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December 14, 2003
Christmas outlawed
The latest bit of PC garbage from our cretinous political elite is the banning of Christmas cards from any member of the Scottish parliament and their employees which bear a message which refers in any way to Christ, the Nativity or anything else which might be construed as a "Christian" message. This is already in force at that other great House of the Utterly Incompetent and Irrelevant - Whitehall.
The ban is a decree from Ministers who claim that any "Christian" message on the cards may offend members of minority religions! It is still - a recent poll revealed that more than 50% of the population still consider themselves "Christian" even though most do not go to church - a "Christian" country, and even the leaders of the Muslim, Hindu and other faiths consulted could not understand what these morons we elected think they could find offensive. The leader of the Muslims even observed that many in his community keep the festival, giving gifts and having a family gathering, though they do not, of course, mark the religious significance of the festival.
While I accept that the festival has become overly commercialised and is becoming very secular, I find it deeply offensive that a bunch of complete and utter ignoramus' can have the effrontery to, at the tax paying public's expense, have printed a variety of totally inane cards with completely secular images (angels and other religious images are offensive!) with an equally anodine message which could be used to describe the Summer Soltice.
Christmas is one of the two most important festivals in the Christian calendar. It celebrates an event which has changed the face of the world, and it began in a smelly stable, in an overcrowded caravanserai. The event that this festival marks, (and I am well aware that it is celebrated over the period formerly the Pagan festival of Beltane!) is the birth of an individual whose message changed forever the course of history. Whether we have the vehicle or the mechanism right is irrelevant. In about 6 BC a boy was born to a Jewish family in that stable who set in train a movement that has shaken empires, framed our legal systems and created the world we now live in with our values of right and wrong, of personal responsibility and of a responsibility for one another and for our planet.
Consider for a moment, even if you are not a person who belongs to a church or subscribes to this view, and even if you have a particular beef about some of the mistakes and - yes - attrocities, committed by MEN in the name of that faith, what could possibly have made this birth (and surely there must have been hundreds that night - whenever it was!) so very different that it has been so influential. This is something that is inexplicable, unless you are prepared to accept that this child was exactly who he said he was. What else could have inspired those struggling first believers, the people who walked and talked with him and with those closest to him in this life, to face prison and death rather than surrender their faith. A faith founded on their absolutely unshakeable belief that he was indeed the Word made man. It was this that drew the Emperor Constantine to adopt the Christian faith as his own - and we should not forget that he had considered a number of other seemingly equally valid options including Mithraism, an early form of Zoroastrianism and, according to some sources, Buddhism.
So, is Christmas important to Christians? You bet! It is therefore deeply offensive and insulting to all of those who call themselves Christian, to have this important feast highjacked by this bunch of ignorant psuedo-intellectuals attempting to use it for their own political purposes while insulting the faith of several million of their electorate.
The prize though for the ultimate insult to all who call themselves Christian must be the Buckinghamshire County Council's ban on a poster advertising a carol service in the Parish Church. It seems that they have a selective policy on religion. Posters for Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist or New Age Pagan festivals are permitted to be displayed in their libraries, Christian ones are not.
Multi-cultural Britain? Meet the new Apartheid. Cromwell and his Presbyters must be really enjoying the triumph of the new iconoclast movement.
Posted by The Gray Monk at December 14, 2003 10:29 PM