What to call the season past
I am so, so tired of the ugly, nasty comments people are making about what to call the time of year that preceeds December 25.Some bloggers and others are jumping down the throats of cashiers and others for not saying "Merry Christmas". Others are complaining because "Merry Christmas" is too Christian and we need to call it "Happy Holidays".
For the sake of (insert word here), GET A LIFE! Is this really the most important problem we've got? How about everyone who's complained or had a bad thought about such things contribute $25 to their favorite charity and SHUT UP!
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 9:41 AM
2 Comments:
I agree with you, sort off... I'd rather see the energy expended else where.
On the other hand, this is all part our ongoing debate about the roles of the sacred and secular and how it all should be sorted out in the modern world.
America, and American religous life are really models for others to follow.
Read Ratzinger on American Religous life and it's diversity and non conformity, and then this today in the Weekly Standard on Devout Democracies,
Iraq and Afghanistan as liberal beacons in the region never really made much sense; as democracies in which devout Muslims wrestle through difficult questions about the proper relationship between God and man, they can have much more impact in the Middle East, where religion is like oxygen. Afghanistan and Iraq are at present the Muslim world's two most important democratic laboratories. They are not causes for despair. On the contrary, for devout Muslims who are trying to introduce concepts of popular sovereignty into political philosophy, both nations are-and the word is used correctly-progressive. This may be hard for many secularized or disbelieving Westerners and Middle Easterners to swallow-"We have gone to war for this?"-but in the context of Middle Eastern history, we should be both hopeful and proud. The real question for us now is the one posed to me in Kabul by an Italian officer, who despite his soft manner had the martial spirit of a U.S. Marine: "Will the United States run? If you do, we all will."
Try as we might, it's a debate we can't run from and one the rest of the world watches for answers.
I wouldn't mind if it were part of a debate. But it's not. It's just bitching and complaining and not listening to the other person.
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