Posted on 09/24/2017 5:54:02 AM PDT by Kaslin
Yes, Virginia, there is an anti-Christian bias in the land.
At least in the Land Down Under.
Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph headline reads, “Big W Removes Christmas References from Festive Tree Products.” Yes, a major Aussie retail outlet has removed all instances of the word “Christmas” when referring to . . . “Christmas trees.”
Instead, shoppers encounter labels like “Grand Pine Tree” and “White Forest Tree.”
How festive.
Is this a war on a particular day? I guess. The fear of offending — or, apparently, mildly discomforting — non-Christians has led many governments and businesses and organizations to downplay the whole “Christmas” tradition.
Secularize it.
When I was young, Charlie Brown worried, in A Charlie Brown Christmas, that the holiday had become “too commercial.” But the extent, today, to which “commercialization” has gone must take modish Lucy’s breath away.
But, to be precise, what we are witnessing is something broader: an exclusionary suppression not so much of one holiday but of a particular concept, ‘Christ,” which derives from the Greek for “Messiah” — in plain English: “Savior.”
No wonder why Christians have celebrated Christmas for a very long time.
And perhaps why some anti-Christians take every opportunity to marginalize even barely religious concepts like the “Christmas tree.”
The term relevant here may be Christophobia, which RationalWiki defines as “the irrational fear or hatred of Christianity or Christians.”
Obviously rampant.
And opportunistic. Christians are taught to “turn the other cheek” upon attack. And though political Christian advocacy can be anything but martyr-acceptant and cheek-offering, the pacifistic meme at the heart of the Gospels makes Christians marks for this advanced snubbing.
That is, Christian teaching allows the anti-religious to attack Christians without much blowback.
For some reason, secularists tend to be less enthusiastic about taking a similar tack against Muslims.
But that’s not the only double standard at play here, a sort of beam-in-my-eye/mote-in-others’. I don’t know about you, but too often I catch the critics most exercised about religious folks’ denial of reality as themselves “in denial” — of obvious reality.
Take the secularists at the above-quoted RationalWiki. They downplay the extent of trendy christophobic commentary and action, using phrases like “persecution complex” and “passing familiarity with reality.” People who most use the word “christophobia,” says RationalWiki, seem to “overlap with the people who claim there’s a liberal bias in the media.”
Funny, I suppose — to witness proudly “rational” people engage, however lightly, in denial of social reality. Did secularists not watch the coverage of the 2016 elections? Apparently these Doubting Thomases do not accept the evidence of Donna Brazille’s CNN leaks and the Podesta email dump as indicative of any bias.
I see it as “evidence that demands a verdict.”
Less funny, to witness businesses distance themselves from the obvious cultural reality of “Christmas trees,” which Katherine Timpf at National Review dubs not only “insanely idiotic” but in defiance of the concise use of precise words.
To talk about “a pine tree that is covered in ornaments and lights that people put up in their homes in the wintertime,” Ms. Timpf rightly argues, “the other person would say, ‘um, you mean a Christmas tree?’ and look at me like I must be high.”
High on silliness, really. Christmas-o-phobia itself is idiotic.
Other apt, precise words come to mind for this goofy culture war:
Grinch.
Bigotry.
Delusional.
What I wish for this “holiday” season? A return to common sense.
Me and my family lived in Sydney for about six months in 1984. Around Christmas time, there was a group of young men who called themselves “Santabusters”. They would go into shopping malls in the area and go up to kids waiting to see Father Christmas (Aussie/Brit term for Santa Claus) and tell them that there is no such thing as Father Christmas/Santa Claus. You can imagine a number of kids were upset to the point of tears and many parents were made very angry at the behaviour of these young men spoiling things for the kids.
In an interview, the leader of “Santabusters” simply said he thought that Father Christmas/Santa Claus had nothing to do with Australia and was basically an old holdover from England that should be done away with entirely. Reading about how upset those kids were over these young men’s antics and also that guy’s comments, I often think of how all of that was an early introduction for me about how very insensitive the left really genuinely are (start of the long road from hating Ronald Reagan big time back then to realizing years later what a young idiot I was for doing so).
Sad day for the Aussies.
Love Christmas? Stay away from that store. I would.
“If anyone is ashamed of me and my message, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when he returns in his glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels.”
Luke 9:26
If they don’t sell Christmas Trees at the store I guess you can’t buy a Christmas Tree at that store.
I can not for the life me think of any use for a “White Forest Tree.”
Since I want to do my Christmas Gift shopping at the same time I buy my Christmas Tree I guess I will be spending my Christmas Gift budget at some store that sells Christmas Trees.
I think that the something along the lines of the above would be an enlightening letter to the management of Big W.
Scroo the trees and Santa Claus. We put a nativity scene on a table and put presents around that.
If they just call it a “tree” or a “holiday tree,” it is clearly a Ramadan Tree.
It is like when they say, “happy holiday.” I just reply that I am not a Muslim.
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