GAP,INC Advertisement jingle song.
"The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin."
It is interesting that both The Mail and The Telegraph have featured articles on this recently, given the rise in popularity of "the war on Christmas" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_controversy), a seemingly orchestrated, politically correct move to reduce the religious aspect of a tradition that does not sit well with the current political climate. As if the removal of Christ from a "Christmas" card was tantamount to Nazism? It's indeed a laudable claim. Let's be honest about it though, "Family Trees" or "Holiday Tree" and "Festive Decorations" or whatever the new, less offensive Christ-less branding is in fashion are about as obviously castrated as a white skinhead attending a "Heathen Festival" meeting. But is the movement to pull a more homogenised and comfortable costume around an unavoidable elephant really any more honest than the move to conserve and feed it?
I would stand by Sam Harris, author of the books The End of Faith and Letters To A Christian Nation. His work is a bitter pill for complacency and neutrality on the matter.
The unfortunate truth is that one is unable to speak or write publicly about religion and its inherent dangers in these times without being classed as "intolerant" and cast out to live amongst the infidels in the desert. Sam Harris is brave enough to admit that "To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it."
It's sad then I have come to learn that if I am to stand on the side of those who would like to see Christmas destroyed, buried and forgotten for all time, then I must don an iron cross and goosestep back into line . . .
"Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance."
"Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors"
Sam Harris, 2004.
I agree with him explicitly that "Spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational." That "Mysticism, to be viable, requires explicit instructions, which need suffer no more ambiguity or artifice in their exposition than we find in a manual for operating a lawn mower."
The term "pagan" is a Christian adaptation of the "gentile" of Judaism. "Pagan" derived from the Latin meaning "land-dweller" or "rural, rustic, of the country" which has been until recent times a word used to deride "un-believers" by adherents of monotheistic religions (such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Now we can alter that word to include the term "Nazi" in the dictionary definition, according to the Christian right-wing press.
I don't know what you'll be doing this Christmas but if you want to come over to mine, we can sit by the "holiday tree" and share a plate of swastika cookies?
The Sam Harris Website
The Daily Mail article
The Daily Telegraph article
As a small update I have just been reminded that the Finnish Jule tart or "joulutorttu" that I eat so much of is actually swastika shaped . . .
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