I have a shocking confession to make. The allegations are true, there really is a War on Christmas, and I am one of its operatives. And I am here today to tell you all about our modus operandi.
I could get done for treason for confessing this, but it's a matter of conscience. Lately many innocent civilians have been accused of being our operatives, and given what happens to suspected enemy combattants these days I feel the need to protect these innocent civilians by disclosing our true methods.
Misconception: We say things like "Happy Holidays!" and "Season's Greetings!"
Fact: We say things like "Good morning!" and "Have a nice day!"
Misconception: We play music like "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bells"
Fact: We play music like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"
Misconception: We decorate with pine trees and snowflakes
Fact: We decorate with throw pillows and area rugs
Misconception: We try to convince you to buy buy buy the most perfect present ever for every single person you've ever met.
Fact: We wish you'd stop it with the fucking shopping already because we just want to pick up a carton of milk and some toilet paper without waiting in all these fucking lines!
Misconception: We're the ones suggesting that the the office or the school or whatever have a "holiday party" or a "winter party" with potluck and gifts.
Fact: We're the ones suggesting that we all pool our money and order pizza since we're all going to be working through lunch and eating at our desks anyway.
Misconception: We think that Christmas is really a pagan holiday so everyone should celebrate it regardless of how religious they feel about it.
Fact: We think that Christmas is on a Tuesday so we should watch that DVD since there's nothing on TV anyway.
So remember: If someone greets you with "Happy Holidays" while buying plastic snowmen that sing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" for their "seasonal celebration", they're just an innocent civilian with a questionable sense of taste. Our operatives are much more insidious than that. The people you really want to watch out for are the ones who say "Hi, how are you? How was your weekend?" while shopping for bread, eggs, and argyle socks and listening to Radiohead.
Showing posts with label recovering catholic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recovering catholic. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Quote of the moment
"A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together." - Garrison Keillor
That is precisely why I dislike it so much.
I keep my home secular and xmas-free for the same reason you batten down the hatches against a storm. I shudder at the idea of an xmas party at work for the same reason you'd shudder if your boss said "I have an idea! Let's all go outside and frolic in the thunderstorm!" I hate early arrival of xmas shit in stores for the same reason you'd hate having the stores overrun with umbrellas and raincoats in anticipation of a storm coming next week when all you really need is a sunhat for the sunny day forecast tomorrow. I hate xmas music for the same reason you'd hate the song "Singing in the Rain" if it was played in all public space whenever there are raindrops in the forecast.
If xmas were just this thing that happened organically, I wouldn't care. But it's so fucking in your face all the time, it just make sme want some peace and quiet.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Things that piss me off
I don't particularly enjoy xmas. It's so long and drawn out and noisy and "OMG, everyone must be happy because this is the happiest time of the year!" all for a celebration of the birth of the messiah of a religion that I don't believe in.
What pisses me off is people telling me that I should celebrate and enjoy (as though you can just enjoy something because someone tells you to) xmas because it isn't really a xian holiday, it actually has Pagan roots.
But I'm not Pagan either! The fact that it has Pagan roots is completely irrelevant! So a holiday in one religion I don't believe in actually has roots in another religion I don't believe in? If they discovered that Ramadan had Buddhist roots, would everyone suddenly start fasting during Ramadan?
It also seems to me that this line of reasoning might be a bit disrespectful to Pagans, although I can't quite articulate why.
***
Not a thing that pisses me off, just an observation resulting from a long and winding train of thought that came to me before I hit Publish Post:
I make no secret of the fact that I have a negative view of my former religion. I figure as someone who was once on the inside, I'm entitled. I've been there, I've lived it, I've given it really quite a lot of thought including a full-fledged crisis of faith, and I've come to the conclusion that it's a negative thing. Not everyone's going to agree with me, but I don't care; I know whereof I speak.
What I find odd is that people judge me for being anti-xian in exactly the same way they'd judge an outsider who had never been exposed to xianity for being anti-xian. They view my negative assessment of the religion I grew up in, studied, wrestled with, carefully examined, and ultimately decided to leave (entailing some family drama) as being just as intolerant as a negative assessment coming from someone who has never even heard of the contents of John 3:16. To me, that sounds like considering the following to scenarios perfectly equal:
"I'm heard of that Bob fellow, and I HATE HIM!"
"You are so judgemental!"
vs.
"I was married to Bob for 15 years, and he was an abusive husband who made my life miserable. I HATE HIM!"
"You are so judgemental!"
I've been trying to figure out if there's anything comparable other than religion where this can happen, where an insider's negative assessment is considered just as unjustly judgemental as an outsider's. I can't think of anything offhand.
What pisses me off is people telling me that I should celebrate and enjoy (as though you can just enjoy something because someone tells you to) xmas because it isn't really a xian holiday, it actually has Pagan roots.
But I'm not Pagan either! The fact that it has Pagan roots is completely irrelevant! So a holiday in one religion I don't believe in actually has roots in another religion I don't believe in? If they discovered that Ramadan had Buddhist roots, would everyone suddenly start fasting during Ramadan?
It also seems to me that this line of reasoning might be a bit disrespectful to Pagans, although I can't quite articulate why.
***
Not a thing that pisses me off, just an observation resulting from a long and winding train of thought that came to me before I hit Publish Post:
I make no secret of the fact that I have a negative view of my former religion. I figure as someone who was once on the inside, I'm entitled. I've been there, I've lived it, I've given it really quite a lot of thought including a full-fledged crisis of faith, and I've come to the conclusion that it's a negative thing. Not everyone's going to agree with me, but I don't care; I know whereof I speak.
What I find odd is that people judge me for being anti-xian in exactly the same way they'd judge an outsider who had never been exposed to xianity for being anti-xian. They view my negative assessment of the religion I grew up in, studied, wrestled with, carefully examined, and ultimately decided to leave (entailing some family drama) as being just as intolerant as a negative assessment coming from someone who has never even heard of the contents of John 3:16. To me, that sounds like considering the following to scenarios perfectly equal:
"I'm heard of that Bob fellow, and I HATE HIM!"
"You are so judgemental!"
vs.
"I was married to Bob for 15 years, and he was an abusive husband who made my life miserable. I HATE HIM!"
"You are so judgemental!"
I've been trying to figure out if there's anything comparable other than religion where this can happen, where an insider's negative assessment is considered just as unjustly judgemental as an outsider's. I can't think of anything offhand.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Going to hell
Similar letters from Cary Tennis, Dear Prudence, and Damage Control: religious kids who think their non-religious parents are going to hell.
Here's something I don't get, and I say this as a former religious child myself: why would you care if someone else is going to hell? The only reason I can possibly think of is because you want them to be in heaven with you. But surely any deity worth being worshipped as a deity can arrange things so that you have everyone you need for a heavenly heaven experience, while everything deserving of a hellish hell experience experiences just that. (In fact, just to make things easier, maybe some people's hellish hell experience is being trapped for eternity with their evangelical relatives!)
Here's something I don't get, and I say this as a former religious child myself: why would you care if someone else is going to hell? The only reason I can possibly think of is because you want them to be in heaven with you. But surely any deity worth being worshipped as a deity can arrange things so that you have everyone you need for a heavenly heaven experience, while everything deserving of a hellish hell experience experiences just that. (In fact, just to make things easier, maybe some people's hellish hell experience is being trapped for eternity with their evangelical relatives!)
Monday, August 13, 2007
Prayer in school
The Toronto Star asks if students should be required to recite the lord's prayer in public schools. (I have no idea why they're asking this and can't seem to find the associated news story.)
We actually did say the lord's prayer when I was in school, up to about grade 3. This was a source of a great moral dilemma for me. You see, I was raised Catholic (which I'm capitalizing only because it changes the meaning if you don't) but I went to public school because my mother's experience as a teacher in our local Catholic board led her to decide that she didn't want her kids going to school in that environment. (To answer the inevitable question, going to public school isn't what drove me away from the church - it was my experience with other Catholics and with the church's teachings themselves.)
Thing is, in the Catholic church, the our father ends with the line "Deliver us from evil." The version we had to say in school had more lines after that: "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen." (Here's a theological explanation of why from a Catholic perspective, but I didn't have access to that information at the time.)
Now I knew that, to be good, I had to do what my teachers told me to in school. And my teachers in school were telling me to recite the lord's prayer complete with those last few lines. And I knew that if I didn't do what my teachers told me, I'd go to hell for being bad. But I also knew that, to be good, I had to do what the church told me. And the church told me stop at "deliver us from evil." And I knew that if I didn't do what the church told me, I'd go to hell for being bad.
So there I was, a good, virtuous child who wanted very much to do the right thing, (seriously, this is actually what I was like at that age) utterly convinced that I was automatically going to burn in hell for all time because the prayer script my school gave me varied slightly from the prayer script my church gave me. I was between the ages of 4 and 8 at the time.
And the thing is, I was just coming from a different sect of the same religion! All this distress was being caused by a slight variance in how to articulate the exact same sentiment! Imagine the kind of confusion and cognitive dissonance it would cause for students from religions with completely different deities! And remember, this includes elementary school students, who are still young enough that they genuinely want to be good by obeying the grownups around them! What on earth do they think reciting the lord's prayer will do (and why this one prayer specifically?) that it's worth putting all the students who, through no fault of their own, were born into a different religion or no religion at all in a catch-22 where they cannot possibly be good?
We actually did say the lord's prayer when I was in school, up to about grade 3. This was a source of a great moral dilemma for me. You see, I was raised Catholic (which I'm capitalizing only because it changes the meaning if you don't) but I went to public school because my mother's experience as a teacher in our local Catholic board led her to decide that she didn't want her kids going to school in that environment. (To answer the inevitable question, going to public school isn't what drove me away from the church - it was my experience with other Catholics and with the church's teachings themselves.)
Thing is, in the Catholic church, the our father ends with the line "Deliver us from evil." The version we had to say in school had more lines after that: "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen." (Here's a theological explanation of why from a Catholic perspective, but I didn't have access to that information at the time.)
Now I knew that, to be good, I had to do what my teachers told me to in school. And my teachers in school were telling me to recite the lord's prayer complete with those last few lines. And I knew that if I didn't do what my teachers told me, I'd go to hell for being bad. But I also knew that, to be good, I had to do what the church told me. And the church told me stop at "deliver us from evil." And I knew that if I didn't do what the church told me, I'd go to hell for being bad.
So there I was, a good, virtuous child who wanted very much to do the right thing, (seriously, this is actually what I was like at that age) utterly convinced that I was automatically going to burn in hell for all time because the prayer script my school gave me varied slightly from the prayer script my church gave me. I was between the ages of 4 and 8 at the time.
And the thing is, I was just coming from a different sect of the same religion! All this distress was being caused by a slight variance in how to articulate the exact same sentiment! Imagine the kind of confusion and cognitive dissonance it would cause for students from religions with completely different deities! And remember, this includes elementary school students, who are still young enough that they genuinely want to be good by obeying the grownups around them! What on earth do they think reciting the lord's prayer will do (and why this one prayer specifically?) that it's worth putting all the students who, through no fault of their own, were born into a different religion or no religion at all in a catch-22 where they cannot possibly be good?
Friday, May 23, 2003
I'm pondering whether it would be an effective political statement to list myself on my municipal assessment as Catholic by religion, but as a supporter of the public school board. Do they keep stats that would show the number of Catholics voting public? I do have the right to identify as Catholic since I was baptized, but I'd rather not do so unless it would be an effective political statement.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)