Atheists, not Muslims, are anti-Christmas

IT was one of those extremely rare moments when I found myself agreeing with John Howard. Asked what he thought of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore's reported plans to make Sydney's Christmas celebrations low-key and generic, the Prime Minister slammed them as "silly", "ridiculous" and "political correctness from central casting".

Out of sensitivity for a multicultural society, Moore was reported to have said she did not want the celebrations "to push any one religious belief".

In fact, Moore had said nothing of the sort. Quite the contrary: the council is increasing its Christmas celebration spending this year by 50per cent. The words were spoken by Jeff Fisher, chief executive of fast-food chain Oporto following news that the chain had banned a nativity display from its franchise in Hornsby in northern Sydney. Media had put the words in the wrong mouth, but Howard's assessment of them remained true.

Every Christmas it seems we go through this farce. Last year, Stonnington Council in Melbourne removed the word Christmas from its celebrations and prevented speakers at a carols night from quoting the Bible. Some kindergartens and daycare centres have stopped having Christmas parties, instead having end-of-year or fairy parties.

All this, it seems, is being done to include Australia's religious and cultural minorities. This is supposed to foster social harmony and tolerance.

But it doesn't. It does exactly the opposite. When Channel Seven's Sunrise recently ran an interactive segment on the issue, a common theme in the responses of viewers legitimately aggrieved by this emasculation of Christmas was anger towards minority groups -- especially Muslims -- who were cast as cultural warriors against the majority.

Muslims may not celebrate Christmas but it is ridiculous to suspect they are behind this absurd trend. Jesus is a revered, prophetic figure in Islam and, accordingly, we are the least likely to be offended by other religious groups celebrating his birth. An anti-Christmas campaign is more consistent with aggressive atheism than any Islamic imperative.

In fact, I know no member of any religious minority, Muslim or otherwise, who asked for or even wants this. In my experience, religious minorities are far more concerned that their right to religious expression is respected and protected. That, surely, is a right belonging no less to the majority than to minorities.

Driving Christmas underground only erodes this treasured Australian norm and that is far more troubling to me than any Christmas celebration. I find the idea of restraining religious expression substantially more offensive than I find any nativity display. The impoverishment of Christmas is done more on behalf of religious minorities than by them.

This is where political correctness loses the plot; what purports to inspire tolerance instead inspires hostility and intolerance. Diverse, vibrant and tolerant societies are created by allowing eclectic cultural and religious expressions, celebrations included, to flourish. You don't achieve that by surrendering a culture, replacing it with bland meaninglessness.

Denying the Christianity in Christmas or, worse, doing away with it altogether helps no one. This is not multiculturalism. It is anti-culturalism.

Waleed Aly, a Melbourne lawyer, is a member of the Islamic Council of Victoria executive.

Something I ran across

Adventure in Asmara
A Report on the Sudanese Resistance
Michael Novak
http://www.nationalreview.com/novak/novak091902.asp

I have just enjoyed one of the best short experiences of my life. I have just returned from a trip to Asmara, Eritrea, where in four days I gave six lectures on religious liberty to the leaders of the Sudanese Resistance. These are the leaders of the growing rebellion against the Talibanish regime in Khartoum. These leaders, some 40 of them representing many diverse and widely scattered groups, have few enough occasions to get together (Sudan is a country three times larger than Texas, with few roads or other means of easy transport). Besides, now they are in negotiations, temporarily interrupted, with the Khartoum government, concerning a peace settlement that might keep the whole country together, if at all possible. Most Sudanese really want that, they say. The Resistance pretty much controls the south, with salients (or at least pockets within them) reaching up on the east to the Red Sea and on the west almost to the Egyptian border. They are beginning to outline their future nation.

(snip)

About half the leaders of the resistance groups represented seem to be Arabic speakers and about half English speakers. A majority represents various Sudanese African tribes, and either Christianity or native religions of nature, but a large minority, represents Muslim rebels from different geographical regions, races and social classes. The Muslims are outspoken and emphatic in their disdain for the abuses of the good name of Islam perpetrated by the government in Khartoum. "Our problem is not religion," one after another insists, "but a politicalization of religion, an abuse of religion. They are not true Muslims!"

"But how do you argue," another says, a former professor who came home from a Western country to become a brigadier in the field, "when they quote a text from the Koran on amputation according to sharia law, and ask if you believe in that text? We accept the Koran. We are Muslims. But we do not accept an eleventh-century interpretation of Islam. We are twenty-first century people. We are Muslims, in a country with eleven different major tendencies among Muslims, and we are accustomed to tolerance of one another."

(snip)

One of the ideological architects of political Islam in Sudan is a man named Turabi, who quite frankly admitted that his teaching was modeled on a careful study of Stalin and the Fascists of the early 20th century. Any and every means possible should be used, he learned, in the effort to organize cadres to build up a utopian, perfect, totalistic regime.

In other words, so-called "radical Islam" or "Islamic fundamentalism" of the new political type is in fact a bastard modernization of authentic Islam, corrupting Islam by the worst of all modern impulses. As one of our professor-guerrillas put it, If they were going to modernize Islam, why didn't they choose the best features of modernity to bring into Islam, like the Universal Declaration, and democracy, and human rights? Why the worst features — Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler? He expressed the last sentence with exquisite disdain, to vigorous agreement from others.....

Christmas is not a secular holiday

I guess that the author of the article below has another opinion:
http://www.lasttrumpetministries.org/tracts/tract3.html
The Origin Of Christmas

Christmas is a holiday shared and celebrated by many religions.

It is a day that has an effect on the entire world.

To many people, it is a favorite time of the year involving gift giving, parties and feasting. Christmas is a holiday that unifies almost all of professing Christendom.

The spirit of Christmas causes people to decorate their homes and churches, cut down trees and bring them into their homes, decking them with silver and gold.

In the light of that tree, families make merry and give gifts one to another.

When the sun goes down on December 24th, and darkness covers the land, families and churches prepare for participation in customs such as burning the yule log, singing around the decorated tree, kissing under the mistletoe and holly, and attending a late night service or midnight mass.

What is the meaning of Christmas? Where did the customs and traditions originate?

You, as a Christian, would want to worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth, discerning good from evil.

The truth is that all of the customs of Christmas pre-date the birth of Jesus Christ, and a study of this would reveal that
Christmas in our day is a collection of traditions and practices taken from many cultures and nations.

The date of December 25th comes from Rome and was a celebration of the Italic god, Saturn, and the rebirth of the sun god.

This was done long before the birth of Jesus.

It was noted by the pre-Christian Romans and other pagans, that daylight began to increase after December 22nd, when they assumed that the sun god died.

These ancients believed that the sun god rose from the dead three days later as the new-born and venerable sun.

Thus, they figured that to be the reason for increasing daylight.

This was a cause for much wild excitement and celebration. Gift giving and merriment filled the temples of ancient Rome, as sacred priests of Saturn, called dendrophori, carried wreaths of evergreen boughs in procession.

In Germany, the evergreen tree was used in worship and celebration of the yule god, also in observance of the resurrected sun god.

The evergreen tree was a symbol of the essence of life and was regarded as a phallic symbol in fertility worship.

Witches and other pagans regarded the red holly as a symbol of the menstrual blood of the queen of heaven, also known as Diana.

The holly wood was used by witches to make wands.

The white berries of mistletoe were believed by pagans to represent droplets of the semen of the sun god.

Both holly and mistletoe were hung in doorways of temples and homes to invoke powers of fertility in those who stood beneath and kissed, causing the spirits of the god and goddess to enter them.

These customs transcended the borders of Rome and Germany to the far reaches of the known world.

The question now arises: How did all of these customs find their way into contemporary Christianity, ranging from Catholicism to Protestantism to fundamentalist churches?

The word "Christmas"itself reveals who married paganism to Christianity.

The word "Christmas" is a combination of the words "Christ" and "Mass.

The word "Mass" means death and was coined originally by the Roman Catholic Church, and belongs exclusively to the church of Rome.

The ritual of the Mass involves the death of Christ, and the distribution of the "Host", a word taken from the Latin word "hostiall" meaning victim!

In short, Christmas is strictly a Roman Catholic word.

A simple study of the tactics of the Romish Church reveals that in every case, the church absorbed the customs, traditions and general paganism of every tribe, culture and nation in their efforts to increase the number of people under their control.

In short, the Romish church told all of these pagan cultures, "Bring your gods, goddesses, rituals and rites, and we will assign Christian sounding titles and names to them.

When Martin Luther started the reformation on October 31st, 1517, and other reformers followed his lead, all of them took with them the paganism that was so firmly imbedded in Rome.

These reformers left Christmas intact.

In England, as the authorized Bible became available to the common people by the decree of King James the II in 1611, people began to discover the pagan roots of Christmas, which are clearly revealed in Scripture.

The Puritans in England, and later in Massachusetts Colony, outlawed this holiday as witchcraft.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, when other Bible versions began to appear, there was a revival of the celebration of Christmas.

We are now seeing ever-increasing celebrating of Christmas or Yule, its true name, as we draw closer to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ!

In both witchcraft circles and contemporary Christian churches, the same things are going on.

As the Bible clearly states in Jeremiah 10:2-4, "Thus saith the Lord, learn not the way of the heathen; and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven. For the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain. For one cutteth a tree out of the forest. The work of the hands of the workman with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold. They fasten it with nails and with hammers that it move not."

So, what is wrong with Christmas?

1. To say that Jesus was born on December 25th is a lie! The true date is sometime in September according to the Scriptures.

2. Trees, wreaths, holly, mistletoe and the like are strictly forbidden as pagan and heathen! To say that these are Christian or that they can be made Christian is a lie!

3. The Lord never spoke of commemorating his birth but rather commanded us to remember the sacrifice of His suffering and death, which purchased our salvation.

Think about it! Can we worship and honor God by involving ourselves with customs and traditions, which God Himself forbade as idolatry? Can we convince God to somehow "Christianize" these customs and the whole pretense and lie of Christmas, so we can enjoy ourselves? Can we obey through disobedience?

So what is right about Christmas? 1. Nothing!
For more information and documentation contact:

Last Trumpet Ministries International
PO Box 806
Beaver Dam, WI 53916

who don't understand that when William F. Buckley proclaimed that racists, bigots and anti-Semites had no place in the Conservative Movement or the Republican Party, it was to try to remove the "stain" put there during the 50's and 60's.

Oh, one other little thing, nu.

If you are implying, as many liberals try to do, that conservatives were responsible for the sins against blacks, you'd best stop listening to those who keep impugning us that way.

The democrats held the South for many many years, the democrats were behind the KKK and other assaults against blacks.

(from this link Klan members sought the return of home rule to white Democrats, and they utilized violent terrorism to intimidate black freedmen and their white Republican supporters.)

Liberal southern democrats voted against the Civil Rights Act, e.g. Al Gore's father, the senator from TN then, who was one of the nay votes.

I'm just a tad weary of hearing this libel against conservatives/Republicans.

So you think (and I use that in the loosest sense of the word) that non-Christians shouldn't celebrate or have anything to do with Christmas?

Leaving your insult aside for the moment, no, they shouldn't. Which won't stop them, nor would I expect it to.

What are they celebrating? All the nonsense? They are free to do whatever they like, and I'm free to point it out. They are hypocrites. Oh well.

You don't like the secularization of Christmas, well I don't either, but I don't let it bother me, I enjoy the spirit of the season.

I enjoy the REAL spirit of the season as well. Not the phony made up aspects of the season which remove Christ from the equation so that all the people who don't believe in him can join in the fun of those who do. They don't want to be left out as long as it doesn't mean anything. That's why they go to any lenghts to secularize it.

And as long as we're going at it you might look at where we got Santa Claus, and why we celebrate Christ's birth on Dec. 25th.

I know all about that. And have already suggested real Christians move the holiday to a different time and leave the empty shell to the pagans.

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