Monday, December 14, 2009

my personal stance on Christmas brouhaha

After opining about the futility and pointlessness of the effort to promote Christmas as a solely Christian holiday, I noticed that I didn't clearly state my own viewpoint.
  • Christians and any Christian/church-based activities and services should of course strive to make Christmas 1) less materialistic and 2) more Christ-focused, simply because those two goals really apply year-round to every activity of Christians: imagine expanding the "Christmas spirit" beyond one-twelfth of each year.
  • Businesses that interact with any willing customer (i.e. one person's $ is equivalent to anyone else's $) are likely to take one of two attitudes toward holidays: total inclusiveness or cautious vagueness, and cautious vagueness is more cost-effective than total inclusiveness. To be perceived as offending or excluding any customer, regardless of whether his or her religion is in the majority, would be unprofitable. Hence, it's unrealistic to expect profit-seeking businesses to cater just to customers who hold a particular set of beliefs, although within an unrestricted marketplace each business and customer will "vote" with their dollars exactly how much this "principle" is worth, similar to the way that they decide how much good customer-service is worth; how much marginal cost is a buyer willing to incur for the sake of "rewarding" a business for compliance?
  • Events/pageants/displays intended for the general community (as opposed to Christian outreach) should in my opinion reject the cautious vagueness/secularism that businesses adopt. I'd rather have such things fairly embrace authentic expressions of all the cultural traditions that people in that specific community wish to be included. If one of the cultural traditions of people in that community includes songs that praise one or more deities, the songs should be sung as is. And the same goes for the rest of the community's cultural traditions. When people object to uniform unbelief forcibly imposed onto public life, they're naive in thinking that the alternative result will necessarily be uniform belief.
  • Motives matter greatly in all these situations because people who don't acknowledge Christ as lord are watching. Is peevish defensiveness a good witness? Is a warlike attitude toward anyone who disagrees with us a likely way to introduce them to the Prince of Peace?

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