to be used as a national secular holiday, then it belongs to all of us, and that includes Madison Avenue, the retail industry, Hollywood and any and all other commercial ideas that the human mind can think up.

you really follow the teachings of that marvelous, inspirational Jewish Palestinian construction worker of two millennia ago, start campaigning for a national, secular Yule Holiday on the 21st, or the 26th or some other late-December day [we need a long holiday close to New Year so we can have that family and rest time], so you can have your religious holiday back. The only thing you can’t have: Your religious ancestors wanted to force everyone to celebrate their religious holiday, as a way of either converting us all, or rubbing our faces in a de-facto theocracy.

Them days are gone for good, no matters what lies a President or politician tries to spin. You can’t slip a theocracy past the Supremes in the 21st Century, even a pack of Republican Justices. But you can put Christ back into a new exclusively-religious holiday. Heck, you could even move it back to when the Messiah was actually born – late March or early April. We’ll still have Christmas, that “family holiday enjoyed by all sectors of American society. “

Deck the halls with boughs of whatever and happy eggnog to us all, every one!

Honoring the 11 Million - Planning Our Own Acts of Courage

In my spiritual practice today, I sent healing prayers to the survivors and descendants of the Nazi Holocaust.  Our new understanding of the science of epigenetics has sobering information on how traumas can shift gene expression, allowing the trauma to be transmitted to succeeding generations in the form of lowered immune system activity and other effects.  Reiki healing helps.

We can start, on this Holocaust Remembrance Day, with remembering all 11 million victims.  It always pains me when Jewish writers and speakers talk about 6 million, instead of 11 million.  Others quote that erroneous 6 million figure all the time.  But talking about 6 million Jews and ignoring the equally-tragic 5 million others is the worst kind of racism.  Those people were murdered once, and now the world is erasing their memory – as if their lives didn’t matter and their deaths aren’t tragedies.  Let’s stop it.  11 million.  The Roma people (aka gypsies) were almost exterminated, a percentage that exceeds any other targeted group by a huge margin.

What also helps is staying vigilant about pain and suffering today.  As people become emotionally overwhelmed, their empathy drops.  We have to avoid becoming overwhelmed, without unplugging completely.  So do Reiki, meditate, exercise, take creative arts time-outs, to renew and replenish yourselves for the long fight.

It might also be pertinent to consider what could be coming tomorrow.   Commentators in the USA and elsewhere have noted not only the appalling spectacle of white supremacists in the White House, but a worldwide rise in dictatorship-under-guise-of-democracy from Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in Russia, to possible (unimaginable) election of a fascist thug in France. 

In the 1930’s, people who noticed the rise of fascist dictators who made the trains run on time and got people back to work weren’t called “negative” of course, but that’s the response to “Uh, people, there’s a pattern here…” today.  Doing the “don’t worry, just mind your own life” dance, as far too many million Americans are doing, worries me.  This problem isn’t going to go away by prayer, or raising the vibrational energy of the room.  Our grandparents didn’t pay attention until it was too late.  I hope that we, with their example to learn from, will wake up and take action sooner.

Our species has much more DNA devoted to cooperation than competition.  Cooperation in early social groups – food sharing, with everyone who had a bad collecting day – is what propelled our lineage into planetary dominance.  Empathy is an advanced trait of primates and the most intelligent mammals, like elephants and cetaceans.  

On Nazi Holocaust Remembrance Day, let’s celebrate the good people of 70 years ago, many of whom died, all of whom risked their lives, to save or try to save the targeted people from death.  We are good people, most of us.  We can call on the better angels of our nature to stay on the path of courage as our own time of testing is upon us.  Who in your city or community needs saving?  Take action.

Is Integrity Obsolete?

“Yeah, cash is great.  You don’t have to pay tax on that,” Sally said.

 

I just stared at her, stunned.   “I report all of my income.” 

Now it’s her turn to look at me like I’m an alien lizard from Alpha Centauri, or clinically insane.  “I prefer cash for my international clients because it’s easier, that’s all.”  Now she’s looking at me with pity.  I’m really, really stupid, she’s thinking. Could be.

I admit to disappointment in my friend.  Professors Kohlberg and Gilligan developed frameworks to explain the levels of sophistication of our human moral reasoning, and doing whatever you can get away with is the level typical of a 3^rd grader.  Later in our development, we grow through understanding that general lawfulness makes everyone safer, on up to doing The Right Thing just because it is The Right Thing, from focusing solely on yourself through level after level until you arrive at the place where all living creatures are your siblings and the earth itself is your mother and father, and you devote yourself completely to the alleviation of suffering in the world.  Nobody gets to that summit but some folks get closer than Sally seems to be aiming.

Then there’s another colleague, who changed her email signature to “Amazon Best-Selling Author” a month before she even finished writing the dang thing.  Her reasoning: she had hired someone who guaranteed to make her book a best-seller (it only sold 200 copies), and thus she was just jump-starting what WOULD be true.  Except that she didn’t change it when she saw the sales results.  [Which were totally predictable, for a newbie author tackling a popular topic that had dozens of real bestsellers to compete against.]  I’ll bet that “I’ll make you a star” charlatan suggested it, but it was my colleague who did it, and still refuses to own her lie.

And she’s not alone.  Everyone who releases a print or even an e-book these days claims it as an “Amazon Bestseller” before it’s even on the metaphorical shelves.

I pity the real bestselling authors, who have their hard work and quality product cheapened because everyone (including me) who knows about the “Amazon Bestseller” scam, assumes they are lying also.  Except Ian Brodie, who does such good work, he doesn’t have to lie to impress you.  I’d be willing to believe that his book really IS the best seller in its category of e-mail marketing.

That’s something that my blow-hard pals don’t seem to understand.  If you cheapen the status of an Amazon bestseller because everyone with any level of thrown-together product is claiming it, then when and if you ever do achieve that real pinnacle, no one will believe you.  It’s a short-sighted strategy, based on the belief that the rest of us are too stupid to see the pattern.  We’re not.  So cut it out, already.  Work for your accolades, like your pre-iPad ancestors’ generations did.

My colleague – whose name really isn’t Sally and isn't even a woman – who thinks that integrity is something you turn on and off, is an example of the driving force behind so much cheating, on every  level, these days.  You tell yourself [and there’s always at least a tiny grain of truth in here] that you have been cheated, or the whole system is unfair and corrupt; this belief and the resentment it generates frees you from your moral imperative to being fair and honest yourself.   And then anything is possible.

Many people have a situational-cheater’s response to taxes.  Taxes are, as my anthropology students learn [see my YouTube channel Anthroisfun], the way that complex societies make sure that resources are redistributed.  In small groups of 20-40 individuals, as our ancestors lived for millions of years, until around 7,000 years ago, we shared our good and bad fortune on a daily basis.  No one hoarded; you shared the food you gathered or scavenged (or later, hunted) and no one went hungry.  If you made two knives, you gave one to your sister or cousin-in-law.  Once a money economy emerged, people could contribute coins instead of wheat and barley and goats, and still no one went hungry.  

Modern Western societies have become so complex, and so many of them,  including the USA, are unequal, unfair oligarchies, that the original purpose of taxing – to share food and provide for common goals like roads, medical care, education of the young, and defense against enemies – can be ignored, while you focus on the things you don’t like or approve of.  It’s impossible to have 330 million people agree on anything, including “the sky is blue.”  For example, in Seattle, the sky is actually varying shades of grey.  If we get a tiny patch of blue sky, we all go nuts and stop talking about politics for the duration of the blessed event.  My otherwise-admirable colleague could give you a litany of things that she refuses to contribute to, and thus is morally justified, in her own mind at least – maybe in yours – in pocketing cash that she refuses to share.

But taxes support children and disabled people, and I’ve been both. You have been a child.  If you are blessed to live a long life, you will be too old to earn a salary.  Taxes fix the roads, provide fire protection and libraries, and you need those things.  Taxes provide Sesame Street and Nova, the National Weather Service and Meals on Wheels; I’ve learned from the former and may live long enough to need the latter.  We all may.

 

I know how selective resentment can make nearly anything seem morally acceptable – and I am asking you all to become aware of it, too.  I have a class that brings people into connection with all the components of their ancestry (Meet Your Ancestors, launching on www.soaringdragon.biz/classes) including the noble and heroic.  These heroes are the parts of your DNA that you can tap into when you feel yourself getting up a head of steam around justifications for resentments.  A new class on Freeing Your Soul From the Poison of Resentment is debuting soon to give you tools for this.  

It all starts with awareness of what is really going on inside your thinking, and a commitment to listen to the better angels of your nature.  Deep breath and make a choice.  Pay your taxes, on all your income.  Give generously to those who have less than you do.  Realize what a hero you are for doing both.  YOU, my friend, are protecting seniors and children, and the disabled, and you are the guardian and protector of your community.  Be proud of yourself.  

And remember the Hindu scripture, “Do not despise your neighbors who are poor, for many poor people were once well-off.  And you may someday be poor.”  We’re all in this together, my friends, we truly are.

If we all learn how to call on our inner hero, regardless of the choices that the swamp around us makes, we will have a roadmap to creating a paradise out of this Earth that we have inherited. 

  Take a step on that path today.  Take another step tomorrow.  Repeat until the day you die.