Instead of Christians in the U.S. getting all freaked out and crying persecution because a store has a “Holiday Sale” (I mean, come ON, people, have you not heard what is happening to Christians in India, the Sudan, etc.? Stop whining about a store clerk wishing you a Happy Holiday!) why don’t we make a commitment to live out Jesus’ commands in Matthew 25. How would Jesus want us to celebrate his birthday, really?

Three reasons why “Happy Holidays!” is wonderful:

1) Holidays = holy days. Nothing secular about it. In addition to the celebration of Jesus’ birth, many consider Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve to be holy days – so why not use this greeting?

2) “Happy Holidays” respects Hanukkah. If we’re going to use the phrase “Judeo-Christian values,” then let’s show some respect for our Jewish brothers and sisters who celebrate eight consecutive days of gift-giving in December. The observance of Hanukkah pre-dates Christmas.

3) You’re being a little too transparent about your love for a certain bombastic TV personality. Everyone knows this “War on Christmas” campaign has been a staple of Bill O’Reilly’s show for over a decade. It’s good for his ratings. And certainly he finds some examples of blatant religious liberties abuses in searching nationwide for juicy stories.

On this issue, O’Reilly is “looking out for the folks”… so resources that Christian donors earmark for charity would be better used elsewhere, yes?

It concerns me that Christian groups spend time, effort, energy, public reputation, and limited funds on this campaign. Let’s save all these valuable assets for more worthy causes (preserving human life, preserving marriage, fighting starvation, etc.)

peace,
-joshMshep

P.S. I would encourage believers to go to the following website and sign a simple petition on this issue:

http://www.faithfulamerica.org/

Really? Find me a few cases of people actually being fired, attacked, or otherwise persecuted for saying these words of power? I think this is entirely an invented persecution. Rumors spread, but if it does happen it’s on such a tiny scale as to be negligable.

“If your child is in school, they do not throw Christmas parties complete with Santa Claus and the goodies.”

Santa is a religious icon? Anyway, when did schools get into the business of throwing parties?

“there is a community threatening to stop Christmas carols from being sung in public places. ”

You couldn’t find a good example from your own country, so you had to turn to the Land of Political Correctness?

“Christmas is about celebrating the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and giving to others in his name.”

It’s also about seeing the family, giving presents, snowmen, santa and the elves, and stuffing yourself with traditional christmas food until you can eat no more. It’s a tangled mix of christian, pagan and secular traditions.

Look at the US. You’ve just replaced an extremally christian president with a slightly less christian one. No non-christian has a hope of being president, and is at a huge disadvantage in lower levels of politics. You have tax-exempt churches, you have a whole program for ‘faith-bases initiatives’ which is supposed to distribute tax money to churches – and has yet to give a single cent to a non-christian church. You have the legislature opening with a christian prayer, tax-funded nativity scenes, and how long as it been since there was a SotU address that didn’t include a few appeals to God? Even your money has ‘in god we trust’ on it. By what possible stretch of the imagination can you say that Christians are being persecuted?

I’m glad that here in Australia things havn’t got that stupid yet. I work in a state school and still say Merry Christmas and enjoy doing Christmas activities.

Insist that Christmas trees get put up at your college. If there are any complaints about it, just instruct the the college personnel to tell the complainer to get some tolerance. If Jews complain, simply put up a Menorah next to the Christmas tree. But most complainers are not Jews, and cannot be placated so easily. Most are anti-Christian bigots, who need to learn tolerance.