Knowing some deeply religious types, I can tell you their offended by the crass commercialization of Christmas and the resultant removal of religion from the holiday.
I do appreciate that. The commercialization of Christmas has been an issue for decades. But it's not the atheists or Buddhists or Wiccans who are commercializing it, it's Christians. It's not atheists who are doing all that Christmas shopping and the vast majority of the business people doing the selling are overwhelmingly Christians, too. If they want to go after commercialization, more power to them.
Picking on people who are just trying to be respectful of the fact that everyone in the community isn't Christian, however, is another matter, logically. Maybe they see it as another attack on the Christly Christmas and are conflating it and commercialization. But it's a different matter.
A community that has an event to promote family, community, peace, and brotherly love and includes non-Christians as equals in that event is doing God's work even if they're not doing it in God's name. It's not taking the Christ out of Christmas, it's just fostering the brotherly love spirit secularly. You'd have to be pretty paranoid or pretty single minded to find that threatening, seems to me. Either that or think that brotherly love is not God's work. which would be a very sorry form of Christianity.
Happy winter solstice to you and yours, too. :) |
