Abolish Christmas, Abolish "the Trappings" of Faith.

different people are using the word
atheism with different meanings and one of the reasons why debates within atheism are often so embittered and vitriolic is that they want to insist no no no only my definition is the true and correct meaning of the word rather than just saying look for this discussion to proceed we just have to say okay there's atheism definition one and atheism definition 2 we come to some mutual understanding and then move on to more pragmatic considerations like what do we do next there are some atheists who look at the type of cultural festival you see on your screen here and they see something that should be abolished they look at this and think well ideally a hundred years from now or 200 years from now this type of religious festival and religious ceremony will have disappeared from the world it will have become a thing of the past it will be something talked about in history lessons in the academic study of cultural anthropology but it will not be something that people believe in it will not be something people practice the songs being sung here to the monotheistic god the ceremonies worshiping that god will actually disappear from society some atheists think of the future of atheism that way some atheists think of the end point or goal that they're working towards as their of their activism as being the abolition of this type of ceremony and then there are some atheists and these people don't have a separate name they don't have a separate category they don't self-identify as a separate movement there are some atheists who vocally and actively say that they would preserve this type of ritual they would preserve the songs they would actually preserve all of the cultural trappings the institutions the architecture the festival of islam christianity hinduism of all the religions they would preserve it all they're only interested in a sort of inward transformation of the people from being believers to unbelievers that people will change from having a religious mentality to having a secular mentality is it good to have a cultural celebration i think it is it seems that you think it is now if we were starting afresh within our culture would i say i tell you what let's build it upon some archaic religion that nobody believes anymore of course i wouldn't say that would i but we're not starting afresh we're starting on a position with a whole lot of history and when i look back at that christmas celebration i see a whole load of depth and richness that has the culture that is so difficult to create from fresh cloth you talk about these other cultures i admire people actually totally contrary to what you say i admire people in these other cultures that can take a secular path in a day-to-day life who can lose their religion and will say that is what i've done because like you say that's not an easy thing for them to do within the societies in which they live it's a lot easier for me it's not so easy for them but still maintain the cultural trappings the celebrations the festivals and managed to incorporate those and then fairly enough they also of course want to pick and choose about which aspects of the tradition they would preserve i would say for example conceding to the other side here they would not actually want to preserve circumcision male circumcision or female circumcision but these people are broadly open to being conservative in relation to religious cultures so that's a very deep divide within atheism and two subtly but profoundly different groups of people who are both using the name of atheism but in the pursuit of different objectives but still maintain the cultural trappings the celebrations the festivals and managed to incorporate those it's syncretism again but going in the other direction incorporating those religious things into a more secular basis and saying you know what we can keep these things right everybody enjoys them everybody enjoys them everybody enjoys them let's keep them on one level this is a really really shallow difference of opinion shallow but important and then there's a little bit more of a profound political point to be made and it's a point that applies to both sides this is not a situation where i'm right and he's wrong and on the shallow issue about to speak on on cultural differences there's no way one side can be right and the other side can be wrong how important is opera should the government of canada spend taxpayers money to maintain arts such as opera and the ballet well if you're willing to accept the incredibly myopic self-centered view that this guy does and just state as a fact this culture is wonderful everyone enjoys it it's important it's valuable then of course it's a very short leap to say well then of course taxpayers money should be spent to preserve the opera to make it possible for canadians in downtown toronto to go and see traditional european culture like italian opera and french and russian ballet let's say i don't know exactly which traditions of ballet they're preserving maybe it's the czech ballet i don't know um that argument is really very very hard to sustain even jazz music it's a very small percentage of canadians who value jazz and our government actually spends millions and millions of dollars supporting jazz music and jazz festivals because it's considered some kind of refined high culture but of course it gets even more observed when you start to ask why are taxes being taken from everyone you know the rich and the poor alike to be spent on a type of culture that's really only appreciated by a very small minority of wealthy people so one of the concepts he uses again and again noel plum the guy i'm indirectly debating with here he just refers to my idea of culture as drab and he completely presumes that his idea of culture is colorful and entertaining and wonderful and is something that everyone enjoys no not everyone enjoys the opera not everyone enjoys the ballet not everyone enjoys jazz music for many of us sitting for three hours through an opera is a horrible experience and this is of course a secular example now um at cambridge university england there's a major annual performance of the tadium there's a major there are many major performances throughout the year of i was going to say carols of of christian choir music christian songs in this traditional gothic architecture now i'm not in a position to say nobody enjoys that some people do and some of the people who appreciate it are atheists or secular people who get dressed up and sit in a church for hours of hearing songs about how wonderful jesus is and how a wonderful god is but it doesn't take a lot of maturity to recognize there are some people who don't appreciate that music who don't want to sit and listen to that for three hours and there are some people who really dislike it intensely there are people who dislike their tax dollars paying for this music to perform there are people who pay tuition to a specific college within cambridge and they don't like the fact that some of their tuition dollars are going to pay for this religious ritual in a religious chapel religious architecture maybe many centuries own there are questions here of saying wait a minute it's not merely that not everyone enjoys this there's a real struggle going on for what the present and future of our culture ought to be now his situation as a kind of monolingual monocultural guy in england it is different from the situation of myself as an ethnic jew in canada do you expect me to celebrate the culture of the british empire in canada a culture that came to us through genocide and conquest a culture that you know for me as an ethnic jew is always going to be a few steps alien from who my family were and my background and so on but it's even more alien when you're looking at it in terms of the history of yes yes y'all slavery and genocide and conquest and colonialism now by the same token i would imagine the significance of italian opera in italy is somewhat different than it is in canada there are all kinds of discussions we could have here about government policy so on and so forth but this problem is not just as shallow as saying well some people like opera and some people like don't some people don't it's not just as shallow or simple as saying well some people want to go to this chapel in cambridge university and hear the performance of the tadium they want to hear christian songs being sung and some people don't uh there's a deeper and broader question here of institutional learning so this is really the use of the word learning that's used in economics and of course it's invaded the social sciences particularly political science um [Music] how do people know in a particular city that if they hang around city hall and watch for the notices of condemned properties being put up for auction they can make a lot of money the practices of the state the way people respond to authority the way they can make money out of you know the standard operation of bureaucracy and authority that's a type of learning which is very rarely or maybe even never taught in schools and colleges but people working within the real estate industry they learn all these things they learn where and when to go at city hall to get these notices and find out what's going on they know how to look up and find out about zoning changes that can be worth millions of dollars that knowledge there's a whole network of learning that goes on and of course it all happens in the shadow of government regulation and government enforcement that these people who are making money out of real estate for example they know that if they break a law if they break a zoning rule or something it'll cost them a lot of money or maybe even put them in prison in the same way people develop attitudes towards democracy bureaucracy authority in the shadow of these institutions there's a type of profound learning that goes on at cambridge university which isn't just what happens in the classroom it what it's what happens through precisely these rituals these performances and people's participation in them i think there's a type of learning that goes on if children grow up really being told that the opera and the ballet are the pinnacle of our culture or the are to be looked up at as the glory of european civilization and by some extent the glory of canadian civilization to go to a university where it is the tadium that's being performed it's songs to the glory of the christian god and jesus and that that is what people dress up in their finest clothes to go and do that that's the celebration that will punctuate a very boring university experience for many of these students most the students i knew at cambridge they had very little time and very little money they scurried back and forth between crummy apartments and the library they lived very harried lives and these ritual occasions um they were major events in the lives of those students and everything about that performance and you know including the architectural setting including just the splendor and and display of wealth that's involved if you like it's a contrast to the shoddiness of their day-to-day lives living in and out of a shoebox meeting with professors in offices that look like a shoebox so on and so forth there is a type of learning here there are attitudes towards authority and society and so on and so forth um that shape the way people behave the shape the way they act i do think that people going to mecca and medina people participating in the stoning of satan people participating in sometimes purely symbolic um you know theatrical rituals i do think that shapes the culture from top to bottom in a way that's reflected in how do you behave at city hall how do you behave at parliament how do you speak to authority figures how do you treat police and how to read how do the police treat you so this is something that for me goes deeper and further than just the question of whether or not people enjoy participating in those rituals but even so even on that shallower level i don't think it's asking too much of the other side to recognize some of us some hate what you love in culture it's the most blatantly obvious thing some people hate going to the opera some people hate having to sit through several hours of reading of the torah at a synagogue they hate it they don't want to be forced to sit through it or they don't want to do it force might be too strong they don't want to do it just to please their grandmother or please their wife or please some family or what have you there's this really strange deep presumption that these festivals are wonderful and as he says everyone everyone appreciates them compared to the quote unquote drab alternative of getting rid of them from your life you're telling me that your method's going to work better i don't think so because it's just drab and dull i'm sorry i've never spoken to a muslim atheist meaning here an ex-muslim atheist i have never spoken to even one that said that they miss attending prayers that they miss attending lectures and listening to the singing i have never met even one who said that they they dearly wish they could participate in the animal sacrifice elements the sort of slaughter and sharing of meat elements or going back on the hajj or what have you it's a very very strange claim that i think reflects a really narrow really self-centered white british perspective let me just ask you directly noel if you were born navajo indian do you think you'd perceive this the same way you do i was nervous about studying god's word because of past hurts that i seen a lot of missionaries had done to the native people i realized that god made me this way for a reason he gave my family for a reason it's just something that you're born into and when it came with denise we encountered that a lot she had a lot of penta bad anger towards uh the christian church because of some of the stuff that they did to native americans um in the name of jesus as i looked at her as she was talking about god and reading his word i that moment i said you know what i want that light i want that fire i got closer to god then i could ever imagine i was going to bible studies every wednesday and i was just reading the bible and it it changed me i've seen god work some great miracles god's even spoken to me in my life he found jesus through science it brought him right back to the creator of our earth i don't think it's too exotic or too bizarre to ask that question what if you were a black indigenous person in australia what if you were cree or ojibwe or mohawk the british empire invaded these places destroyed the indigenous culture forced them to stop practicing their own religion and force them to attend exactly these shitty boring british religious rituals for hours and hours and hours and you're saying everyone loves them everyone wants to continue with them only a crazy grinch would be against perpetuating and preserving these cultural traditions forever and ever well one some people regard those traditions as oppressive and some people who don't regard them as oppressive regard them as drab and boring how easy it is it's too easy to take up the cause of atheism and skepticism merely as an excuse for cheating on your wife and i'm sorry but that is part of what's going on right now in 2018. oh do you know that's a pretty high level a high standard of grubby behavior i lose some respect for you when you say something like that i just have to call [ __ ] on this no no this is a real factor do you know people look do you just live on the internet my father was a devout christian and he did not grow up in a christian family his mother before him he was raised by a single mother was not christian in any way my father was a devout profound christian he named like his first four sons all really obvious biblical names matthew christian joel and adam okay he was completely committed to what he called uh christian existentialism he was sold on but guess what he just could not commit to monogamy for him really specifically the idea of having an open relationship an open marriage or today people would use words like uh polyamory they didn't have terms like that back then so he probably just called it swinging um he was deeply committed to nudism and he struggled with being faithful or cheating on his wife and that broke his faith okay my father was a left-wing extremist he wasn't just a moderate communist compared to other communists he was an extremist that didn't break the faith that the christian religion and the bible had on okay cheating on his wife the desire to cheat on his wife is what broke it transformed his whole life and both gay people and straight people go through this where struggling with their own sexuality is what leads them to reject religion i think you're being an insincere piece of crap by not dealing with this you just want to act as if i'm not raising something meaningful here when i am no i have no statistics to back it up because i think nobody really wants to be honest and come forward and talk about it the gay community the trans community those people will more openly talk about how their sexuality led them to break away from the church um heterosexual men cheating on their wives less likely to be honest you're not even satisfied with the if you're not doing it my way you're not atheisting right no no you're going beyond that and just to see asserting that anybody that doesn't follow your lead has nefarious ulterior motives no that's not true i think this video will be really too boring if i went through point by point and after every single point he made just said no that's not true you're misrepresenting my argument he is step by step he's misrepresenting my argument at every step and i think he just sincerely isn't very bright and didn't pay much attention i don't think he has any ulterior motives at all and i don't describe negative ulterior motives to people who agree with him i would say that most of the people who agree with him haven't really thought this through short term or long term short term for example i don't think they've really thought it through the impact it will have on their own children if they have and raise children if they raise those children with muslim rituals and muslim festivals if they raise their children with hindu customs hindu festivals now atheists raising their children in those traditions as he's endorsing as he's supporting you you can't imagine any short-term problems with this back in the day back when i was first on the internet there was a support group for secular jewish parents who were horrified that their own children had basically converted to orthodox judaism like they were jewish parents who themselves were either atheists or like agnostic and didn't take their religion seriously but they maintained the customs and rituals of judaism and then one day they wake up and they're astonished normally their kid as a teenager is in a sense rebelling against them by going back to judaism by really taking their religion seriously if you maintain the outer husk of the religion intact one of the very clear dangers is simply that the next generation is gonna interpret that religion in a manner that is more traditional that is more forceful that is more true to what's actually written in the bible what's actually written in the quran even for religions like buddhism and hinduism so short term there are real concerns of that kind and again if you i don't know how much real world experience this guy has if you know some muslim families you'll know families like that where they feel like the older generation was this cosmopolitan secular muslim family and then they're shocked that maybe two generations on there are younger people getting radicalized and becoming to some extent fundamentalist and returning to the roots of religion well why did you raise your kids muslim yeah you raised the muslim light you raised them with a watered down westernized version of islam but guess what like all the components of the bomb were set out on the dining room table and all it took took was your kid to take this seriously assemble the components and they've reassembled the same ideology that's been so potent it's been such a transformative force in the world for centuries the same elements of the religion that appealed to people powerfully say one thousand years ago they can still appeal appeal to people powerfully today the long-term problems are even more bizarre is your theory that downtown montreal quebec should remain dominated by cathedrals and christian churches of various kinds forever and ever and ever is your theory that 200 years from now in the future places like australia and canada and new zealand should devote taxpayers dollars to maintaining and retrenching the infrastructure the actual architecture the institutions the festivals the recitation of those songs forever and ever and ever or at some point does it stop what if you lived in a society where people celebrated the birthday of adolf hitler all over the world including within russia and within china there are people who still celebrate the birthdays of of joseph stalin who celebrate mao zedong those celebrations those symbolic ritual events they don't do harm in themselves they don't hurt people directly however they demonstrate who you really are regular viewers of this channel will be very familiar with what i'm getting at in that clip and it's so clearly explained in the video he quoted from there i mean obviously he cuts short i'm not complaining but it does not take a lot of intelligence to fill in the conclusion to even what you just heard there in black and white in only so many words okay the next step of the argument is to say look when someone wears a t-shirt with a swastika let's just even say a t-shirt that specifically approves of adolf hitler the problem is not that the t-shirt is doing harm the problem is not that the t-shirt kills people the t-shirt doesn't travel back in time and kill millions of people it doesn't directly harm people today however a human being wearing that t-shirt they have revealed to me something about themselves the t-shirt helps me understand who you are if you're wearing that t-shirt that leads me to assume that you are the kind of person who either approves of what adolf hitler did in the past or who even would approve of something similar today politically racially what have you okay when i meet people which happens more often who are wearing a t-shirt that shows joseph stalin or mao zedong and that is proclaiming that they support communism okay the t-shirt doesn't do any harm but it reveals something to me about you about your mentality about your values about your ethics it reveals a present tense political problem that is still unfolding so if i meet someone in canada who's wearing a t-shirt that says that they support the anglican church and the genocide the anglican church carried out in canada if i met someone who was wearing a t-shirt that specifically approved of the pogroms against jewish people or forcing jewish people to live in a ghetto this is medieval europe we're talking about here not the nazi period if you ever met someone who's actually wearing the symbols showing that yes they approve of this tradition they approve of this history they approve of this ideology then that presents a problem in the present tense and you know what the good news is most of the people who are wearing t-shirts that show mao zedong show a communist leader they actually are ignorant of what it is they're endorsing most of the people who wear a christian cross are ignorant of what the history of the church is and if they can be enlightened if they can learn more about the history of that church of what those symbols mean of what was so terribly wrong with that history then they're probably going to change what at least how they're expressing their faith or religion and they may actually change their attitude towards the political history of europe in the past the present the future what decisions they want to make to have a secular society as opposed to a theocracy here and now so this somewhat staggering false equivalence of of celebrating hitler's birthday with celebrating um the modern instantiation of christmas everything he says from this point forward is complete nonsense that there's no point responding to this was his initial reaction to me on twitter and it's the reaction that carries on and on in this youtube video which is just him having a connection because he he's freaked out by the comparison between christianity and nazi ideology but it's not sufficient to understand that i am making such a comparison you have to understand the allegory and the purpose the allegory is put to so i do not subscribe to a current left-wing notion of symbolic violence okay i don't subscribe to that i'm spelling out for you precisely what it is i think the problem is with the symbolic celebration of or respect paid to an ideology like communism an ideology like the third reich in germany or an ideology like christianity maybe especially in the context of canada the united states and australia where the genocide was committed right there by and for this ideology now i don't think it takes a huge amount of intellect to understand the point i'm making the point is not that hitler and jesus are the same the point is not that hitler and santa claus are the same those are outrageously stupid childishly stupid misinterpretations of both what i said and why i'm saying it i'm spelling out for you why it is that the employment of these symbols has real political importance here and now and i'm not subscribing to a stereotypical left-wing approach of claiming symbolic violence or complain complaining that like speech is violence or that you're oppressing me by wearing that t-shirt or that i'm oppressed by the fact that people at cambridge university are going to attend christian church services paid for by my tuition i don't see things that simplistically but on the other hand when you using these clear examples you have a sense of why it's disturbing why you detect that there's something wrong when people are wearing t-shirts approving of adolf hitler and joseph stalin okay that symbolic significance that's there for me also when in the 21st century people are providing even symbolic recognition to god almighty jesus christ etc etc christmas has a very very different um role within our society than celebrations of hitler's birthday how would i view somebody who celebrated hitler's birthday i'd view them with suspicion right because it's not a normal thing to celebrate i would assume that if you celebrated hitler's birthday that you had sympathies for hitler as he says though it says something about you yes it would in that instance you really don't have to go out on a limb to celebrate christmas it tells me next to nothing about what you believe that you celebrate christmas do you think that would be true if you were living among the cree and ojibwe of saskatchewan indigenous people in canada you know what it actually tells me a lot about you in that cultural context whether you celebrate christmas or whether you refuse to because you correctly perceived the anglican church and the catholic church as responsible for the genocide and overall destruction of your people over decades and decades but leading up to and including like the 1980s it's not ancient history for those people it's not at all do you think it tells me something significant about you if you celebrate christmas in cambodia where i used to live and work by the way if you celebrate christmas in vien chen the capital city of laos all places i've known all places everywhere don't you think it tells you something significant about you let's just say right now in laos if you either refuse all religion if you embrace the religion of the french empire that previously conquered laos and set up you know catholic missionary outfits there and catholic temples or or if you reject both buddhism and catholicism and you subscribe to some kind of marxist materialist you know atheism yeah you know what it tells me a lot about you in all of these contexts the one exception is you because you live in such a narrow minded white bred echo chamber that it can't even [ __ ] occur to you that yes noel it tells me a lot about your lilly white british ass that you don't question christmas that you're not willing to question the centrality of this ritual of this song and dance of this tradition you can question other traditions but not your own you can't even question that some people not everybody not everybody likes the anglican church not everybody likes your [ __ ] cultural values just as not everybody likes the opera and not everybody likes the ballet not everybody likes christmas not everybody likes sitting in church pews and listen to the tdm being worse bursted but in the political context of the 21st century now more than ever you've got to look around and ask what does atheism mean to you what does it mean to us and what is the future we're building in this case genuinely i think that noel has a valid definition of atheism that's just completely different from mine the vision of atheism that he spells out at length in the video as a whole when he's not just insulting me or misinterpreting and misrepresenting what i said the vision of atheism that he spells out is in a word reformed christianity that's what he wants he doesn't want a secular society he doesn't want one day in the future to walk through the streets of paris and not see cathedrals he wants the cathedrals to be there forever and ever 200 years 40 years five years he doesn't want one day in the future to walk through mecca and medina and not see people celebrating uh throwing stones at satan and uh going around in a circle around the cabin touching the magical stone from heaven the uh this asteroid fragment you know oh no all from his perspective all of those traditions can continue forever and ever without end he fundamentally doesn't see a problem with them he just wants a reformation of religion so that it more suits his 21st century secular sentiments and that's fine i actually regard that as a legitimate definition of atheism it's just one that's completely different from mine the form of atheism i'm interested in would actually aim at in future separation of church and state something we don't have in canada people sure as [ __ ] don't have in saudi arabia and a lot of countries around the world but we don't even have it in canada i would want a form of secularism a form of atheism that is actually pursuing a future in which these religious practices cease to exist and yes of course circumcision is way more egregious than the celebration of christmas in terms of priorities of course getting rid of circumcision it should be a higher priority but in terms of the difference you can make in your own life and for the life of your children getting christmas out of your life and replacing it with something meaningful and something beautiful that's something you can do i focus on the difference i can make in the world i'm completely powerless to oppose the catholic church even in cambodia even in laos countries where the catholic church is relatively powerless compared to i don't know italy or france okay i'm completely powerless to oppose circumcision even in the united states of america a country where the circumcision lobby is less powerful than it is in saudi arabia or indonesia okay circumcision mainstream decision huge issue in all these countries okay it would take a huge amount of money an organization of huge numbers of people and decades of hard work to even make a dent on the circumcision issue and that's why it's really worth talking about the difference you can make for yourself and others here and now within your lifetime by engaging in positive cultural production okay he says some really snarky backhanded insulting things like oh whoa i hope your christmas celebration goes well you're not you're not the first person he says i'm just like the jehovah's witnesses giving my kid a miserable celebration and refusing to participate in christmas no no no i'm not like the jehovah's witnesses you know what i taught my daughter that christmas which yeah i had to block people on the internet because i went to france and then 24 7 for the short period of time i had custom my daughter we made christmas cookies with all this stuff but you know what we did we replaced christmas with sock mus we told her the story of socrates okay you know you know what the difference is between jesus and socrates jesus stood up for what he believed in was executed for what he believed in socrates stood up for what he believed in was executed for him well for one thing socrates was a real person not a mythological character that's a significant difference but you know what the other difference is what they believed in one of the reasons why socrates was put on trial and executed was that he taught in his school that thunder and lightning are not controlled by zeus thunder and lightning are natural phenomena created and controlled by the clouds he actively through discourse and logic and through his teaching taught people that it was a custom and a superstition to believe that thunder and lightning were controlled by zeus that you could pray to zeus and control those things that in fact they were natural phenomena controlled by the clouds that ultimately the con the clouds were controlled by the vortex of winds in the sky so on and so forth okay he was willing to stand up for that principle be put on trial and die for it in his own society he was considered a heretic because he was a secular activist an atheist activist after his own fashion in his own deeply imperfect way critique of socrates would be a separate video to make okay we made christmas cookies but the man with a white beard wearing a white toga on those cookies wasn't santa claus it was socrates that was a meaningful story i could share with my daughter we had a wonderful sock mess and we had to sit down and explain to her yeah you know those buildings were walking past from the street those are churches but they aren't made for people like us our history as ethnic jews which is what my daughter is by blood she's jewish the same way i am she's gonna have to deal with anti-semitism her whole life the same way i did you know what those buildings were made by this religion that persecuted our people in fact ultimately they're the reason why several million of us are now missing and aren't in europe anymore today where they aren't here in france they aren't here in germany so on and so forth yeah you know what that's a terrible bloody violent history that excludes and oppresses us so i'm not gonna make cookies celebrating them and their religion i'm not gonna wear a trinket around my neck or a t-shirt that says i'm on their team because i'm not i'm working for the eventual abolition of christianity in canada united states and europe and the progress i can make towards that although tiny although minuscule can at least be sincere i wish more people like you noel would at least share in that sincerity and maybe together step by step we could make a lot more progress