Home sweet home

I got back to my home in Kentwood about 1 p.m. today. I've still got work to do, but tonight we're going to my husband's departmental holiday party. I'd say "Christmas" but after the week I've had, I prefer to say "holiday." Conservative Christians truly do help me understand why Gandhi said he had no problem with Christ, but Christ's followers were another matter entirely. My cousin Walt is ranting about how all the liberals and atheists are trying to take the Christ out of Christmas, so I stole a segment from Austin Cline about how they seemed never to mind that the Mass was already taken out of Christmas. You won't see Fundamentalist Protestants doing anything that even remotely resembles Catholic practice.

The Christmas cards are trickling in, most of them with a heavily religious theme. Is it time to drag out the "Jesus: Liberal Jew" cards to send? Or the Festivus cards? Or the ones where the Republican families have no gifts under the tree? Don't I wish. As my colleague at school told me, as atheists, he and I would be persecuted if we put a symbol of atheism on our office doors (he knows of a professor who suffered a great deal of persecution for publicly "outing" himself as an atheist), yet our co-worker down the hall, who has a ton of religious crap on her door is considered such a sainted person. (Yet I've heard her saying things that struck me as incredibly mean-spirited and intolerant about poor people.)

Oh, how I would love to ask, "Several books of the Bible seem to contradict each other in certain ways. If God inspired each of the writers to put down His thoughts, did God change his mind? Forget? Does he have Alzheimer's?" I can imagine God being asked about this and saying, "Oops! My bad! Just having one of those senior moments!"

I'd also like to ask them how the original story of Adam and Eve was written since there were no books, pencils, or even the technology of writing, if Adam and Eve were the first two people. Did the story keep getting passed down orally until someone developed a way to write it down? Gee, every time I ever played "Gossip" or "Telephone" it was hilarious how quickly the message became adulterated and changed from the original. And since humans have developed about 10,000 religions in 10,000 years, with over 1,000 different deities, how do they know they happen to have the "right" one? Hasn't it occurred to them that they have the religion they have simply because they were born and brought up in a specific place?

And I am REALLY tired of this crap about the USA being a "Christian nation" founded by "Christians." Where were these folks during their American history classes? Of course, the way the religious right censors textbooks (and when the truth is revealed, it's decried as "revisionist history"), who knows what the ultimate story will be if the Fundamentalists ever get their nasty claws on the educational system. Oh, I forget. They have had their nasty claws on the educational system for a couple of hundred years. I am not as old as a dinosaur (yet), but within my elementary schooling, I was REQUIRED to pray before we ate lunch. Columbus was portrayed as a hero who "discovered" America in my textbooks. It was grad school before I got the truth on that one.

Guess I'd better get ready for the party. Sigh. I'd rather stay home, but we have to put in an appearance.