Should we be celebrating Christmas?

[Lark]

Scrooge was a small business owner. He needed to save money so that he could re-invest it in his business and create more jobs.

You're missing the entire point of the tale, maybe even the entire point of life but carry on.

 

[Grand Admiral Crunch]

You're missing the entire point of the tale, maybe even the entire point of life but carry on.

No, you missed it. The capriciousness of society drove a good man nuts, and he gave a man a raise instead of hiring more people.

 

[Peter Deadpan]

I'm an atheist INFJ. No, I should not be celebrating a holiday about a guy I don't worship for the sole purpose of fueling materialism.

How many people hate me now?

 

[Mole]

I'm an atheist INFJ. No, I should not be celebrating a holiday about a guy I don't worship for the sole purpose of fueling materialism.

How many people hate me now?

You know from 12,000 miles away I am somewhat hampered in hating you as I am in loving you.

However we do note, we become what we worship, so if we worship Christ, we become more Christlike, and if we worship Mohammed, we become more like Mohammed. And if we worship our material possessions, we become materialists.

So perhaps one of our more important life tasks is to discover what it is we unconsciously worship, and replace it with something we choose to worship.

In that way we can choose what we become.

 

[The Cat]

 

[SpankyMcFly]

@OP Yes we should be celebrating Christmas.

In that way we can choose what we become.

[MENTION=3325]Mole[/MENTION]:

"Becker taught us that awe, fear, and ontological anxiety were natural accompaniments to our contemplation of the fact of death.

Since the terror of death is so overwhelming we conspire to keep it unconscious. "The vital lie of character" is the first line of defense that protects us from the painful awareness of our helplessness. Every child borrows power from adults and creates a personality by introjecting the qualities of the godlike being. If I am like my all-powerful father I will not die. So long as we stay obediently within the defense mechanisms of our personality, what Wilhelm Reich called "character armor" we feel safe and are able to pretend that the world is manageable. But the price we pay is high. We repress our bodies to purchase a soul that time cannot destroy; we sacrifice pleasure to buy immortality; we encapsulate ourselves to avoid death. And life escapes us while we huddle within the defended fortress of character.

Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

One of Becker's lasting contributions to social psychology has been to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals. Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth. Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat "atheistic communism."

The fourth strand. Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles — my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of god, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand year Reich.

Perhaps Becker's greatest achievement has been to create a science of evil. He has given us a new way to understand how we create surplus evil — warfare, ethnic cleansing, genocide. From the beginning of time, humans have dealt with what Carl Jung called their shadow side — feelings of inferiority, self-hate, guilt, hostility — by projecting it onto an enemy. It has remained for Becker to make crystal clear the way in which warfare is a social ritual for purification of the world in which the enemy is assigned the role of being dirty, dangerous, and atheistic. Dachau, Capetown and Mi Lai, Bosnia, Rwanda, give grim testimony to the universal need for a scapegoat — a Jew, a nigger, a dirty communist, a Muslim, a Tutsi. Warfare is a death potlatch in which we sacrifice our brave boys to destroy the cowardly enemies o righteousness. And, the more blood the better, because the bigger the body-count the greater the sacrifice for the sacred cause, the side of destiny, the divine plan.

Becker's radical conclusion that it is our altruistic motives that turn the world into a charnel house — our desire to merge with a larger whole, to dedicate our lives to a higher cause, to serve cosmic powers — poses a disturbing and revolutionary question to every individual and nation. At what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic? No doubt, one of the reasons Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness. He reveals how our need to deny our nakedness and be arrayed in glory keeps us from acknowledging that the emperor has no clothes. "


By celebrating Christmas I am engaging in a mini act of heroism by upholding my cultural values which imbues my life with meaning and value, "I am a human being god damnit, my life has value!" I scream to the cosmos. This boosts my self esteem which I need as an anxiety buffer to keep my fear of death unconscious and repressed. What about that guy 'over there'? His/her mere existence is testament that an alternate version of reality might be true. Subconsciously, this is intolerable because it threatens the very foundations of our own immortality projects. The very foundation of all human conflict is now revealed. Quite the conundrum we face, an instinctual need to pursue 'heroism' (or excellence if you will) via our societal/cultural scripts to serve as a shield to keep the fear repressed but also knowing that these heroic pursuits lead to conflict and potential destruction of the very things most cultures value. This begs the question, which came first? heroism or 'evil'? Does not heroism create the 'evil' in order to have something to pursue and eventually vanquish?

*flees from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age*

 

[Forever]

I'm an atheist INFJ. No, I should not be celebrating a holiday about a guy I don't worship for the sole purpose of fueling materialism.

How many people hate me now?

Take a look at this way:

In a Christian perspective: materialism is nothing. It's about family, friendship, and being one under God.

In a marketable perspective: take advantage of showing your love more by buying bigger and better things to show how much you "care".

Atheism is simply the lack of believing in God or asserting he doesn't exist. There's no dogma required other than that. Atheists can still do both without believing in God.

 

[The Cat]

...and a partridge in a pear tree!

 

[Grand Admiral Crunch]

Guess that's the end of this thread. I enjoyed reading all the posts. Finding out what it means to other people helped me find my own meaning and the goodness of it. Also a good way to pass the time when it's cold outside, maybe. Possibly I should've found soemthing more productive to do, but all that stuff to do is still there. *sigh* Anyways, I hope that other people also enjoyed the thread and I thank you all for your contributions.

 

[solpi]

Oi, I know it's the 28th and this thread has technically "ended" but I'm intrigued with the topic.

I know a jewish family and they literally have a christmas tree (but with jewish ornaments). I gave them christmas presents and they're currently still giving me hanukah presents.

Christmas in my opinion is not strictly for christians. My sister is a leader in a church organization that has 100 to a couple hundred people and they're very welcoming. I can see how it may be disrespectful to christianity even with christians welcoming everyone but it's not in the religion's obligation to celebrate it.

 

[Ursa]

Oi, I know it's the 28th and this thread has technically "ended" but I'm intrigued with the topic.

It's the third day of Christmas, so this topic is still very much current and relevant.

 

[Jaq]

I'm late to the party on this thread, but my two cents are simple. Christmas is steeped in tradition in many places, it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Even the consumerist aspect of it is going to stay too. Plus, pro social behavior makes people feel good and makes them look good.