"Secular Christmas", the Hypocrisy of New Atheism.

I remember seeing a critique of the
various forms of personality test intelligence tests and aptitude tests that were circulating and popular in the Western world I remember a critique pointing out that none of these tests would ever tell you that you're lazy and laziness is a force as fundamental as gravity or any other law of physics and explaining why society is the way it is around us right now there can be no doubt that for both those who are very religious and for those who are very secular the most fundamental reason why the holiday of Christmas continues in its current form is laziness there are Christians who regard Christmas as wrong because it represents a departure away from what the Bible and legitimate Christianity are supposed to represent and of course there are secular atheists who regard Christian is wrong precisely because it is Christian and they want to reject or challenge the social status quo of a Christian dominated Christian defined society but it's hard to do something really creative it makes you vulnerable it opens you up to judgment and scorn and mockery I think everyone is familiar with the paradox of the stereotypical teenager who tries to do something innovative in their style of dress or their style of makeup or hair a teenager who ostensibly and outwardly says they don't want to conform they say they want to do something creative but what they end up doing instead is being different just like everyone else they conform to some other set of conformist standards to be redundant which is to say they reject one set of fashions for another set of fashions that are equally not of their creation not of their own innovation and you wonder to what extent it really is elective as opposed to conform behavior something I think all of us have either dealt with ourselves growing up or seen others deal with I say it with some degree of sympathy when you do something really creative even if it is in a theater as shallow as your own hair and makeup and clothing when you do something genuinely creative genuinely new innovative and unexpected it opens you up to mockery and scorn whereas clothing yourself in the familiar attire of cultural expectations is safe and the fundamental challenge that atheists sceptics and rational thinkers are facing in the 21st century is creative not destructive were past the point when any purpose was served by simply pointing the finger and saying that Christmas is something bad and wrong frankly I think we're past the point of pointing the finger and saying that elements of the faith or their religion themselves are bad in role that only gets you so far at some point we have to stand up and creatively face the challenge of not replacing music with silence but with new different better music of not replacing customs with a mirror empty space and sense of self-righteousness but of recognizing oh when I'm raising my child I need to have fables to tell I need to have stories and songs and maybe puppet shows and rituals and it's not enough for me to merely complain that the rituals of the old society were linked to maybe feudalistic ideals or fascistic ideals or supernatural notions that i want to repudiate we have to move on from repudiating religion to replacing religion and I stand in the party of people who don't just want to replace religion with another equivalent religion I don't just want to see people convert from Islam to Christianity or Christianity Buddhism I really want to see a regeneration of culture in the 21st century from root to branch and I say this because I think especially as parents if we're being honest with ourselves the vast majority of what is taught to our children is garbage is a waste of everyone's time it's a waste of your time singing it as a parent and it's a waste of the child's time learning it ring around a rosy a pocketful of posies how many times are we gonna sing this song the the farmer in the Dell I mean the whole accumulated wisdom of storybooks and fables and fairy tales they're intellectually bankrupt and morally bankrupt ironically not just from a secular atheist perspective but also from the perspective of religious fundamentalists this is often something we have a in common at the two extremes because those are the extremes of people who are questioning cultural conventions and we're asking in a sincere sense where can we go from here now there's a further irony I want to draw attention to in this in this video the irony is this nobody likes to be told that they are lazy nobody likes to be told that they're self-indulgent and a hypocrite and yet the role that secular atheist activists have taken on in the 21st century is really one of reproaching the religious establishment for being lazy intellectually dishonest self-indulgent hypocritical well at the same time showing these same traits showing how lazy they are how hypocritical they are when it comes to the challenge of replacing Christmas or in any way offering a better positive alternative to the institutions and cultural assumptions that they rightly criticized to be clear I'm not saying that they're wrong in criticizing these things I'm saying that criticism itself has its remit and its limit and beyond that we're looking at a truly creative challenge when I say that people in the new atheist movement are self-indulgent what do I mean I was talking to a friend of mine a relatively old friend of mine recently in response to the the video just prior to this one on this channel and she was telling me that she used to go to many of these conferences normally called secular conferences new atheist conferences sometimes using the label of skeptic humanists under various settings and she herself was once sexually assaulted by someone by complete stranger one of these conferences and she was aware of these controversies circling at the conference's about sexual misconduct and bad behavior of this kind and she observed she said part of the underlying dynamic here is that these are predominantly people who were raised in a repressive religion they were raised Mormon or Presbyterian or even Catholic or Muslim and then they come to these conferences to declare that they're ready to sin that they're ready for all of the indulgences that they denied themselves for so many years when they sincerely believed in this religion right and this sets up a kind of intellectual antagonism it sets up the expectation that the function of the secular movement is to liberate you from the expectations of your grandparents to set you on a path to this kind of self-indulgence and to provide a set of ready excuses for things you already desire to do this isn't a framework that presents you with a challenge of saying hey you can't just replace a song with silence you can't just raise the next generation raise your own children with a blank sheet of paper where Christmas used to be or where all these relatively meaningless stories used to be whether we think of those as a corporate children's fables like Batman and Superman and spider-man or if we think of those as the folklore of the Dark Ages or is the legacy of modern Western religion and the creative element requires great self-discipline great self-sacrifice and real vulnerability where people are gonna laugh at you people are gonna make fun of you and score you because you're doing something genuinely and authentically nonconformist and creative and new so I know it's dorky but I'm out here no here short you know it's done I'm out here so all of you can laugh at me I've got this is a pro so in the background already this is a toy representation of of Socrates and I've been going through a stack of books I already made a book review of one of the worst of them this is just Aristotle been reading the clouds which is a classical comedy a critique of Socrates in many ways different books that have attempted in different ways to popularize and reconceptualize the historical and philosophical importance of Socrates for children for young adults and so on I've been looking around these materials I'm looking at them as raw material as precedents inspiration in trying to trying to write my own stories in trying to challenge I mean not just the tyranny of you know institutional Christianity but in some ways just the tyranny of mediocrity the extreme mediocrity of Curious George and Peppa Pig and Batman and spider-man the readily available and meaningless institutions that seem to shape the values that are passed on from one generation to the next all right I think people don't realize 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 no 2018 that is that is part of the problem and the torrent of excuses I've received I don't know maybe I received as many as 100 messages in total many dozens of messages from people who identify as skeptics and new atheists and as members of the movement I received so many messages insisting to me that there's nothing wrong with celebrating a so-called secular Christmas I really have to ask you guys to look in the mirror on this one I really have to ask why it is you're overlooking the points I already made my in my first video he doesn't strike a chord with you what if you lived in a society where people celebrated the birthday of Adolf Hitler you may not know it but you're living in a society like that right now every so often one of those people comes on YouTube and uploads a video of that neo-nazi subculture celebrating 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 who celebrate people who are responsible for math mass murder pardon me for mass murder 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 the reason why it's so terrifying to find out that your neighbor celebrates the birthday of Adolf Hitler is that it tells you something about him and his character it tells you something about him of course morally if you live in a society or if you live in a family where you're expected to not rock the boat to just conform to just get along with the celebration of Adolf Hitler's birthday at some point there's an onus on you as an adult to say no this tradition this history it's gotta stop somewhere and it's gonna stop with me now standing up and doing what's right because it's the right thing to do even if I have to risk being laughed at being laughed at by my own family in replacing this with something better how is it that the new atheist movement has become so lazy that they do not expect of themselves what they expect Muslims to do in much more difficult circumstances they do not expect themselves to do what Hindus do in much more difficult circumstances would you accept for a minute that someone was an ex Muslim and rejecting Islam if they participated in all of the outward trappings rituals and celebrations of the Muslim faith you wouldn't accept it at all you demand to know how is this society ever gonna change if people of principle like you don't stand up and make that change happen and that's what you should demand of yourselves and you know it would require real courage real risk to do that in Saudi Arabia even in Malaysia Indonesia the so-called moderate Muslim owners you can imagine just how hard it would be to stand up and refuse to participate in those cultural conventions but here in the decadent West where everythings made easy for you by the corporate culture of so-called secular Christmas you don't even have what it takes to stand up and do the right thing at no risk to yourself really at no inconvenience and maybe that is because you have come to regard secularism as something self-indulgent as something destructive yes in that you just see the critique of religion the repudiation of religions the holes you remove as the whole of your movement but also in that you're avoiding really thinking through the possibility that there's an onus on you to take the next step to do something creative if not for yourself alone for the next generation and for the changes that's going to bring about in society these things do have negative consequences for people living a life of prayer of self-deception living a life defined but cultural expectations that are even indirectly formed by these religions living a life in which you perceive the political status quo hierarchy Authority secular Authority even in religious terms in which the whole scope of what's thinkable and unthinkable to you is formed by the legacy of religion going back for so many centuries the accretions of religion even when you take faith out of the picture even when you because the vast majority of people living within a Muslim society at your society Christian society I have no doubt that majority these people truly in their heart of hearts don't believe or feel that they can't believe even if they want to believe but they nevertheless live within those strictures they live lives in which they are constantly in subtle ways encouraging others discouraging others and punishing others to live within the narrow band of what is thinkable in a religious worldview and it's that worldview we're trying to take apart and to replace with something better as I say I've received maybe 100 excuses for why so-called secular activists new atheists etc think there's nothing wrong with continuing to celebrate Christmas I think every single one of you is a hypocrite who could not for even one year take on the burden of in this same way celebrating Muslim religious traditions in an atheist way who could not for one year take on the celebration of Hindu cultural traditions in an atheist way and you wouldn't looking across the border to those countries you wouldn't look fondly or caught kindly on someone who was themselves personally an inwardly an atheist but raising their own child in that way within the strictures of a Muslim cultural tradition of a Hindu cultural tradition because everything you believe everything you represent is a challenge to an Gatien of that tradition so all I've got to say to you is I hope you find the strength to be vulnerable to be creative and to see that we collectively can do better than the Bible we can offer something better than Christmas and I think also we can offer something better than Batman and Curious George but it's all got to begin with the recognition that there is a problem that there's a creative challenge for us to face so stop making excuses for so-called secular Christmas it's lazy it's hypocritical it's self-indulgent and it's morally wrong