Merry Holidays

It’s that time of year again when a certain cable news network tries to make something out of nothing when it comes to Christmas.  Somehow it’s good for ratings.  The lone atheist comes on to debate the so called ‘attack on Christmas’.  First let me state, I thinks it’s a rather banal waste of time to lawyer up and go around looking for manger scenes on public property and sue them.  Time is much better spent on trying to educate these pundits, some less evolved than others.  Take the following statement for example:  “Jesus was a white man too……that’s a verifiable fact.”  Quite a loose interpretation of the word fact, but I digress.  Now, I’ll do my best to defend the devil in disguise-a suit and tie actually-and get to what I hope he’s trying to say.  When people wonder why America is so exceptional, look no further than the first amendment:  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, yada yada yada, you know the rest.  The founders basically said we’re not choosing sides when it comes to religion and you’re free to worship whatever or whoever you want, or don’t want.  We are the birth place of Mormonism and Scientology for Pete’s sake.  It’s why no one is buying a one way plane ticket to Iran.  And its why, even though the majority of Americans are Christians, government shouldn’t take sides.  Imagine if JFK, a catholic, instead of respecting separation of church and state, decided to declare the U.S.A. a catholic country.  Sorry Protestants, Lutherans, Jews, Muslims, atheist, convert or be banished.  Missed Ash Wednesday, off the jail you go.  Didn’t take communion last Sunday, sorry no excuses you now will be burned at the stake.  Sounds absurd to us, but you only have to look across the Atlantic to understand where I’m going here. 

Douche Bag Dynasty

With all the talk this week about freedom of speech, I thought It'd be fitting to start a blog.  Sorry!  This will hopefully put an end to my thoughts on the Duck Dynasty guy, recently booted off A & E.  The question is, were his comments hateful or not, and should he be kicked off his very popular T.V. show?  The answer.....yes and yes.  Don't get me wrong, he has a first amendment right to voice his opinion: "Start with homosexuality and just morph out from there, bestiality........".  If you use homosexuality and bestiality in the same sentence, paragraph, whatever, this is not only ignorant but hateful and disrespectful.  And A & E as a corporation-remember corporations are people now-has a right to tell him bye-bye.  If an employee of mine decided one day to get a visible tattoo that read: HOMOS=BESTIALITY, I would definitely have to show him the door.   But isn't he just voicing his religious views and shouldn't we respect that?   NO!!!!!!  This is the whole point.  Yes he has a constitutional right to say what he believes and why.  At least he didn't say we should go around killing them like god did; Leviticus 20:13.   The smart thing would have been, when asked about sin is to say "that's a private matter".  Instead he went off on a diatribe about those darn sinners.  And now people are outraged-mostly hard, religious, right, conservatives-that he's being kicked off his show.  I'm a big fan of Bill Maher.  His show Politically Incorrect was cancelled when he made remarks after 9-11 that were considers ill timed.  Youtube it.  He usually defends people for freedom of speech.  He defended Paula Dean and even Rush Limbaugh.  But I've also heard him say we need to make people feel uncomfortable when they make ridiculous statements.  I'm with him on the latter on this one.  When are we going to take the 'kid gloves' off when it come to religion and start making it NOT ok to say stupid stuff and get away with it because "it's my religion and you have to respect that".  No thank you!  In 20 years we'll look back and think of how ridiculous people were when it came to homosexuality.  It would be like saying today that slavery wasn't all that bad.  Oops....he also said that.