An Open Letter About Christmas

Dear easily offended American Christians,

There is no anti-Christian conspiracy regarding the holiday greetings expressed to you publically by commercial organizations and/or their employees.

I could stop there, or just point to last year's rant on this topic, but I'm afraid you've shown me that you're very, very thick, so I feel a need to expand on this:

When someone wishes you "Happy Holidays", it's not an insult to you or to your religion. As a commenter on a blog I read recently pointed out, it's actually someone wishing you well for basically the entire month of December and a bit of January to boot, in fact, but even leaving that aside: it's not them prejudicially choosing to use a generic greeting from some secular humanist plot, or some liberal atheist snobbery about the word Christmas. It's them choosing to use a greeting that doesn't presume to tell people what they should be celebrating. That's the opposite of prejudice.

Get this through your heads: not everyone in this country is Christian. Not everyone in this country is even nominally Christian. And unless you're awfullly ostentatious, your Christianity is not visible to people, nor is someone else's lack of Christianity. The people who aren't Christian look and dress and talk and act just like you (barring any cross you might be wearing, and be honest: you probably aren't). So those store employees? They don't know which holiday you're planning to celebrate, if any, and therefore, it has nothing to do with your religion.

(As to the random wingnut who posted on their blog that "holiday" is somehow an insulting word: the word 'holiday' derives from "holy day", as in "what Christmas is". Seriously. That was pretty stupid even for this brand of stupidity.)

As I said last year: Get over it. No one is stopping you from religiously celebrating Christmas by not making sure they use the word regularly. Or, if they are, your faith is pretty fragile.

Which, come to think of it, it must be, if you think that other people not celebrating your holiday properly somehow damages your faith.

Maybe you should be thinking more about that.

Love,

Me

The Lord's Prayer (interpreted)

The Lord's Prayer, as intepreted by Right-Wing American Christians:

Our Father in Heaven, hallowed by thy name,
(You know, unless we need to use your name to justify the things we do.)
your kingdom come,
(Preferably just soon enough that I can see the smiting.)
your will be done,
(As we interpret it, of course.)
on earth as it is in Heaven.
(Excepting that 'love thy neighbor' crap, amirite?)
Give us today our daily bread.
(Me first! Me! Me!)
And forgive us our debts
(And sins and stuff, too, okay?)
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
(Not their debts. We've just forgiven them... for being lazy.)
And lead us not into temptation,
(Or at least ignore us when we dive after it.)
but deliver us from the evil one.
(Obama, right?)