Posted on 12/24/2008 7:51:12 AM PST by Daffynition
Scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins has admitted he does celebrate Christmas - and enjoys singing traditional Christmas carols each festive season.
The writer and evolutionary biologist told singer Jarvis Cocker that he happily wishes everyone a Merry Christmas - and used to have a tree when his daughter was younger.
Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists in the world, was interviewed by Sheffield born Cocker when he stepped in as a Christmas guest editor on Radio Four's Today programme.
'I am perfectly happy on Christmas day to say Merry Christmas to everybody,' Dawkins said. 'I might sing Christmas carols - once I was privileged to be invited to Kings College, Cambridge, for their Christmas carols and loved it.
'I actually love most of the genuine Christmas carols. I can't bear Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and you might think from that that I was religious, that I can't bear the ones that make no mention of religion. But I just think they are dreadful tunes and even more dreadful words. I like the traditional Christmas carols.'
Cocker, the former frontman for Britpop band Pulp, said he was also a fan of Christmas traditions.
'I am the same in a way,' he told Dawkins. 'I really like the kind of peripheral things about Christmas. I like the smell of tangerines and the smell of the tree and to pull crackers.'
Dawkins said his family had a typical Christmas celebration each year like so many others.
'We are not kill joys, we are not scrooges,' he said. 'We give each other presents and when my daughter was a bit younger we would have a tree. We don't now.
'We go to my sister's house for Christmas lunch which is a lovely big family occasion. Everybody thoroughly enjoys .....
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
There are actually two "flavors" of atheism. Strong atheism denies any sort of supreme beings as per your definition: "I know there isn't a God or Gods", whereas weak atheism is simply a lack of belief: "While I can't know that there isn't a God or Gods, I see no reason to believe that such a being(s) exists."
As for agnosticism, I think your definition is way off. The way you define it Christians would be agnostics, since they deny all sorts of specific supreme beings (Zeus, Odin, Krishna, etc.).
That's because everyone's world, with or without Christians in it, is a scary, dangerous, miserable place
"Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."
“While I can’t answer for Dawkins, I’m certainly not faking it...” ~ GL of Sector 2814
Maybe you & Dawkins just don’t understand enough to know that you’re both faking it. :)
“...After all, anyone can practice a religion, whether it is Christianity, Darwinism, Atheism, or Materialism, but that doesn’t mean they understand their religion in any deep way. For an atheist to reject religion means only that he has failed to understand it, precisely.
A confession of atheism is simply an honest confession of ignorance of any realities that transcend the human ego, nothing more, nothing less.
And why argue with a man who not only clings to ignorance, but is proud of the fact?
When we talk about metaphysics, we are talking about very basic truths that are adequations to divine/human realities that cannot not be, such as “Absolute,” “being,” “truth,” etc. But...”
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2008/06/science-of-center-and-religion-of.html
<>
Never Make a God of Your Irreligion
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2005/10/never-make-god-of-your-irreligion.html
Even if you don't subscribe to the religious portions of a holiday, why wouldn't you take the day off, like everyone else?
“People celebrated Christmas (by another name) long before Jesus walked the Earth” ~ Joseph20
People did a lot of other stuff long before Jesus walked the earth, too. :)
Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism (and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality - Dennis Prager
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles2/PragerHomosexuality.shtml
I'm an atheist, I enjoy singing "genuine" carols. I also enjoy singing Handel and Brahms. I can appreciate the music while realizing that the supernatural events spoken of in the lyrics are mythical. Saying that atheists are blind for enjoying God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen is akin to saying that Christians are blind for enjoying Frosty the Snowman...after all, they don't believe that there was magic in that old silk hat they found.
As for partaking in the celebration of a savior in which they don't believe, I've already pointed out that there's a huge part of Christmas that's secular in nature. I don't have to be a Christian to enjoy watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
I don’t get your point. It seems like a non-sequitar to me. You seem to be trying somehow to argue that Jesus owns Christmas because a lot of people were homosexual before Him? That makese no sense to me at all. I don’t even know why you brought up the issue of homosexuality.
My post was simply saying that non-Christians can authentically celebrate Christmas since it has been around a lot longer than Christianity. I think it’s arrogant for Christians to say that Christmas is ONLY about Jesus and Christianity.
Actually, Ramadan is not normally celebrated this time of year- it’s based on a lunar calendar and takes place every 354 days.
“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” ~ Ostrich Boy
“....The local manifestations of life and mind are relatively recent phenomena in the cosmos. The cosmos is at least 13.7 billion years old, meaning that it did just fine, thank you, for about 10 billion years without any creepy living things slithering about and mucking things up. And after that, the cosmos went another 3.84 billion years or so without any of these animals getting a big head and thinking that they knew better than the cosmos that had bearthed them.
Although modern human beings have been more or less genetically complete for as long as 200,000 years, we really don’t see any evidence of what we — or I, anyway — call humanness until its sudden emergence about 40,000 years ago, for example, in the beautiful and fully realized cave paintings at Alta Mira and Lascaux.
As I pointed out..., once you have these new modes of locally concentrated Life and Mind, you also have the entirely new existential category of pathology.
In other words, prior to the emergence of life 3.85 billion years ago, there were literally no problems in the universe.
Nothing could go wrong because nothing had to go right. But every biological entity is composed of various functions that must achieve their end in order for the organism to survive.
In a human being, there are thousands — millions, I suppose — of large- and small-scale things that have to go right in order for us to be free of pathology.
Our lungs must exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the environment; our heart must circulate blood; our pancreas must produce insulin (d’oh!), etc. All of these things have to go right for life to continue. Anything that interferes with the ability of an organ to accomplish its end is called “pathology.”
But this leads to an interesting question, for what on earth or in heaven is the mind for? What is the proper end of human consciousness? Because of we don’t know what consciousness is for, we can’t very well say that this or that individual is pathological, can we? Nor can we even begin to develop a functional political philosophy. It would be like trying to build a zoo with no proper knowledge of the appropriate habitat of each individual species.
Now, if you adopt a strictly Darwinian, materialistic view, then the answer to this question is obvious: a healthy person is simply one who survives, because that is the whole point of natural selection.
Thus, Stalin was more healthy than the 20 to 40 million people he murdered, just as Hitler was clearly more healthy than the 6 million Jews he slaughtered. Survival of the fittest is the final arbiter in nature.
You may think that I am being a bit polemical, but this was the philosophy of one of the forerunners of postmodernity, Nietzsche, who believed that the whole idea of “God” was a pathological meme that simply protected the weak and infirm from the harsh judgment of nature. Nature loves man ruthlessly, as someone once said. ...”
Epidemanology 101: The Cause and Cure of Mankind
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2007/08/epidemanology-101-cause-and-cure-of.html
What does this thread have to do with pagan sun worshippers celebrating the solstice before the birth of Christ showed the supremacy of God’s holy spirit over nature?
Back to MY point
It’s VERY arrogant and disrespectful to put TV created cartoon items like “festivus poles” in the same display as Christmas items and menorahs
You're trying to have it both ways. First you say that atheism is a religion, then you say that atheists reject religion. By the way, here's the definition of a religion, as per Merriam-Webster: "the service and worship of God or the supernatural". Atheism, materialism, and "Darwinism" ( a loaded term) are not religions, any more than "bald" is a hair color.
A confession of atheism is simply an honest confession of ignorance of any realities that transcend the human ego, nothing more, nothing less.
So I can't simply disagree with you about whether or not the supernatural exists...I have to be by definition ignorant? Sheesh...
And why argue with a man who not only clings to ignorance, but is proud of the fact?
When did I say I was "proud" of being an atheist? It's simply a fact.
“Moslem guy down the street had four children ~ for several years he hung a pitiful string of 24 lights all of one color on his porch.”
For a Muzzie I’d say he did good just doing that. Heck, he did more than many Christians do, so what the heck.
Exactly. I didn't think that Martin Luther King Day deserved to be a federal holiday, but I'll certainly take the day off next month.
“When you have successfully demystified the world, your soul is officially dead. ....”
I don’t know if that is the dumbest thing I have ever read in the English language, in any medium or context, but it has to be pretty close.
Well, he may have set up a CHRISTmas tree... but I will bet he never put up the CHRISTmas Manger.
That seems fairly unlikely, yes :-)
From an atheist point of view, what could possibly be "wrong" with notions like that, other than you don't like them? I don't like vanilla ice cream, either. So what? On atheist terms both are nothing more than different, bio/physical evolutionary products of chance/necessity. So what rational basis can your chance/necessity offer for your ethical complaint against God's character?
Cordially,
That hair colour is "clear"
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