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Atheist Penelope

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JReynolds:
Christmas as it is celebrated in the U.S, Britain and countries heavily influenced by those countries is largely a 19th century invention, as is discussed in the Pulitzer-Prize nominated book The Battle for Christmas.

From the Publisher's Weekly blurb that appears on Amazon:

--- Quote ---Christmas in America hasn't always been the benevolent, family-centered holiday we idealize. The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony so feared the day's association with pagan winter solstice revels, replete with public drunkenness, licentiousness and violence, that they banned Christmas celebrations. In this ever-surprising work, Nissenbaum (Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America), a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, conducts a vivid historical tour of the holiday's social evolution. Nissenbaum maintains that not until the 1820s in New York City, among the mercantile Episcopalian Knickerbockers, was Christmas as we know it celebrated. Before Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore ("A Visit from St. Nicholas") popularized the genteel version, he explains, the holiday was more of a raucous festival and included demands for tribute from the wealthy by roaming bands of lower-class extortionists. Peppering his insights with analysis of period literature, art and journalism, Nissenbaum constructs his theory. Taming Christmas, he contends, was a way to contain the chaos of social dislocation in a developing consumer-capitalist culture. Later, under the influence of Unitarian writers, the Christmas season became a living object lesson in familial stability and charity, centering on the ideals of bourgeois childhood. From colonial New England, through 18th- and 19th-century New York's and Philadelphia's urban Yuletide contributions, to Christmas traditions in the antebellum South, Nissenbaum's excursion is fascinating, and will startle even those who thought they knew all there was to know about Christmas.

--- End quote ---

There's a 190-year-old tradition of spending and consumerism at Christmastime-- a tradition that has only the weakest links to the New Testament nativity story. Spend, spend, spend, citizen!

Tyler:
Well, duh.

Ceiling Cat:
There's also the element of social pressure in Christmas too...no matter what religion you are, if you live in the West it won't get out of your face. A lot of small businesses rely on the Christmas rush to push them through the next year. People expect you to buy presents, there are the Christmas songs on the radio, the invitations to Christmas parties...Plus, Christmas dinner is just so, so good  :-P
This thread went off topic pretty quickly.

Is it cold in here?:
The phrase for Pennelope is "passionate rationalist".

It was the mention of ghosts, not God, that started the argument, which she told Dora was an "argument about metaphysics" rather than an argument about religion.

By Pen-elope standards she was pretty calm and controlled about the whole thing. We've seen her hyperventilate, after all, in a different context. And she didn't try to convert Wil, though who knows where the conversation would have gone if the bear hadn't interrupted it.

harniq:
I'm going back to the first post because I felt I had to add something to it.

I'm a believer. I don't know what exactly I believe in but through observation of the world and interpretation of the facts of every given day I realised that most of the stuff that's happening is nigh to impossible without some form of god or higher power. It's very hard to explain this to people. It's even harder to explain this to atheists.

When I discuss religion, faith and related stuff with a christian, jew, muslim, buddhist or any religious person for that matter, it's entirely possible to talk about the differences in our believes, trying to give new insights to eachother and generally just laidback talk about god.

When discussing religion with an atheist it quickly turns into a fierce battle. Atheists generally reject all my reasoning and insights with a simple: "there is no god, period". That's the answer to all my important believes. Most of the time they want to convert ME into their perfect faith of atheism. It's something I come across every time I give a slight hint to people around me about me believing. It's very annoying. Even more annoying is the fact that atheists usually can't explain the reasoning behind their atheism. I can perfectly explain the reasons for a god to exist without a shred of doubt. Them just rejecting my arguments without counterarguments is not productive and does not constitute a decent discussion.

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