I thought Atheists were supposed to be well informed people?
December 16th, 2007 • atheism, idiocy
It’s now days after the House of Representatives passed a House Resolution recognizing the importance of Christmas to Christianity. In those ensuing days, all manners of non-theists have been up-in-arms about it, saying it violates the First Amendment. I’ve voiced my opinion in a number of comments on various blogs on how delusional secularists have become and how hypocritical they act. I once thought secularists, and Atheists in particular, were intelligent, well read, and well informed people. The public outcry from secularists on this resolution has truly led me to believe otherwise.
The resolution does nothing more than states “Christmas is a holy holiday for Christians and we, as the House of Representatives, recognize this.” Guess what? They have one for Ramadan and one for Diwali too (where’s Hanukkah? Or Kwanzaa?). I don’t hear people bemoaning this fact at all. And why is this? Because many American secularists just want to keep the Christian church out of our government, they don’t care about the other religions. It’s purely misplaced vitriol for Christianity. I’ll admit that I was taken aback by the resolution when I first read it until I remembered that resolutions are not laws, they have no affect on national law until they pass from resolution to bill (or act) to law. My middle school Social Studies teachers would be proud at the fact that I remembered such a basic principle of our government. You secularists would be well fit to do the same.
This trio of resolutions is nothing more than pomp and a waste of taxpayer’s money. While I will agree that passing such baseless and pointless resolutions does very little to lend credibility to what being a Representative means — the function is clearly defined by the name, you represent — I can’t fathom how people have made the leap from “this is something we’re recognizing” to “the government is trying to authoritatively assert Christianity as the foremost religion of the United States”. I wish I was making this up but the general consensus from Digg to Reddit to various blogs and their comments clearly points out that people grossly misunderstand what the resolution means — and what resolutions do — and that they think Big Brother is marching with jackboots to declare some kind of state religion. I would say it’s amazing that so many people are this ignorant but it’s not amazing at all, it’s frightening.
Maybe secularists should get together, form some committees, and devise a national secularist holiday. Then we could raise hell that our important holiday isn’t recognized officially by the government and claim some kind of restitution for this gravest of omissions from national accordance. Or we could realize this was probably passed in order for them to waste time do a little more work before their session is over.