Over and over again, this is an issue with Fox-loving conservatives: if you disagree with them, you're anti-American. They claim that they are the true lovers of freedom and the Constitution, but of all the people out there, they are some of the farthest from either. They have been fed lie after lie by a particular group of overpaid pundits and have been led to believe that the Founding Fathers were evangelical Christians who based the Bill of Rights on the Ten Commandments and that America is the new holy land, decreed by God himself. All of which is completely ridiculous and unfounded. They literally need only pick up the works of the Founding Fathers to understand that, but god forbid we learn to read and think for ourselves.
Conservative Christians, in particular, have this insatiable desire to control the population. Oh, they have the right to believe and worship as they choose, but you don't. I saw a Facebook post by an ex-teacher of mine who commented that Christmas and Easter had been removed from the school calendar that teachers receive; of course, every comment after that was about the supposed "war on Christmas," much to my chagrin. I was particularly surprised because he is the teacher who taught us about the Constitution and he did not teach it from a conservative point of view. This guy made us watch the entire PBS series "Eyes on the Prize," had a POW-MIA flag in his room, and once put on judges' robes and a Nixon mask and ran through the halls. Maybe some people just get more conservative as they get older. Anyway (back to the point), the removal of Christian holidays is not an act of aggression toward Christians UNLESS Christian holidays are the only ones excluded, which of course, they're not.
The most perplexing thing about this Christmas business is that Christians are offended by "happy holidays" and holiday displays. I shouldn't be offended when a person says "Merry Christmas" (and I'm not, ever), but they are horribly offended if someone says anything but "Merry Christmas" to them. If you make a holiday display instead of a Christmas display, then you are attacking Christmas. How ridiculous. They would be just as offended if they had to look at displays for Muslim holidays (if you can make a display for one; I wouldn't know, I've never seen one). Of course, a menorah is okay because they don't want to look completely bigoted. Jews are just unsaved Christians, dontcha know? Attacking only one religion makes it okay, I guess.
Which brings me to my next point: all Muslim people are not terrorists. In fact, most Muslim people are not terrorists. In every online article I see about Islamic people, there is post after post stating, "if Muslims aren't terrorists, then why don't they speak out against the extremists?" (my version edited, of course...I can't simulate the poor language skills seen in posts like these...that doesn't make me elitist, it just means that I am disappointed with the complete disregard our nation has for education). My response to this is simple: "do you Christians stand up and publicly speak out against Christian extremists?" No one ever answers me directly. I always get some comment about how that is completely unrelated, which it's not. At all. There are Christian extremists in our country. Some live in compounds, some practice polygamy and marry off their young teenage daughters to old men, and some look like normal churches, but they preach hate and violence with all the fervor of the most devout Taliban leader. They are extremists and they're message is quickly becoming mainstream, at least within the evangelical movement.
There are many who, in fact, want to create a Christian Taliban, or to be less incendiary, a theocracy, where the ultra conservative Christians rule over the rest of us sinners with an iron fist. "Jesus Camp," a popular and well made documentary about a group of Pentecostals, brought this to light while following children's pastor Becky Fisher. Fisher said that we should be teaching our children to be as radical as the Muslim extremists. Our children should be willing to die for Christ as the Muslim children (I'm not convinced, but it's what she said) are for Muhammad. She also said that we should be indoctrinating our children...the flip side being that it is not okay for Muslim extremists to indoctrinate their children because they're wrong and the Christians are right. All fundamentalists believe that they are right and it always astounds me that they cannot understand this. Most Christians I know also don't understand that they are Christian because they were born into Christian households. Geographic location has more to do with a person's beliefs than the message ever has.
The evangelical movement is another thorn in my side. First of all, I grew up in church and only around Christian people and I never heard the things that I've started hearing in the last 10 years. I had the good fortune of not growing up evangelical; I grew up in a mainline Protestant church. Mainline Protestant churches are typically centered around social justice as opposed to proselytizing and telling people they are going to hell. Starting in the late 1990s, the movement seemed to pick up a great deal of steam, particularly, I think, from Christian rock bands and the concentration that they (with the help of youth pastors) placed on youth. After 9/11, the movement was quickly grasped by the fearful masses, looking for any explanation and comfort that they could find. I don't fault people for that. I do, on the other hand, fault the media and one channel in particular, for using that fear and confusion as a means for profit and political power. In the past 10 years, I have seen us embrace ignorance and hate instead of intelligence and tolerance. Willful ignorance is profitable and the pundits who jumped on the wagon are making obscene amounts of money on the backs of people who are often simple, uneducated, and so completely indoctrinated with the evangelical message that they are too afraid to question anything they hear in church.
On a side note, I don't think the fear of questioning has much to do with hell. I think it has far more to do with the possible reactions of family, friends, and their communities. The prospect of being shunned by most everyone they know keeps them in line, not the fear of going to hell. It can't be the fear of going to hell because they all believe that they've been saved (another concept that I was completely unfamiliar with).
I'll end with something I read in a letter to the editor in a local paper. The writer had expressed frustration with the fact that because he had done something nice, another person assumed that he must be a Christian. Of course, another writer took great offense at his offense. "What's wrong with someone thinking your a Christian?" he asked. Well, that isn't the problem. The problem is that Christians don't seem to think that nonbelievers are capable of kindness, morality, or values (by the way, I hate the words "morals" and "values" with a fiery passion). We don't need a god to teach us right from wrong.
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