Christmas and Religion

 

It’s Christmas time again. Everyone is so excited and want to celebrate peace as the holiday suggests.

But most Christmas celebrators are rushing around to malls spending money on things nobody needs or wants just to keep the big box  corporations’ profits coming in to fill the pockets of the CEOs. Or to show off to gift recipients that they have lots of money to spend.

The Christians have started their frenzied run-up to their holiday.  The nativity scenes are in yards, but for the most part, not on public lands, much to the Christians dismay.

But yet, you see they think that because they are so vocal in their hatred of other religions that they should be able to have the ‘freedom’ to impose their beliefs on the world in front of courthouses and other public spaces.

They also think that members of other religions need to be killed. That seems strange, doesn’t it, when Christianity, just like all other religions teach that killing is wrong, no matter what. 

There are well over 20 major world religions that celebrate a holiday this time of year, usually honoring the changing of the season and Christianity is one of them. Why they insist their way is the only and best one, I will never understand. 

And even if they do, why must they force it on others, even to the point of advocating death to the believers of other major religions.

Even now, radical Christian extremists are killing Muslims in the streets and sidewalks of the US.  And worse yet, the leaders of the Republican party are running on platforms that include blasting the countries who have Muslim populations off the face of the earth.  

Do we study the Crusades and the reason for the killing that happened during them in the name of Christianity? 

How about the Spanish Inquisition and the mass murder involved?

Are we really a country who thinks this way? I know we were when adolescents had a minor uprising during puritan times and religion resulted in the killing of women, a few men and some dogs who were considered witches.

Again, we saw it in Germany when Hitler ordered Jews, Romani people, Gays, and disabled people to be put in camps and exterminated.  And over 6 million people were killed.

During WWII, the Japanese were packed off to internment camps  because they were thought to be a danger to this country. Really?

And here we are again. Threatening people with death because of their religion. Have we learned nothing or are we simply blindly following so called leaders who yell the loudest? 

Makes ya Wonder

I was born in October1941 and when Pearl Harbor was bombed, I obviously was not far from my mother. She tells me she was at her mother in law's house for dinner when they got the news. So, I don’t remember much of the war.  My uncle went to the New Hebrides, but I only remember his coming home with a pea coat for his sister, my mother.  My dad worked in the defense industry and his parents only had one child - my father, so my dad did not fight, nor did his father, my grandfather.  

Until  I became self aware, I lived a wonderful life being a free range kid in a small town, an ideal childhood and school experience all through the 50s until high school was over for me in 1959. I set off for Michigan State University, my first visit to a place where some of the people were different from the all white protestants who lived in my small town of Spring Lake, Michigan.

Mygod, there were people of different colors, people who wore strange beanies on their heads, had beards and wore their hair funny.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that these folks were treated differently whether they wanted to be or not. I learned what prejudice was. 

I could never figure out prejudice except it was used by large patriarchal institutions to gain and keep power and control.  If the population was given someone to hate, that population was easy to control and manipulate. Don't think so? Read "1984" and "Animal Farm." Or read history. See what Hitler did. See what organized religion has done from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the present. See what has happened to the public educational system with the dumbing down of students, so many of whom are drugged daily so they behave. Scary isn't it?

For reasons I still don’t know, I had problems with that. And at that moment, at 17 years old, social activism became a major cause in my life.

It started with me realizing that unfairness was no way to run a university, let alone a country or a world. I participated in varying acts of civil disobedience as I grew into my new role as a social activist.  I participated in sit ins, demonstrations, marches and even published my own alternative newspaper and distributed it off campus.

Of all the things I learned through the 60s and beyond, I found useful later in life after I became disabled, these were just lessons that I could use to still change things. 

And I do.