i had a pretty uneventful christmas. mostly it was because we didn’t go to chicago, and it was just the four of us plus grandma goldie (and turbo and seefa, if you count cats). but i was thinking about how i used to believe, like most christians do, that the true meaning of christmas is the birth of jesus. i mean, that’s why the holiday was founded in the first place. then capitalism came and shat on it quite extensively. but at least the one thing that christmas is about, regardless of your belief, is that it’s a time to be with your friends and family. that’s what i think the most important part is now. don’t get me wrong, jesus. you were a pretty cool dude, by nearly all accounts, but i compare you to gandhi or mother teresa or some other famous historical pacifist, and we don’t exactly have a day celebrating the births of either of those two. and i’m just not such a huge fan of your dad. kinda strict. due to the sporadic, stream-of-consciousness nature of this post (and nearly all of my other ones) i will take it right now to say that i don’t intend to make anybody feel uncomfortable for believing or not believing a certain set of beliefs, or to convert anybody to anything. i’m just gonna ramble on a little bit about what i think.
oh and i remembered what else i was going to say. samantha and i were expressing disinterest in going to church and poking a bit of fun at it, and my grandma didn’t like that so much. she told us not to criticize religion, just on principle. naturally, being good grandkids, we didn’t do it any more in front of her. but why should religion by default be free from any logical inspection, criticism, or questioning? people tend to do that with everything else. anyone who believes a certain religion should be able to tell someone their reasons why, or otherwise they’ll fail to convince others that they really believe it in the first place.
that said, i know what you’re thinking now. my response is: i don’t care about capitalization. it’s completely unnecessary, especially for a low-quality stream-of-consciousness blog post. anyway. what was i talking about?
yeah. i don’t really care what you believe as long as you acknowledge that it’s a belief and not a fundamental truth of the world or anything like that. that’s when you get people imposing their beliefs, whether it’s your grandma persuading you to go to church or waging religious wars on people of other cultures. if you realize that and regarding christmas, i don’t care what your particular religious or non-religious opinions are about it. i just hope that you took time to spend with family and friends. so happy holidays. i’d like to celebrate festivus. now that christmas has no religious meaning for me anymore, i guess i need a holiday for the “rest of us.” and by anymore, i don’t know when i really kinda gave the whole thing up… maybe shortly after freshman year of high school, albeit subconsciously. consciously by college, when jeremy lent me his copy of the god delusion and letter to a christian nation. though i don’t really believe in an ultimate objective reality or truth at all, i thought they were both much more convincing than the bible. interestingly enough, i got my dad the latter book as a gift this christmas. talk about irony! i realize i drop these weird statements halfway through these posts like “well, because i don’t believe in an objective reality…” and yeah, i might get around to elaborating on them at some point, whether on this post or another or maybe in a conversation in real life. but don’t count on it… i’m trying to stay on topic. it’s hard to write a stream-of-consciousness when you’re trying to be self-aware. sorry.
anyway, you get the evangelical preachers being jackasses on one side, and you get jackass atheists like richard dawkins on the other side. (richard dawkins is a really smart dude, but he’s just so fervent of an athiest that his rhetoric for being such is just so similar to that of evangelical preachers that it doesn’t really matter). then you’ve got something like 78 percent of america identifying as christian, and most of the people i know aren’t jackasses about whatever their belief system is. anyway, i really don’t like it when people of a certain religion call atheists or agnostics “non-belivers.” we’re just non-believers with respect to your god/belief system, to restate a common argument. christians don’t believe that the gods of the ancient greeks are really gods; and so they’re atheists with respect to the ancient greek religion. this goes on and on with each faith being atheists with respect to most other faiths (i say most, because buddhism isn’t exclusive to other faiths. maybe some other eastern religions are, too). so i feel that it all gets down to cultural relativism at some point. once you realize how different the world’s cultures are and learn a little bit about why they’re different, you get a sense that no one system, culture, whatever, is inherently right or wrong. of course, it’s all much more complicated. different cultures evolved under different contexts-that’s all that i feel like i can go into detail here before i feel like i’ll have to defend these claims with a well-thought argument or thousand-page novel. that and the words “anthropology class”.
but wait. maybe some people, like in poorer countries and societies, need religion to get them through the day, to give them more of a positive outlook. it seems kind of “developed world educated middle class” to reject the idea of a god, especially because god/faith doesn’t play much of a role in developed-world-educated-middle-class society. which is why it’s a bit weird for me when christmas rolls around and people are talking about going to church, and that has culminated in this really exhaustive, incohesive ramble on tumblr. too postmodern. but then there’s also the idea of picking a faith and sticking with it-something i feel like many americans (mostly moderate-liberal christians, i guess) have done in a thought process that i would suppose to be along the lines of “well, it doesn’t matter what religion to be, just believe in something.” that would, i guess, lead to many people doing what works for them, keeping on with the religions that they were raised in. i have absolutely no problem with this at all. so, jackass atheists, don’t give me any of this “we have to transcend every aspect of religion and rise up to a newer level of understanding.” similarly, don’t ever tell me that i have to go to church. it won’t do anything for me, because i’ve definitely made up my mind for a while. (it could always change, you never know!) you’d be telling me to do something based on your own beliefs, to which don’t apply to me.
i just hope that whatever their beliefs, people realize that they all stem from certain cultural context/s of which there are a huge variety, none of which is superior to any other. and yes… atheism is another belief, epistemology, whatever you call it. i love the word “epistemology.” it may be one of my favorites. also, going back to the part where i talked about “no objective reality,” a parallel to that might be “no single force governing our universe.” it seems that every day or week or whatever i hear more about the concept of emergence, the interactions of many parts of a system to produce a complexity far greater than the sum of the interactions of the individual parts. this is so, so cool. way cooler than the word “epistemology.” anyway. holism, bitches.
i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to make this so long. my opportunity cost is very low because it’s winter break and i’m sick. i just meant to maybe say a few things about why i don’t believe in god and that we should strive to be more like jesus because he’s a pacifist like gandhi or martin luther king, not because he’s the ticket to heaven or something. and i gotta respect the religious people who acknowledge the struggles and complexities of their faiths-i’m somehow thinking of the lyrics to “casimir pulaski day” and how it’s a totally different ball game than the “you gotta shut up and stop questioning and just sit down and believe in god/jesus/the holy spirit already!!!” of some nastier sects. (the holy spirit was something i never understood anyway. what a copout! it’s like whenever i lose my bus pass, i could just blame the holy spirit for snatching it from my pocket or something!) i was also gonna say, “i wonder what wiccans do during christmas” and speculate on that for a bit but it seems like i want to be done typing now. i’ll wrap this up. more important than faith itself is the reason for believing (or not doing so). while my mom and grandma were at church attending the same service that they put on every year, samantha and i were sitting on our living room couch and talking about why we were there instead of at church. that discussion felt like it made so much more sense than any service i’ve ever attended.
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