Atheists: A Little Tolerance for Christmas, Please

Christmas Can Be Secularized Through Toleration

The Founding Fathers of the United States seem to have included many atheists, agnostics, and deists (people who believe in a God that doesn't matter). It is also a historical fact that in the late 1700's there was a Christian religious revival, and that since that time a majority of Americans have been at least nominally Christian.

Officially the national government has always been secular, as enshrined in the Constitution, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exorcise thereof." And "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office of public Trust under the United States."

At times in America it was dangerous to say you were an atheist, especially if you were both a communist and an atheist. So atheists kept a low profile.

For decades now the separation of Church and State has become a battleground. Christians forget the historical fact that they were the ones who originally asked for the separation because they feared the doctrines of either the Church of England (now Episcopal) or the Roman Catholic Church would be imposed on them.

Atheists have led the struggle to keep Church and State separated. That is fine, but some atheists have become as intolerant as their Christian opponents.

I believe we can benefit, now, from showing a little tolerance. I believe that building up a culture of tolerance, including among religious sects, is something that atheists should help with, not fight against.

I believe our message of the priority of reason and fact-based culture over "revealed" religious tradition is winning. I believe that being nice to Christians (within reason) and people in other cults encourages dialog that leads to reason and fact-based beliefs.

So: I don't have a problem calling a Christmas Tree as Christmas Tree. I am not going to deny that Christmas Day is Christmas Day. I personally don't celebrate Christmas, I deny the divinity of Christ (and Isis and Zeus and all the other gods), but I'll take any holiday I can get. Sure, in my ideal world we would secularize Christmas by moving it to the Winter Solstice, but that is not a priority for me.

Let's start with the naming of decorated trees traditionally put up during the month of December. Most atheists, Jews, and other non-Christians want them to be called Holiday Trees or maybe Yule trees.

I can see the argument that official government holiday trees should be for everyone, not just Christians. But it is hard to get around the fact that they are associated with an official government holiday, Christmas Day.

But Christmas long ago came to have a meaning going far beyond the (probably not accurate) birthday of Jesus Christ, who certainly was not God, but was a historic figure and therefore must have had some birthday. Judging from the New Testament, he did not make a point of celebrating his birthday when he was alive. The holiday could be cancelled on religious grounds; the Puritans did not celebrate it.

Many Americans celebrate a non-Christian Christmas. Gifts and family and alcoholism and all that food.

We atheist are supposed to be the reasonable ones. We are the leaders in tolerance. So let the Christians have their Christmas and Christmas Trees.

Let's use the opportunity to talk about what is important: good will towards all people. Including immigrants, homosexuals, foreigners, and people of other faiths than our own. The ability of the Earth to renew itself (the evergreen trees being a symbol of that before being appropriated for Christmas), which is being rapidly lost.

The atheist brand has been tarnished over the centuries in a number of ways, most notably by scientific inventions gone awry, from atomic bombs to insecticides that are killing off bees. Joseph Stalin's mass murders did not help our image either.

If you want to attract people to atheism, the brand should have a positive aura. Fight for the environment, fight for justice, fight for truth. But be kind to those who have not seen the light of reason yet. Our brand should be a showcase of tolerance. We should not fight all the time just because we have gotten used to having to fight for our rights.

I'm going to celebrate Christmas as an atheist. I don't admire Jesus the way I admire Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But to the extent he is symbol of the idea of tolerance (as when he stopped stonings) and substituting love for humans over the cruel laws of the Old Testament, Jesus is okay. If he were alive today, he'd probably be an atheist.

Vladimir Putin and the Atheist Holocaust

We almost never put personal faces on the atheist holocaust. Today a news item did just that, though of course it failed to remind people that there was an atheist holocaust during World War II and it was the result of careful planning and execution by the Roman Catholic Church, including Pope Pius XII (real name: Eugenio Maria Pacelli).

The face of the holocaust today is Viktor V. Putin, younger brother of Vladimir V. Putin, currently Prime Minister of Russia. Viktor was born in 1940, in Leningrad (now going by its prior name of St. Petersburg). In 1942 during the Battle of Leningrad, Victor Putin died, probably of starvation or disease caused by starvation. On January 28th, yesterday, Mr. Putin laid a wreath at Piskaroyvskoye Cemetery, which is a mass grave of about 470,000 civilians and soldiers who died in the battle or from the results of the siege. They were not all: the plaque there says over 640,000 people died of starvation between 1941 and 1944, when the Red Army finally got the upper hand and started rolling back the invaders.

The Atheist Holocaust was the idea of Pope Pius XII along with his predecessor Pius XI. It was executed by the fascist, Roman Catholic leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, with some help from other Catholic fascists, notably General Francisco Franco of Spain and Benito Mussolini of Italy. The Atheist Holocaust engulfed some 20 million people. Its most terrible phase began with the Germany occupation of the Eastern U.S.S.R. in 1941.

Of course we cannot be certain that Viktor V. Putin would have grown up to be an atheist. We unconsciously grant 2 year olds the religious status of their parents. His mother, Maria Ivanovna, was so starved that she was mistaken for dead and nearly buried before someone heard her moaning. His father was wounded and hospitalized in the war. Vladimir Putin is their only surviving child, having been born well after the war, in 1952.

Adolf Hitler saw himself as a new Holy Roman Emperor, who should be able to choose Popes and dictate to them. Pius XII saw himself, and the papacy, as the supreme leader of the entire world, to whom men like Hitler should subordinate themselves. They were united in a hatred of non-Catholics, socialists, communists, and even anyone advocating democratic or republican forms of government. Their plan was to conquer the world and impost a single state with a single religion upon it, the same ancient plan of "Saint" Constantine the Great [3rd - 4th centuries A.D.]

Most people are familiar with the fact that about 6 million jews died in their Holocaust. Most people don't know that most of those Jews were not religiously observant. They were modern jews, often socialists, and just as fairly described as agnostics or atheists. Add in the atheists killed by General Franco in Spain and you have a lot of dead atheists. But the really big numbers come from the invasion of the U.S.S.R. Some of the soldiers and civilians murdered in that invasion would have been Russian Orthodox, but the vast majority were atheists.

Why don't we know this, at least in the United States? American capitalists were happy to see Soviet soldiers chew up Hitler's armies. America emerged from the war as the only intact industrial power and proceeded to grab (in an economic sense, not by actual colonization) pretty much the entire world outside of the Soviet sphere. Americans were taught to hate communism. Critically, the U.S. had a large contingent of Roman Catholic voters who provided the balance of power for the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.

As a result, for education and propaganda, there was an instant re-branding of what happened in World War II. Hitler, a Catholic, was called a pagan. Franco was made into an ally even as he continued to execute people for the offense of not being Roman Catholic. Soviet casualties went without mentioning, and the term atheist was never used to describe them. Pius XII suddenly switched from being Hitler's ally against communism to being America's ally against communism.

The American people need to know this story, whether they want to hear it or not. An honest appraisal of World War II would probably have prevented the Vietnam War, which resulted from a Catholic U.S. president, John Kennedy, supporting an unpopular, minority Roman Catholic regime in South Vietnam against a nationalist, non-Catholic popular revolt.

The Roman Catholic Church continues to deny what it has done. It is a package of lies born from Constantine's anti-pagan reign of terror. Millions of Protestant Christians were murdered by the Catholic Church in Europe from the middle ages until the 18th century.

We need to remind American (and global) Protestants that while they might agree with the Pope on certain issues, he is a dangerous bedfellow. Atheists and Protestants are traditional allies on at least one issue: freedom of religion. We may argue with some Protestants about how the concept of freedom of religion is applied in public places, including public schools. That should not separate us on the basic idea of freedom on conscience and religious choice.

We must also keep in mind that any sufficiently large group of people will be complex when we look at its individuals. History has seen intolerant Protestant sects at times, and too often atheist dictators have treated religious belief or practice as criminal. Many modern Catholics do not want to force their religion on others. Those of us who believe in religious tolerance must stick together on that issue. On the other hand, we must not excuse the complicity of churches, or non-religious institutions, in crimes against humanity.

See also: At Event, a Rare Look at Putin's Life [Ellen Barry, New York Times]

Confusing Muslim Childhood

Last night I started reading Irfan Yusuf's Once Were Radicals, My years as a teenage Islamo-fascist. I got to page 93. You must read it.

Once you get past the I-am-not-a-terrorist Prologue, Irfan's story gets really funny, really fast. His family is Pakistani Muslim, middle class emigrants to Australia. He gets picked on as a child because he is different. His developing understanding of religion, both Muslim and other, is wonderfully portrayed through the eyes of a six year old, then as he matures.

I can relate, if my experiences were no where near as extreme. Irfan's mother was his main religious influence. Compared to my own mother she seems quite tolerant. I was raised by a mother who had converted to Catholic Christian from old school Baptist/Methodist, in a community (Jacksonville, Florida) where Catholics were still a minority clumped in with Jews and Blacks by the local KKK.

I have not gotten to the point in the book where Irfan goes militant, but in my own youth I did a back flip on that idea. Irfan rebels against Australian society by becoming, for a time, a militant Muslim. I dropped the Catholic Church like a hot potato and was attracted, instead, to Marxists, Anarchists, and even Buddhists.

The great thing is that Once Were Radicals allows you to see the varieties of Islam (it is just as varied as Christianity or atheism) from the inside, with an overlay of being able to have the sharp critical insights that usually come only from outsiders.

Buy this book and circulate it. Americans need to read it, especially those few remaining Americans who are religious intolerants.