DocZOnline

To stoke the baseless delusions of right-wing extremists, the Trumpster is now adding to his rants about a war on Christmas in the United States a rant about a war on Christians. Seeing his remarks reminded me of an op ed column that I wrote some years ago for a Fort Worth, Texas, independent newspaper. I dug it out, but I decided that it needed revising and expanding. This is the result:
CHRISTMAS THROUGH NON-CHRISTIAN EYES
Since the winter solstice with its density of holidays is here again, one can anticipate the annual explosions of righteous Christian indignation at institutions or persons who substitute a generic greeting like “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” for “Merry Christmas.” Such indignation is nothing more than bad manners and bigotry based on erroneous history masquerading as principle and on faux piety grounded in bogus tradition.
I do not say this on behalf of myself as an adult. In my mature apostasy—now of more than six decades duration, since the year after my Bar Mitzvah—I have become comfortable with a variety of religions and their expressions. In particular, I can relish the beauty of the Christian liturgy (especially the Catholic mass intoned in Latin) and the glories of Christian-inspired art (especially the music). I, even I, feel an awe and chill when I hear and (yes) sing along with traditional Christmas hymns and carols.
As an adult, I am comfortable both with my apostasy and with my appreciation of the sentiments of believers of many faiths.
However, the true root of my antipathy toward those religious bullies who violate the basic tenets of their own faith, the founding principles of the United States, and the ruling customs of common decency and etiquette is this. When I remember myself as a still-believing child raised Jewish, I cannot forget the discomfort that even the most benevolent public expressions of Christian belief caused me.
I recall the needless conflict ignited in me by the thoughtless imposition of Christian lore and practice on me. In my public schools, that lore and practice found expression in the implicitly mandatory singing of Christmas songs during holiday assemblies in the auditorium. My religion told me that I should sit silently during these exercises, but pedagogical authority and peer pressure told me that I must participate. However, when I succumbed to the social pressure and sang along, even enjoying the music as I did so, my enjoyment was poisoned by my inability to bring myself to utter the words “Jesus Christ” or “Christ the Lord.” Jesus was neither my Christos (anointed one, messiah) nor any part of my Lord. In Judaism, it is strictly forbidden to utter even the name of the genuine Lord of hosts. To exalt the name of what a believing Jew would regard as a false god was blasphemous idolatry.
Such feelings were not restricted to schools. As difficult as it may be for many Christians to grasp, one should try to understand the perplexity that the display of a crèche in a public space can cause in a Jewish child. A Christian who cannot understand—and feel compassion for—such a child is, to my mind, a questionable Christian.
After all, it is Judaism that—from its very founding—is the quintessentially militant and parochial religion, while Christianity is founded as the quintessentially pacifist and catholic (in the literal sense) religion. Jews are destined to live in a permanent state of circling the wagons, but Christians are meant to live in a radically open door and open-arms world.
The paradox of the Christian crusader in arms striving to eradicate non-Christian infidels may have been with humanity for a long time (for a variety of political and social, but not religious, reasons), but in a secular humanist society like the United States—a society colonized out of a quest for religious freedom and founded on principles of political enlightenment—there should be no place for such a crusader.
Hear the resounding words of Thomas Jefferson [from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII (on religion)]: After stating that neither "the operations of the mind" nor "the rights of conscience" are political concerns, Jefferson says unequivocally: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
It is long overdue to banish the delusion that the Founders of the United States were Christians who founded the country on Christian principles (see Post Scriptum below).
Whether the children of Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, or any others feel the same discomfort that I did, I cannot say with certainty, but I suspect that they do.
Moreover, if they do, compassionate other humans need to allow them the youthful safety and warmth of their parochialism. The bellicosity of irascible Christians should not be allowed to trample the rights and feelings of non-Christians.
In the United States, all persons ideally should be co-equal citizens, free to be privately zealous in various idiosyncratic ways. On the other hand, public areas must be DRZs (de-religionized zones), or better, OMZs (omni-religionized zones). In public, a crèche should be neither more nor less welcome than a monk chanting “Hare Krishna.”
When the right-wing zealous fanatics mount their righteously belligerent steeds, one should remember that the steeds are nothing but hobby horses rocking on the quicksand of mindless hate.
In addition, if a retailer—out of business sense, if not out of courtesy—adopts a generically neutral and all-encompassing holiday salutation, one should applaud the act. Even more, one should hope that the day arrives when the act will go unnoticed.
Furthermore, one should remember that there are two Christmases, the religious celebration of the birth of a savior preaching peace and good will and the latter-day secular Saturnalia of gift-giving profligacy. To confuse the two demeans the former.
If one were honest, one would admit the true Lord of Christmas to be Mammon.
POST SCRIPTUM:
Most of the Founders were not believing Christians. Many of them (such as Jefferson, Franklin, and Paine) were proponents of a rationalistic civic religion rather than a fideistic revealed religion. Some prudently (one might even say, euphemistically) called their belief system “deism.”
In the Declaration of Independence, the word “God” appears only once, in the phrase “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” To an eighteenth-century thinker, this was a reference to the mathematician-deity of the Enlightenment philosophers, not to the object of worship of any revealed religion. In the statement that all humans “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” “their Creator” is sufficiently ambiguous that it could allude to one’s parent as much as to some supreme being. The invocation of “Divine Providence” in the Declaration’s final statement is vague enough to embrace all beliefs. The only use of the adjective “Christian” in the Declaration was in a paragraph, deleted by Congress, in which Jefferson spoke derisively of “the Christian king of Great Britain.”
Neither does the word “God” appear in the U. S. Constitution, nor does any word that evokes divinity (except the formulaic “year of our Lord”). In fact, according to the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Constitution embodies a thoroughgoing religious neutrality that involves a strict separation of what eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke called “politics and the pulpit.”
Alexander Hamilton was the author of sixty percent of the essays in The Federalist Papers (1787-1788) that were meant to defend and garner support for the Constitution, the other two authors being James Madison and John Jay. Hamilton chose the pseudonym “Publius” for the essays in the volume, which showed that the Founders were looking to pagan antiquity, particularly Republican Rome, for guidance, not to the Christian Bible, else he might have chosen for a pseudonym “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” or “John” (or tilting Judaically, “Moshe”). A story (probably apocryphal, but nonetheless apt) circulated about Hamilton: when Hamilton was asked why the authors of the Constitution made no mention of God, he replied, “We forgot.”
In the presidential campaign of 1800, Jefferson’s opponents vigorously and frequently accused him of being an “atheist,” an “infidel,” and a “howling atheist” in an unsuccessful attempt to turn voters against him: he won the election.
To put it in a nutshell, the founding of the United States was not inspired or informed by looking toward monarchical Jerusalem; it was inspired and informed by looking toward democratic Athens and republican Rome.

MORE PROGRESS
One wall of books in what will be the library is now complete: it comprises books of antiquity [ancient Near East and Egypt (from Gilgamesh to The Book of the Dead)/ancient Greece (from Homer to Euclid) and Rome (from Terence and Plautus to Marcus Aurelius)]; medieval (Christian, Jewish, and Islamic) philosophy, through modern philosophy (Galileo to Kant) and nineteenth century philosophy (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Darwin, et al) to twentieth century philosophy (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, et al); British literature (from Beowulf to Burgess and beyond); and the beginning of American literature (from Cotton Mather). More cartons remain to be unpacked: those gray cabinets (whose doors I plan to have removed) contain already unpacked books, and the table is piled with partially sorted books. Several more cartons are in the adjoining room, where there is another bookcase waiting for them.
On the floor of the main room (sala) are the components of two more IKEA bookcases that my trusty handyperson is scheduled to assemble tomorrow morning.
Each block of books is a block of memories of the past and a promise of memories in the future.

A LOGIC LESSON
(prompted by the hyperbolic rhetoric spewed by politicians and commentators and regular civilians about the Israeli-Palestinian morass, but more broadly applicable)
[Note: For now, I put aside the uncomfortable issue of the acceptance and bruiting to bolster preformed policy commitments of unverified accounts that confirm one’s prefabricated, knee-jerk view of the situation (accounts accepted and bruited without sober investigation to determine whether such accounts are demonstrably accurate or propagandistically hyped).]
In the catalogue of twenty logical fallacies that I used to distribute to students in my Logic class, there are two that have been committed egregiously by Chicken Littles on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian chasm. They are two sides of a logically fallacious coin:
(1) Accident: the misapplication of a generalization to inappropriate individual cases, i.e., moving too carelessly from a general statement to a possible example of it.
For example, the naïve leap among left-wing extremists from the assertion that Palestinians per se are victims of systematic oppression and brutality at the hands of the Israeli right-wing berserkers to the assertion that Hamasians qua Palestinians somehow are justified in their barbaric and inhumane retribution.
(2) Converse accident: the misapplication of an individual case to an inappropriate generalization, i.e., moving too carelessly to a general statement from a possible example of it.
For example (a), the calculated Netanyahuian leap from the assertion that the Palestinian cabal known as Hamas is a venomous terrorist organization bent on the destruction of Israel to the assertion that all Palestinians are de facto terrorists by association equally bent on the destruction of Israel. (This is a fallacy shared—however much they try to hide it—by a significant portion of American political leaders, from the President and Democratic Party regulars on down to GOP legislators like Pence and the rest of the evangelical Christian right-wing crowd who are terrorist pots calling the terrorist kettle black.)
For example (b), the accusation against those who criticize Israeli policy (those who are anti-Israeli-political-action) that they are ipso facto criticizing Jews as such and hence are anti-Semitic.{Note: These are the mechanisms at work in the social construction of stereotypes.]
I proffer this lesson (perhaps a bit oversimplified but not inaccurately so) as my waiy of issuing a call for sanity in public discourse rather than hysteria, a call that I am certain will go unheeded.

BOOKCASE PROGRESS REPORT
At last, my bookcases arrived from IKEA’s bounteous domain last Friday. Now, my trusty hired trabalhador, a genuine faz-tudo, is assembling them (quatro estantes grandes e três estantes pequenas). Two of the small bookcases have been deployed to their destined place in my sala, one of them to support on its roof minha impressura. The final small bookcase and one of the big bookcases are in the bullpen awaiting deployment until the construction process is over and I can begin emptying cartons to make room for them. Behold the interim documentary record in the photographs below.