just wondering with both events taking place this month of December, Is anybody going to recognize these days.since there are over two million Christians, Christmas is celebrated in song exchange of gifts, movies etc etc. while the winter solstice gets hardly any press.What does Christmas mean to you as an individual, no matter where you may live.I guess there Isn`t many ways to celebrate the solstice. just wondering what my friends on this web sight are thinking.Do you feel forgotten this time of the year? What are you feeling? please consider, thank you.
Subscription Note:
Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.
Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.
Christmas means nothing to me. Nor does being alive. Being alone is a luxury I don't get often enough. Sixty-one years of experiencing stupid human behavior often makes me feel late for my exit. That's without even adding religious lunacy into the mix. I do empathize with apologists who see their hopes for eternity as a reward for being human. That much I will concede.
Forgotten? I celebrate xmas! I love it! It is fun. If you were to see my living room right now, you might think xmas barfed all over it. My favorite thing is putting up my wee xmas village...complete with a small King Kong on one of the buildings and a house one the other side of the train tracks in which I put a red light.
Look around...you will see WAY more santas, elves, snowmen, and the like than crèches. At least in the U.S., xmas is far less about jesus than Santa! Heck, pretty much everyone who celebrates it, puts up a tree. And decorating trees, if the xtain bible is interpreted in a certain way, can be considered a big fat no-no. I would guess that in a few centuries, folks might be surprised to hear that xmas ever had anything to do with a religion.
All it is, really, is a time to get together and enjoy each other.
You cannot take Christ out of Christmas, He is the reason for the season.
Christ is a hijacker. Before he was heard off, it was Yule, Saturnalia, Sol Invictus, etc. Now it's the festival of Visa and Mastercard. People in the Northern Hemisphere need a ceelbration to mark the halfway point through winter. It feels a bit weird having a mid-winter festival in the Southern Hemisphere though. It's about 35C (95F) here today, and we've got Santas, reindeer and fake snow everywhere. Not much sign of Jesus, however.
"You cannot take Christ out of Christmas, He is the reason for the season."
I know it's a linguistic thing, but in my language "Christmas" has nothing to do with "Christ", the name comes from the Latin word "calendae:, meaning "the first day of the month". Of course we have the other name - the birth of Christ, but almost no one uses it. Aren't we lucky! :D When I think back of my childhood, I had never in my life related the celebration with him. It was only when I grew up that I relalized it was supposed to be his birthday which christians celebrated.
@ agnostic enlightener
Odd forum name you've chosen there...... you don't seem particularly agnostic nor enlightened..... not as a supporter of Mother Theresa .... (.He maligned the great mother Teresa from the country of India,........ by the by...she was from Albanian....she only inflicted her warped doctrines in India ..) any way.....
.you say...."You cannot take Christ out of Christmas, He is the reason for the season."
I have to ask....just where do you get this idea from.......if you would be so kind.....
just why do you think Jesus had anything to do with what is called Christmas....
hia you know the slogan jesus is the reason for the season came from a religious station called ewtn catholic global network. As far as I know and I`m 61 years old I was celebrating from a very early age.As for when this hemisphere started I really don`t know to be honest with you.You know I really never gave it much thought.christ name is in Christmas, if you look at the commercial aspect of it such as santa claus and exchanging of gifts and the tree and all of that, I really have no answer I am agnostic completely dumbfounded with know coherent explanation.
AE....
"I really have no answer I am agnostic completely dumbfounded with know coherent explanation."
and you've never bothered to find out...never asked the question....in 61 years......just what kind of agnostic are you..??
back in my day we never asked questions, my father use to say that children are to be seen and not heard, I was baptized catholic went to public school received communion and confirmation, the kind of questions you are asking weren`t discussed by religious education nor in my science biology class in public school. I started questioning things about my Christianity when I was in my late 50`s.but I never took the leap to agnostic until recently. the church that I went to never discussed why the birth of jesus was celebrated on December 25th ,, it was something that you never questioned the nuns in religious education.As for my history class we never discussed any thing Christion or religion period.So I grew up ignorant of such things.you have to remember watchman that the mind set was different in the 50`s and 60`s.everybody I knew went to church on sunday it was later on that people started asking questions, especially once the Vietnam war broke out.here in the usa there was dramatic uprisings in the streets of many cities, protest then came madeline O'Hare she went all the way to the supreme court to get pray out of the public school system.she would eventually be murdered.then the pill was introduced then eventually abortion was legal in January of 1973.so the evolution of thought towards the sacred and the secular became a present day realty.today the people are no longer interested in religion as in my growing up experience. you know have upward of at least 25% of the population that call them selves nones.No identity or affiliation with any religion.today with the dawning of the computer we can have dialogue on a whole host of subjects.Parents are a lot different in how they raise there children because the parents came out of the generation of the 60`s and much later.psycholgy was introduced much more medicine are handed out for depressed feelings and anxiety children can have and ask for a therapy session.When I grew up that was unheard of.to come to and end you know Watchman I seen a lot and heard a lot in my life of 61 years what really concerns me is how the kids of today are growing up what traditions will they carry on with them? everything seems to be relativistic , what is good for me may not be good for you.
The reason for the season is the sun's relative position in the northern sky. The return of the sun was celebrated long before Christians decided to make it Christ's birthday! So, that's the real reason for the season; Jesus worship is a latecomer.
I always enjoy reading your comments. Happy winter solstice! :DD
One year my wife and I had a Feast of Alvis party instead of Christmas.
I will celebrate Christmas with my family. They are Christians and take Jesus seriously. Our gathering will not be religious. It will be a nice dinner with good people. I am also not attached to celebrating Solstice either. Just an event that happens yearly. But if all Christians became atheists overnight we should celebrate something, so a winter festival is great! Oh, and Happy Festivus everyone!
To me, Christmas means financial stress, fake conversation, pretending to pray, and spending time with family that I don't particularly care for.
Christmas? OK in small doses. We send out christmas cards, yes even including the much maligned christmas letter, because it's a way to keep in touch with friends and family all over the country and the globe at least once a year. I put up a couple of lighted christmas trees outside and inside, but that's about it for decorating.
Christmas music will be playing in the house and car during December. I still like the traditional christmas carols sung by a choir because I used to sing them in the (Anglican) church choir before my voice broke. Nowadays I enjoy the sound and pay little heed to the words.
We will spend christmas with my religious in-laws, but religion will be limited to a couple of prayers before big meals on christmas eve and day. Might be a bit trickier for me this year, though because the 25th is on a Sunday and the family all go to church.
Being astromomically aware, I mentally note the passing of the equinoxes and solstices, but I've never celebrated one.
The only religious ritual I will see this year will be grace before dinner. We will join hands in a circle. While my deacon brother or his Pastor brother in law burble away with christian grace I say my atheist grace silently :
For the food we are about to eat we thank the farmers, merchants, and cooks.
I never say amen.
you know chimp 3 that who gave the farms the seed in the first place to tend to their fields.and what is an atheist grace, Atheist grace has religious connotations arising from it.Who gave the merchants the wherewithal to have ideas to package the food and the patience you see chimp it is a lot more then just a simple grace being recited we have to look at life itself.I for one have to many unanswered questions coming from a view point of agnosticism it leaves open to many fields of thought.I am leaning to intelligent design.
WTF?
Seeds come from farmers. Some farmers grow seeds for other farmers. You buy seeds at seed stores.
My seeds come from orders I make to seed catalog companies and the seeds I save from particularly successful crops in my garden.
Also, some of the food I will be cook for my family's hysterically wonderful xmas celebration (we sing, we dance, we hoot and holler, we have two hour conversations that are nothing but quotes from movies but it makes perfect sense, we eat, we drink, we love, we are family) came from the garden I grew with the seed I bought or grew.
I hate that xtians think they corner the market on love, family, and celebration.
I can relate to intelligent design. Malaria has several different life stages in the human body and we were working on a vaccine that would protect against all those different life stages. We took short sections of protein ("antigenic determinants") from about a dozen different proteins, then, using genetic technology, we spliced all those different sections together to create one totally new protein molecule that included them all. We then expressed and purified that molecule and used it to immunize animals. That is intelligent design.
it is a human contrive that you used I`m talking about something completely different Alembe what I mean by intelligent design is an explanation how everything works. Not just a few experiments in a lab.A supernatural deity like God if you look at the dna and rna in the cell you will come away amazed.Also how consciousness works.
@ae:
"what I mean by intelligent design is an explanation how everything works. Not just a few experiments in a lab."
If there was an intelligent designer, why did it take billions of years to evolve all the species? A cosmic conjurer should have been able to wave a wand and create it all in a very short time, say around 6 or 7 days. And why have there been so many errors? Look at the fossil record of doomed species and mass extinctions. Look at the compromises and bungles in our own bodies. Why would a god design things like leukemia, muscular dystrophy, even hay fever? Why are our eyes made of jelly instead of toughened plastic? Why does our god-designed skin get cancer if we spend too long under the god-designed sun? DNA/RNA look to me like the results of incremental changes caused by evolution on a billion-year time scale.
It's all a bit too random to support claims of design, intelligent or otherwise.
Algebe are you trying to debate God, God can have morally sufficient reasons for allowing the diseases and illnesses that you cited above.We just can`t conceive of an omnipotent deity.the extinction of species just shows how unique we really are.Made in Gods image.science has no explanation for the cell the amino acids are just right for human life.the proteins I once heard that it is the soul that god put in mankind that feeds the dna rna.the cell the genes are a remarkable factor and can`t as of this moment be explained by atheist.
There is nothing intelligent about intelligent design.
@AE
"Algebe are you trying to debate God"
That would be a very one-sided debate, since I have the advantage of existing. No. I'm trying to debate you. You have a strangely anthropocentric view of existence. You personalize the cosmos as god, and then claim that we are created in god's image. That sounds very arrogant to me.
I'm ceaselessly amazed to learn that I'm related to every living thing that is and ever was on earth. I'm also amazed that my personal DNA is part of an unbroken story of life going back billions of years to the dawn of this planet. That's the image I was created in.
@Algebe I am playing the devils advocate here, since I call myself an agnostic I really don`t know if I can make god into mans image.How do you know if God exist or not?
@AE
"How do you know if God exist or not?"
Do you believe in the existence of Ra, Thor, Baal, Jupiter, Mars, Amaterasu, Odin? If not you're an atheist for all of those gods. Do you have any evidence to put Jehovah, Allah, El or Jesus in a separate class from these other deities? Is there any event in the history of the universe that required the existence of a god in your opinion? Religions originally attributed all of existence to the actions of gods. As science began to explain the universe, the role of gods shrank until today there are just two events that religions still claim as a habitat for the god of the gaps: the triggering of the Big Bang, and the start of life. I see no reason why human intellect shouldn't eventually solve even these puzzles (hopefully in my lifetime). That's one reason I know there's no god.
The other reason is that the whole story is crazier than a low-budget sci-fi flick from the 50s. See aliens from another dimension create a whole planet and a new race of beings! See cities destroyed by deathrays and floods! Cringe at the horrors of torture pits on Satan's Death Star! Watch a man nailed to death and then beamed up Jehovah's Starship!
Frankly, I'm embarassed for people who actually take this crap seriously.
AE....
Ok...sperm penetrates egg....first cell is formed....cell divides...now we got 2....further division...now we got 4......
in which cell do we find the soul.... the 16th...the 100th ..which one...?
"I once heard that it is the soul that god put in mankind that feeds the dna rna."
Now where did you "hear" this ?....
Pages