To what degree does the influence of christmas make an atheist grumpy?

I think I have stumbled across a phenomena I never seriously encountered before coming to this site.

Whats the angle?

Does christmas make the average atheist into a grump?

 

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Yes. It brings every jesus freak out into the open. Every song on the radio reinforces the jesus myth. It's like a party for ignorance and blind robotic conditioning.

Other than that. No. I like the pretty lights and the smell of a fresh douglas fir.

 

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M*W: No, Christmas does not have anything to do with being a "grump." Perhaps a lot of what Christmas does to Atheists has to do with physical pain. Perhaps a lot of what atheists have to bear is stupidity with Christians. We don't want to cause you pain. We don't want to make your lives harder. We don't want to aggravate your senses. We just want to have fun. There are some of us who hurt from physican injuries. There are those of us who have suffered the loss of a loved one. There are those of us who have families to care for at Christmas. There are those of us who have no family. Even so, we love humanity. We care for the sick and the infirm. we help as best we can, and we share our lives with those less fortunate. Christmas is just a day on our calendar. It has no meaning to us. Still, we care for each other, and we love one another. That is our promise as atheists. we care about humankind, all of humankind. We would be happy if everyone believed as we do, but we know that is a personal and individual process. We all wish happiness for the world, and we are all avid lovers of humanity. Who needs a god when there are atheists? There is no god who could be greater than human beings. I cannot speak for all atheists, but I can speak for myself. Happy Holidays to you all, whatever your religion, and happy atheism to everyone else who has become wisened.

~ Medicine*Woman

 

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does that mean that theists should practice higher levels of tolerance for the brash and unwarranted actions of atheists over the christmas period?

Does this begin at a particular time during december?
How can one determine when the danger period is over?

 

There is no danger period. It's a personal thing. We still put on a civil face in public. Those of us who do get grumpy. As MW pointed out, many of us do not. No theist has ever been in danger from an atheist. It's obvoiusly the other way around.

 

call me over sensative but i can never adopt a mood of relaxed safety within the proximity of grumpiness

 

*cough*

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1121/p09s01-coop.html

 

Oops.

 

Just so you know, the CSMONITOR is not an unbiased source and that was not the reason those fine upstanding gents did what they did.

 

Isn't it more the theist that gets grumpy at christmas? It's always them in the media complaining that we aren't celebrating the religious aspect of christmas (I never knew there was one), and bemoan that we have started a war on christmas?

Trying to paint the atheist as a scrooge is an old tactic, and part of the PR problem the atheist has, but it's far from accurate.

 

Grrrr... fuck xmas. Grrr....

Just trying to help...

 

Russia:
Even before the end of the civil war and the establishment of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church came under persecution of the secular Communist government. The Soviet government stood on a platform of militant atheism, viewing the church as a "counterrevolutionary" organization and an independent voice with a great influence in society. While the Soviet Union officially claimed religious toleration, in practice the government discouraged organized religion and did everything possible to remove religious influence from Soviet society.

Thousands of churches and monasteries were taken over by the government and either destroyed or used as warehouses, recreation centers, "museums of atheism", or even GULAGs. To build a new church was impossible. The sixth sector of the OGPU, led by Eugene Tuchkov, began aggressively arresting and executing bishops, priests, and devout worshippers, such as Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd in 1922 for refusing to accede to the demand to hand in church valuables (including sacred relics. Many thousands of victims of persecution became recognized in a special canon of saints known as the "new martyrs and confessors of Russia".

Practising Orthodox Christians were restricted from prominent careers and membership in communist organizations (the party, the Komsomol). Anti-religious propaganda was openly sponsored and encouraged by the government, which the Church was not given an opportunity to publicly respond to. The government youth organization, the Komsomol, encouraged its members to vandalize Orthodox Churches and harrass worshippers. Seminaries were closed down, and the church was restricted from using the press
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orthodox_Church


China:
From 1959 through the late 1970s, Chinese authorities methodically sought to destroy most aspects of Tibetan Buddhism. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, the Party intended to eradicate religious belief and practice in Tibet and committed acts of genocide. Over six thousand monasteries and temples were destroyed, dismantling the entire monastic system of Tibet. Tens of thousands of monks and nuns were executed, sent to concentration camps or sent back to their villages. All religious activity was banned.

"This Communist Chinese view was all-pervasive. In Mao Zedong's own words, "... but of course, religion is poison. It has two great defects: It undermines the race ...(and) retards the progress of the country. Tibet and Mongolia have both been poisoned by it.""

"By the middle of the 1950s, the Chinese authorities realised that religion was the principal obstacle to their control of Tibet. Therefore, from the beginning of 1956, a so-called "Democratic Reform" was carried out, first in Kham and Amdo, and later (in 1959) in Central Tibet. Monasteries, temples, and cultural centres were systematically looted of all articles of value and then dismantled."
http://www.tibet.com/WhitePaper/white7.html


Cambodia:
" Between 1975 and early 1979, Pol Pot and Leng Sary led the Khmer Rouge – the Communist government of Cambodia. Their government turned Cambodia, which it called Democratic Kampuchea, into the “killing fields.” The Khmer Rouge emptied all cities and towns, sending the entire urban population to the country side to farm the land and be “re-educated.” They banned all institutions, including stores, banks, hospitals, schools, religion, and the family.

Dissenters were brutally executed. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, and just about anybody with an education were killed. Hundreds of thousands starved or died of disease. During a four year period, more than 2 million people died; almost one third the 1975 population of Cambodia."
http://www.globalsolutions.org/programs/law_justice/faqs/cambodia_factsheet.html


Germany:
Hitler focused his propaganda against the Versailles Treaty, the "November criminals," the Marxists and the visible, internal enemy No. 1, the "Jew," who was responsible for all Germany's domestic problems. In the twenty-five-point programme of the NSDAP announced on 24 February 1920, the exclusion of the Jews from the Volk community, the myth of Aryan race supremacy and extreme nationalism were combined with "socialistic" ideas of profit-sharing and nationalization inspired by ideologues like Gottfried Feder. Hitler's first written utterance on political questions dating from this period emphasized that what he called "the anti-Semitism of reason" must lead "to the systematic combating and elimination of Jewish privileges. Its ultimate goal must implacably be the total removal of the Jews."
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitler.html

The emergence of eugenics as an ‘applied science’ culminated in the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Society was to be cleaned of all alien contamination, hence the German phrase ‘Rassenhygiene’ meaning ‘racial hygiene’. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with hereditary diseases were deprived of their human rights, herded into concentration camps, used for scientific experimentation and murdered. And the scientists who provided the scientific backing were respected university professors or researchers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS), the predecessor of the Max Planck Society. Many of them remained in renowned positions even after 1945, influential enough to delay an unbiased historical confrontation.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1084095


Tally:
Chinese Communists -> 65 million dead, 40 year period - Economic ideology, not religion
Cambodian Commies -> 2 million dead, 5 year period - Economic ideology, not religion
Soviet (Russian)Commies ->20 mill dead, 50 year period -Economic ideology, not religion
Germany ->60 mill dead -- 8 years- racism, imperialism, not religion.

 

It would be interesting to see whether christmas time exacerbated the number of atrocities performed by stalin, hitler, pol pot and mao

BTW - i think medicine woman just posted her largest string of responses in history on the religious thread - on christmas day too - I think she is in a bad mood (even though I told her several times I am actually not a christian I don't think it clicked)

 

I've noticed a few grumpy Atheists or, at the very least, strict-secularist every year. However, other Atheists, including the very "militant" Daniel Dennett, love Christmas. I guess it's hard to not love it, though, when one looks like St. Nick...

 

if you took the time to check, you would find she is one of the biggest contributers to sciforums, with some of the most intelligent and thought provoking posts, you however are the complete opposite, so I can understand why she doesn't post here so often now. she doesn't suffer fools gladly, and hell, there are quite a few like you on sciforums of late.

 

its christmas

and you sound grumpy

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(BTW - I have never even read the bible in its entirety -lol)

 

me grumpy no, just stating the facts as I see them.

I never read the easops fables in it's entirety either whats the relevence.

 

Small potatoes. Why not do the opposite, (and make sure you start with the head honcho - from what the good ol' book says he killed everyone).

As for christmas.. it's neither here nor there. It's an excuse for a week off and a lot of alcohol consumption. So some silly little christians don't even know the origins of christmas and pretend to themselves that it has anything whatsoever to do with jesus. Good luck to them.

 

Boy do you sound grumpy!

Merry Christmas! Ho Ho Ho and all that!

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Not really, no.

The first part was a response to your earlier statements, the latter part was me saying I like alcohol and I think christians are idiots. No grumpiness there whatsoever. Still, I do value the time you took to tell me what mood I'm in. I'll jot it in my diary.

"Merry" never has the same ring to it unless you're drunk. Trust me when I say I'm working on it

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