2013.12 Humor: Really, It's ALL Made Up, You Know

Click to enlarge:

2013.12 Book Report: The Trouble with Christmas, by Tom Flynn

The Trouble with Christmas
by Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry magazine
(Prometheus, 0-87975-848-1, 1993, 244 pages)
Summarized by Richard S. Russell
Where do our Christmas traditions come from?

• Pre-Christian sources: evergreens (tannenbaum, holly, ivy, mistletoe, Yule log, strenae); candles; giving gifts; feasting; wassailing
• Christian sources: midnight mass (Yup, that's all, folks!)
• Post-Christian sources: everything else, almost entirely derived from the 6 DWAMQs (dead white Anglophone males and a queen) — Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, Clement C. Moore, Thomas Nast, and Francis Church, from 1830 to 1910. Subsequent, tho lesser, customs include the poinsettia (timed to bloom red on Christmas Day), electric lights for the trees, a national tree (Eisenhower), and innumerable TV specials.

How accurate is the Biblical account of Jesus's birth?

• Neither unique nor original: Pre-Christian god-men sharing 1 or more of these characteristics — angelic annunciation, peri-solsticial birth; virgin mother; divine father; birth attended by signs and royal visitors; youthful prodigy acts; wonder stories as adult; persecution; grisly, untimely death; return from land of dead; silvan symbolism; solar symbolism — Osiris (Egypt), Horus (also Egypt), Attis (Phrygia), Adonis (Syria), Dionysus (Greece), Perseus (also Greece), Mithra or Mithras (Persia), Krishna (Hindu)
• Unsupported by historial evidence: No historical record of Caesar Augustus’s great census, star in the east, or Herod’s massacre of the innocents. Also ahistorical is shepherds watching their flocks by night at any time of year other than lambing season, usually around April.
• Contradictions between gospels: Jesus’s genealogy, whether Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether there was a manger, who attended the birth, and where the family went afterward.
• Contradiction within a gospel: Matthew’s “fulfilled prophecy” that the messiah should be named Emmanuel.

Are Christians generally fond of birthdays?
Actually, no; death is more Christian. Early Christians thot it blasphemous to celebrate birth (entry into the mundane world) and instead marked feast days of the saints on the much better recorded anniversary dates of their deaths (their entry into the divine world of the afterlife), including the biggest of them all, Easter.

Surely all Christians agree on the central importance of Christmas?
No, as usual, they leap at any excuse for a good fight. Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists tried to squelch Christmas celebrations as unholy and unseemly in England and its colonies thruout the 17th and 18th Centuries. Anglicans, Catholics, and Lutherans, OTOH, reveled in the occasion, which is why George Washington chose Christmas Eve to cross the Delaware River, expecting to find the British and Hessians inebriated via celebration.

Who are those DWAMQs you mentioned?

• Washington Irving wrote the “Knickerbocker history” of New York, describing a supposed Dutch cult of Saint Nicholas, who would ride a magic horse thru the sky distributing presents on his feast day. Irving later described an “old-fashioned Christmas feast” set in a fictional English manor.
• Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, with its soppily sentimental conversion of the miser Scrooge. Even so, upon awakening from his dream, “In no time flat, [Scrooge] finds a little boy walking down the street who, on Christmas morning, has nothing better to do than run an errand for a stranger. Scrooge gives the child some money without the slightest worry that the butcher’s shop might be closed. His confidence is justified.”
• The young Queen Victoria was wildly popular in England and set many social standards. A descendant of the German House of Hanover, she and her family celebrated the holiday with an indoor tree. “In 1847 few English households had trees; by Christmas 1849 trees were everywhere.” The silvacide has continued unabated ever since.
• Clement Clarke Moore claimed to have written the poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (AKA ’Twas the Night before Christmas), and Flynn is willing to concede authorship despite considerable doubt, but its influence on the legend of Saint Nicholas — essentially transforming it rapidly into a recognizably modern Santa Claus, complete with “8 tiny reindeer” — is unmistakable. But Claus was rotund, jolly, and secular, not the gaunt, severe Nicholas of the Christian tradition.
• Thomas Nast was the greatest editorial cartoonist of the 19th Century. If an ordinary picture is worth a thousand words, his depiction of Santa Claus was probably worth a million. It gave form to the somewhat vague word picture of Moore’s poem. His first Claus appeared in an 1862 issue of Harper’s, delivering presents to the “good” Union soldiers. But he kept it up almost every year thereafter for 3 decades. He’s the one responsible for siting Santa at the North Pole.
• Francis Church, an editorial writer for the New York Sun, was called upon by his publisher in 1897 to pen a response to 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, who had inquired whether Santa was real. Under the heading “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”, Church opened with the observation that her friends “have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see.” and thence proceeds to lay waste to the scientific method.

Miscellany

• A fair number of Christmas carols aren't as "traditional" as commonly believed. Jingle Bells (1857), We Three Kings of Orient Are (1859), I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day (1863), Joy to the World (1872), Away in a Manger (1887), Little Drummer Boy (1941), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1949).
• The solstice is a holiday magnet. Christmas, Hanukkah, Saturnalia, Festivus, Yule, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Kwanzaa, Brumalia, Sankranti, boar's head feast, Dongzhi, Soyal, Yalda, Modraniht, Pancha Ganapati, HumanLight, Hogmanay, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day.
• Should we celebrate any holidays? Flynn himself does not and recommends against doing so for people in general and atheists in particular. He especially disparages the idea of celebrating the solstice (a pagan holiday) or made-up alternative holidays like Festivus, because he says we're fooling nobody; everyone knows we wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for the big fuss being made over Christmas.

Thomas Nast's First Santa Claus Cartoon (1862)

20th Century Sanitized Commercial Santa Claus

2013.12 News: AHA! FSM at the Wisconsin State Capitol

The imaginative folx at the University of Wisconsin's AHA! (Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics) group have added a Flying Spaghetti Monster to the rapidly growing collection of solstice-seasonal observances at the Wisconsin State Capitol.

2013.12 Opinion: Proper Season's Greetings

Have you heard that some people are taking offense at being issued the "wrong" kind of season's greetings? For pity's sake, people, nothing to get all snippy about. It's not that hard. Here's the short course:

 • If you know somebody is a Christian, say "Merry Christmas".
 • If you know that they're Serbian, like my mom's side of the family, say "Khristos se rodi" (or "Joyeux Noël" or "Felíz Navidad" or whatever the appropriate ethnicity is).
 • If you know they're Jewish, go with "Happy Hanukkah".
 • If you know they're Wiccan, say "Blessed Yule".
 • If you know they enjoy Kwanzaa, say "Joyous Kwanzaa".
 • If you know they celebrate Festivus, say "Happy Festivus".
 • If you're talking to me — “Are you talkin' to me?” — “Go, Pack!" gets a big grin all year round.
 • And in all other cases (that is, when you don't know), go with "Happy Holidays" and you can't miss.

Do you detect the common theme here? It’s about spreading cheer to the other person. It’s not all about you.

Now please pick your favorite season's greeting and pretend it came from me. 8^D

2013.11 Action: Promote the Meme "Neo-Theo"

I invite you to join in propagating a new meme: "neo-theo".

Despite its obvious resonance with "neo-con", the term "neo-theo" more closely parallels the rebranding that the creationist movement undertook after getting repeatedly slapped down for making its religious motivations too visible. They went back into their burrows and emerged again as defenders of "academic freedom" (religious zealots have a free-speech right to indoctrinate school children about "evilution") and "intelligent design" (a pseudo-scientific label for the laffably named Discovery Institute, which operates no labs, runs no experiments, publishes no papers, and has never discovered a damn thing). The legal, academic, and scientific false fronts they put up are mere sham, of course, but they help to preserve the legal facade of not being religiously motivated.

It's the same deal with the neo-theos. Instead of being repackaged creationists, they're gussied-up dominionists. In their heart of hearts, they believe the United States should be (and probably all along was intended to be) a theocracy, but they've learned from bitter experience that they can't come right out and honestly say so. Instead, they take refuge behind nominally secular legal concepts, such as the idea that corporations are people (which gained legal credibility after the eye-opening Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC) and thus entitled to "human rights", such as conscientious objection.

There's another case currently headed for the US Supreme Court, in which the newly minted "person" known as Hobby Lobby claims its conscience has been shocked by being required to provide the same kind of health-care coverage for its employees as, say, General Motors or Microsoft. In fact, while the fundamentalist owners of Hobby Lobby may have just such an attitude (the same way that the owners of Chick-fil-A are opposed to gay marriage), the corporation itself, not being a human being, is devoid of opinions on the subject. And the law applies to the corporation.

Just as with the "academic freedom" claims of the creationists, the neo-theos are attempting to put a smiling secular face on their ludicrous claim, wrapping it in shiny colored paper with a ribbon, a bow, and a label reading "religious liberty". Well, "corporate personhood" (either as such or in its guise as "church personhood") is as much an oxymoron as "intelligent design" and deserves to be exposed for what it truly is: dominionist dogma rebranded for secular consumption.

I believe that identifying its proponents as "neo-theos" (which has the added advantage of rhyming) will help to do that.

2013.11 Opinion: Honesty of a Neo-Theo

Today I submitted this letter to the editor of the Cap Times of Madison:

---

Thanks to Craig Vance for his honesty in revealing the true agenda of the self-proclaimed "right to life" movement. In asserting that his particular favorite flavor of superstition outranks the highest court in the land, he places his lust for a theocracy ahead of the people-ruled, rights-based republic envisioned by America's Founders. His Dominionist advocacy of 2nd-class "your body is ours" status for women exactly parallels his fellow religionists who burned "witches" at the stake during the Middle Ages or who stone them to death in modern-day Saudi Arabia for the "crime" of being raped by somebody not their husband.

His comparison to the Nazis was apt in a way he probably didn't envision, in that those genocidal maniacs also favored keeping women "in their place" with their official policy of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Yes, Hitler too meant the part about Kirche. It's so easy to oppress others when you have Gott mit uns (God with us).

Fortunately, in America we still have at least lip service toward the 1st Amendment, with its guarantee of separation of church and state, and neo-theos like Craig Vance haven't yet succeeded in undermining it entirely.

I too am particularly unhappy with certain decisions of the US Supreme Court (Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, Kelo v. New London), but the proper way to deal with them is thru the political process or Constitutional amendments, not by denying or undermining the court's legitimacy. If you want to live without the rule of law, try Somalia. If you'd rather live with the civil authority subordinate to a religious supreme leader, Iran's set up exactly that way.

2013.11 News: Graveyard of the Gods

Created by our young friends over at AHA (Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison) for Halloween 2013, this Graveyard of the Gods display on Bascom Hill features mock tombstones for many of the thousands of gods once as revered by their respective civilizations as Yahweh is by many in our supposedly modern, enlightened, sophisticated society.

Follow the above link to see more images.