Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.

It's my observation that the same people who accept what the newspapers say tend to accept what the Bible says, the common element being a lack of critical judgement.

It's understandable though. People dislike uncertainty. That dislike is built into us at a biological level - it's part of our basic instinct to survive. Uncertainly means danger and a potential threat to our existence, so, when someone hands us a solution that seems to work, we latch on and make it our own. If we're brought into it as children we have virtually no choice in the matter. We simply accept what our parents tell us because they in turn accepted what their parents told them. Tradition. This is how cultures survive. They create a mythos that explains away the uncertainty around them and gives them some guiding principles to make their way in life, such as not killing your neighbor for his wife or donkey.

As I see it, the problem today is not a lack of belief in God, but a lack of applied reason in trying to solve the problems of urban-industrial society. Today we face massive uncertainty on a daily basis, so it's understandable that people would look for a way to manage that in their lives, hence the upsurge in not just Christianity, but in every religion on the planet. The problem is, you cannot return to the past without paying a heavy price. Iran was once one of the most prosperous nations on earth. Now look at them Do you really want to live like that? That's where this kind of thinking leads.

Don't get me wrong. I don't slight people for seeking refuge in spirituality - for many I'm sure it helps. Where I have issues is with suppression of the TRUTH. We criticize the government and media for not telling us the truth, but at the same time expect people to accept on faith alone what is written in a SINGLE BOOK out of the many thousands of religious and philisophical texts available to us. Why is that? Is it that none of those other books contain any truth? How long did the Catholic Church sit on the works of Plato and Aristotle? For that matter, how long was it forbidden to render the Bible in any other language but Latin? Then there's Galileo. Everyone knows that story. How do you account for that? How do you excuse it? Isn't it the same thing the Nazis did - suppressing knowledge that contradicted their Faith?

Then there's the religious revisionism of Early American History by people who've clearly never studied it, trying to cast it as something inspired by God when in fact it was a product of the Enlightenment, the first serious break with religious authority and attempt to reform society based on rational principles - the same principles expounded by the Greeks which the Church suppressed for so many centuries.

I agree when the author says Christians feel set upon, but I'd have to insist that they've mostly earned it. I'll just point to the most glaring modern example of why that is: Creationism. This aberation of thought which is contradicted by ALL the evidence is now being taught in some American schools as a credible alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution. This is nothing less than an attempt to overturn Rational Thought and supplant it with, you guessed it - faith in a single book.

As for chreches, trees (which are pre-christian anyway) and other symbols and cliches of Christmas, who really cares? Nobody I know who had cool parents gives a damn. The Christian haters I see were mostly brought up in that belief until one day they just snapped - couldn't manage the contradictions anymore and turned hostile on what they saw as their oppressor. That's just physics really. Push down hard enough on anything and it's gonna snap back up and bite you. In other words, you reap what you sow.

OK, enough preaching to the choir already.

Have a Merry Christmas everyone ( including you athiests - there's gotta be at least one or two out there, no?)

ebear

don't tread on me, bro'