Putting the Yule Back in Yuletide

I’ve been debating about this for a while and there’s lots of reasons for and against posting this. Why do it? Because this initially started off as a journal to express personal thoughts, opinions, and feelings about life events or just life in general and it has sort of deviated from that, but in a good way (I think). But I’d like to get to personal topics more often, especially when they may or may not be relevant. So if this does get posted, it’ll be Christmas because of the topic I’m going to cover…

So why not post about this vague topic I’ve yet to elaborate on? Because it’s controversial to a point where there are some people I care about who may get mad at me for talking about it, and I’d hate for that to drive a wedge between us at all. Because some of you people are really cool and I like having most of you in my life (except for you…. You know which one of you I’m talking about). All kidding aside, it’s time we discuss religion on this post… just this once. Depending on how it goes, we might do this again, but I’m going to keep it simple and just do it this one time for now. And why bring it up? Because of one topic that has been bugging me for a bit and has only gotten louder because of social media like Facebook and Twitter… 

“Put the Christ back in Christmas.” Or the “War on Christmas.” Or whatever else right-wing media likes to push in order to get ratings rather than tell facts and focus on actual news. Hell, I identify as a conservative, and even I get annoyed by this. In fact, the very notion of “Put the Christ back in Christmas” is something that really pisses me off because of how arrogant that notion sounds on its own. It harkens back to the days when the Native Americans “owned” the land here only for it to be usurped by a bunch of foreign white people who turned it into the metropolitan hell you see before you filled with pollution and a shit government. And now we complain about people coming to our country illegally over the southern border and the irony is so thick, and yet so few people seem to notice it because rather than admit that America was wrong about how it treated Native Americans, we just continue doing what we always do and shuffle that under the rug.

Wow, tangent there. But going on to our normal under the rug shuffle, it’s frustrating to see movements like this in place when Christmas, in its original and untouched form, had literally nothing to do with Christ or Christianity at all. It was originally a Pagan holiday to bring in the winter solstice and that was it. But, for some reason, ancient Christians of long ago decided to take the holiday for themselves and repurpose it because it was easier than just taking a different day of the month and calling that Christmas. Funny how white people and Christians (again, generalization) like to assimilate other cultures into their own without so much as caring about the people who were their first and embracing those aspects of that culture (holidays, traditions, land etc) as their own.

I mean, Hell, I’ve seen well-supported arguments that Jesus’ birthday wasn’t even IN what we now know as December, but actually sometime in the summer, like July. So Christians of long ago really did seem to just pick a day with an existing holiday and just overwrite whatever was already there with their own shit. Bravo, guys. Way to respect other people’s way of life. But, again, this is me bashing Christians from back before we had indoor plumbing or a proper judicial system. Their actions don’t really have any bearings on what people of today are like… for the most part.  

(summer... scott summers... get it? visual gag? no?)

Oh… boy… here we go…

My religious history is rather… simple and uninteresting but since we’re here, let’s talk about it. I’m not a religious guy in the sense I don’t go to a church on a regular basis nor do I identify with any mainstream religion of the sort. It’s not so much that I don’t believe in a “god” or anything like that, but that I’m rather jaded by most mainstream religious practices and you can largely blame my stronger interest in history and how various religious groups have acted or been treating each other over the many hundreds of years. So much shit has happened that all the discussions now feel like apologetic hypocrisy for everything that happened then. The only notable exceptions being Judaism because they were a group that was never abusive (from my understanding) just repeatedly abused by damn near everyone over the course of thousands and thousands of years. The other being Buddhism because they don’t really identify as being a religious practice, but more as a way of life for self-improvement and not just worshiping because someone tells you to.

I get that a lot of people may not agree with that way of thinking. That’d be like me acting that the Germans are horrible still because of WWII, and you’re mostly right. Though I blame the French for WWII more than the Germans, you’re mostly right. (No, seriously, if you know anything about history, the French have just as much of the blame, if not MORE than German for a shit ton of reasons that I really can’t get into right now… but I might in a later post if you guys really want to hear me rant on about this for a while). But there’s the added problem of how mainstream religion practices their faith that I’ve never been comfortable with. 

Simply put, the Bible, to me, is just a book and nothing more. It might have good moral lessons, but it’s more archaic than our constitution (which needs some major updates nowadays). Not only that, but it’s been translated into multiple languages multiple times over the course of 2000 years. And that was before we had our modern day English language. I’ve translated Japanese to English and back and plenty of meaning and phrases are lost in translation just by doing that. I can’t imagine that everything from the original Bible made it into our current day Bible fully intact.

And that’s just by translation. Assuming everyone who worked on the Bible over the course of two millennia were all good people, that’s enough. But I imagine some people had their own purposes when putting this book together and might have slipped things in to that end. I mean, we have that with writing in modern times, so why would it be so farfetched to have the same kind of shenanigans 2000 years ago? Yet there are still some people (it might not be a majority, but it’s a large and vocal number) that insist on the Bible being true and not seeing how impossible that notion sounds just by taking a moment to think about it. I’m all for you believing in whatever makes you feel comfortable, but I do ask that you use logic when doing so. 

But let’s get to the real nitty-gritty, and it’s how religion works in modern times today. I’m not gay and I don’t go out and support their rights because I choose to abstain from the argument and focus on my own problems at the moment. That said, it’s really sad that a religion that preaches love and tolerance is also capable of producing so much hate and animosity towards people who just want to live their lives in a slightly different way than some other people. I don’t necessarily agree with abortion entirely (but that’s more of a government debate and not religious) but I don’t think that a group of religiously inclined people should be allowed to tell other people what they can or cannot do with their bodies. Hell, I argue that the father of a potentially aborted baby shouldn’t really have a say in the matter since he isn’t carrying the baby around.

Which I suppose brings me to my overall about point religion in general. I’m less inclined to follow it when you force it in my face and insist its right or the only way that’s proper. The same applies to entertainment or anything really. Keep shoving a popular TV show or movie in my face and I’ll just not watch it out of protest because I’m tired of hearing about it. Shut the fuck up and I might willingly try it… or just make it into a TellTale game and I’ll hesitantly go for it. Religion is the same way and that’s because the most vocal people who insist their way is right are the people who make the religion, entertainment, or whatever else look bad for everyone involved. 

To put in ways that I can more easily relate to, and perhaps you as well: I’m a gamer and I love gaming because it’s a way for me to explore other worlds, new ideas, and even myself if the game is designed with that in mind. But there are so many loud, obnoxious, and vocal people within the gaming community that it burns a lot of people from wanting to play games or to bother with playing online. Such verbal abuse, racism, sexism, and immature dickheads acting like their entitled to be dickheads to anyone else on their internet space. Hell, I don’t like online gaming because of these people and I’m embarrassed to be called a gamer when that means I’m associated to these people by our shared hobby. And that’s sort of the vibe I get when it comes to those insanely vocal parties in religious groups of all varieties.

Again, this brings up that old argument of “Well, if you don’t like a small segment of incredibly vocal people, then you shouldn’t discuss politics either or judge topic X, Y, or Z.” Just because I don’t like something about a particular entity, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about it. If anything, it means I should be allowed to voice my opinion in hopes to get these people to calm their tits and maybe even improve the overall experience of whatever it is these vocal motherfuckers are yelling at me about. 

So, to put it all into question… what is my fundamental religious beliefs? I was raised as a Christian (don’t ask which, I really have no idea because the denominations never made a difference to me because it’s all fundamentally the same shit). Then our family stopped attending church because my mom and dad didn’t like the new pastor they got or they only wanted the old pastor because of reasons. I was never really clear on the reason why we stopped. All I knew is that this meant less time using coloring books and more time being at home to play with toys and watch old Disney films (did I mention this is around the time I was maybe 5 or 6)?

It wasn’t until years later when I was in middle school that church became a relevant question in my life again when friends would insist I join them on their church outings for whatever reason. I’d go because I didn’t know any better and because I liked hanging out with some of these friends. In all those experiences, I never really took to what was being said at these gatherings. I listened, but I didn’t stick around to hear more because I wasn’t really interested in what they were offering (so to speak). I felt I fit into those settings about as good as a whale fits into a Volkswagen Beetle.

Eventually, I just got to the point where I determined that religious worship, in the traditional sense, wasn’t for me. And when I asked my parents why we don’t go to church like everyone else (again, I’m paraphrasing, so don’t go to them and ask for clarification because I’ve already said to stop doing that). Their answer was pretty much that they didn’t think church was necessary to believe in God. As my Dad put it (again, paraphrasing), God knows if you believe in him or not and going to church and through all the motions of church doesn’t really matter to someone/something on his level. In short, they have their own way of showing their faith and they felt that’s all we really needed. And, on some level, I respect that answer because that’s an open-minded concept to have when most opposition I get on the matter is accusatory and closed-minded about the whole process. 

As I got older and learned the history of Christianity, I came to the conclusion that while God might (and probably does) exist, I certainly don’t want to associate with a group that has historically fucked up so many things throughout history all in the name of a God. Further into my adult life, I also heard a line from an individual (not naming names) that went something like this: “The problem with Christianity is that their god is supposed to be all-power and benevolent. It sounds like an easy sell but when life turns completely to shit you have to come up for all kinds of whacked out reasons why kindly old Jehovah saw fit to run little Timmy over with a combine harvester and leave him in a state of limbless agony for 18 years. Ancient cultures didn’t have that problem. They knew their gods were a bunch of drunken lunatics that were boning their close relatives and turning their ghoulies into fruit bearing trees. Consequently they tend to make much more interesting stories.”

Or, to put it another way, while most mainstream religions excuse the all the bad stuff in the world as “God Testing Us” I don’t buy that. There’s only so much testing that really needs to be done unless god is GlaDOS and secretly gets off on trying to kill us and seeing us just barely get out alive, making him sadistic more than benevolent. Then you have the polytheistic religions that tend to explain the bad shit on our world as the results of stupid shit gods do to either us or each other and we just have to deal with it. And at least that way it sounds more interesting. And, taking it a step farther from there, who’s to say that we were crafted by Gods? Perhaps there’s just a higher form of life (not even a God in the traditional sense) that’s responsible for our existence and we owe our lives to these advanced species for having not killed us yet.

In short, I don’t know what I believe, but I will say that I believe something created us at one point or another. But they created us in the most basic form and we evolved from that. As to the question of what is our purpose? It’s whatever you make of it. Nothing put us here for some clandestine reason, as far as I’m concerned. If you want something in life, you have to go for it and you can’t expect God to just hand it to you. But that’s a lesson lost on most of the world with the governments willing to just hand out everything like candy without making people actually WORK for it. 

Overall, the closest religious belief I feel I follow is that of the polytheistic faiths (no one in particular). But just the idea of multiple gods makes more sense than just having the one and only one. I like the idea from Native Americans about how everything in nature is spiritual and sacred and that we should respect it. True or not about the spiritual side, it’s true we should respect nature or it’ll kick us in the teeth for not doing so. I’d argue my “official faith” if labels are so damn important, is Agnostic, but leaning more towards the side of being an all-around spiritualist and thinking there’s more than just one answer to a much too simplified question of “Where do we come from?” or “How did we get here?”

And going back to what I said earlier about Buddhism, that’s a practice I’m somewhat interested in joining. Not because I believe it’s right and other religions are wrong. But I like how instead of focusing on how we’re all fucked and going to hell like other religions are basically telling us, Buddhism is more lax about the matter. To them, we’re all fine and all we need to do is just improve ourselves with spiritual enlightenment and hard work. That’s something I’d be willing to follow because of how simple and refreshing that concept is. 

Holy shit (no pun intended) I’ve gone on for a while on this subject… Ahem. So that’s my take on religion in a nutshell. You’re welcome to disagree with me and say I’m a heretic. You’re welcome to stop being my friend if what I believe offends you somehow, even though it doesn’t really change how you should follow what you believe because what I believe and what you believe have nothing to do with one another for the most part. But I invite you to discuss it and share your thoughts. It’s Christmas / Xmas / Yule / Chanukah / Kwanza / or whatever else you want to celebrate. Don’t dwell on me discussing this and let it ruin your holiday. Instead, embrace your family and traditions this day and just enjoy yourself. A day like this only comes once a year and I’ll be damned if I let someone else bring me down on a day like today, so you shouldn’t let me bring you down either. Have a great holiday and I’ll likely see you before New Year’s.