Don't Take Theological Advice From Me

Our morning newspaper allows reader comments about its various stories in the online edition. These comments provide entertaining reading, assuming you read them with the understanding that many are written by imbeciles. The nuttiest among the commenters practice a kind of seven degrees of separation from illegal immigration. Give them any subject and they can tie it to illegal immigration in a couple of steps. The reason I mention this is that the other day our paper ran a story about the various holiday traditions that are celebrated this time of year, including Kwanzaa. One of our resident geniuses pointed out that Kwanzaa isn't a real holiday because some guy made it up. This unleashed a chorus of knuckleheads howling in agreement with him. The gist of their comments was, Christmas real, Kwanzaa bogus. Here's a flash. All holidays are made up by someone, some more recently than others, but all are of human creation. If anyone thinks that Jesus was the only supposed deity born on December 25th they need to do a little reading. In fact, he isn't even the only one reputed to have been born to a virgin, visited by Magi, crucified, died, rose from the dead or ascended into heaven. Nor is he the first to allegedly provide a path to eternal salvation. These are familiar religious motifs. The pagans were going along fat, dumb and happy, when the Christians showed up and ruined their party and stole their holiday. That's how it works. Personally, I get annoyed when I hear people pissing and moaning about the true meaning of Christmas, because its true meaning sort of depends on who you ask. If you are a serious Christian then you have a totally different real meaning that I do. In our family we get together, eat a lot and show our love and affection for one another by buying stuff. Okay, so it works better than it sounds. Seriously religious people get together, eat too much, maybe exchange more modest loot and reflect on how lucky they are that Jesus was born. So whether people celebrate traditional observances like Christmas or Hanukkah, or lesser known ones like Kwanzaa, or even Festivus, I'm okay with however they do it so long as they don't hassle me about what I'm doing. I would caution you not to spend too much though. Unless you really want to. . Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky