Mrs Traps is outraged at the fact that this Christmas, her favourite time of year, she has seen very few television programmes celebrating the holiday.
Despite being Jewish she loves the carols and all the other festivities that Christians traditionally employ to remember their saviour.
On Christmas Day she normally serves up her famous ‘Turkey Surprise’.
Surprise? That Turkey shat itself when she shot it in the kitchen.
Mind you we do keep a kosher home with two basins ; The Nile River Basin and the Zambezi River Basin. Whenever she informs us that she is about to start cooking the kids and I take refuge there.
Yet if truth be told there is, alarmingly, a trend in many Western countries towards toning down Christmas in case it offends other groups.
Instead of specifically celebrating the birth of Jesus many countries, with a Christian majority, place the emphasis on a general catch-all offend-no-one holiday season.
This is surprising because Muslims, Jews, Hindus and other religions don’t tone down their holidays so as to avoid offending anyone. Correctly, they are of the view that a failure to accept their religious beliefs is a form of unacceptable intolerance.
Even liberal atheists who believe that religion is the 21st century’s hocus pocus cannot take issue with celebrating Christmas if they truly believe in freedom of belief.
If everyone conformed to the exact same behavior we would not require laws to regulate our conduct as it would become unnecessary. Because human beings are so different we create laws which should safeguard our freedoms. We do this by using mechanisms such as a constitution.
Constitutional democracies generally include freedom of belief, expression and speech among many others. This system of government is the one that is most touted by so-called liberals (progressives?) as providing the most freedoms while safeguarding the citizens of a country against government and state abuse.
Yet it is these self-same liberals who are at the forefront of efforts to ban any official celebration of Christmas.
In the United States, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)have initiated court cases to bar the display of images and other material referring to Christmas from public property, including schools.
They argue that government-funded displays of Christmas imagery and traditions violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, prohibiting the establishment by Congress of a national religion.
There is, in my opinion, a vast difference between the government of a predominantly Christian country celebrating Christmas and a breakdown of the separation of powers between a secular state and church. In the case of the former it is an expression of joy relating to the season which has no impact on the day to day system of running the country. In the case of the latter – where religious laws are used as the test for the legitimacy of laws or simply employed wholesale to govern the state – you have a problem.
As I am finding more and more often these days, it is the liberals/progressives who are among the most intolerant of all and who have no regard for others whose views differ from theirs. They set about deciding what they deem to be morally correct and batter everyone and anyone whose opinion differs from theirs.
Not only in the case of freedom of religion but in other instances such as freedom of speech.
Activists who are at the forefront of freedom of speech can be heard raging on about the danger of government encroachment in this area. (I have personally waged an ongoing war against the Protection of State Information Bill and certainly condemn any intervention). Yet they are the same people who wish to decide what is politically correct and as such are as much a danger to this right as the state.
Anyone who dares to even make a joke which they deem to be politically incorrect is the subject matter of a media onslaught.
As an example the latest utterances of Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson has formed the subject matter of a witch hunt led by these self same “guardians of our morals”. What Clarkson jokingly said about protesters and suicide cases is suddenly the greatest threat to our moral wellbeing.
I dare say that Rowan Atkinson, John Cleese and many other great comedians have said far far worse than Jezza and somehow gotten away with it. Could Cleese have done the German sketch in Fawlty Towers today?
I doubt it.
Yes Clarkson and other comedians should be allowed to make jokes like that and worse.
Left to the guardians of our morals soon nobody will be able to say anything because if being offended is the yardstick for sanction then trust me somewhere, someone is going to be offended by anything we say.
Liberal/progressives believe that they are at the forefront of “safeguarding” our rights to freedom of speech and belief, yet to my mind they are the biggest threat to it with their unofficial method of censorship.
With that said I would like to wish all my Christian readers a very merry Christmas, my Jewish readers a happy Hanukkah and if I’ve missed out any other religions please let me know in the comments section below.
To my atheist readers and others who don’t believe in religion here’s hoping you guys get a good rest and enjoy a safe and healthy holiday.
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