#ReplaceChristmas ("New Atheism" Needs New Holidays)

Christianity it is really easy for
intellectuals to sit around and pat themselves in the back and feel like the era of Christianity's power is broken and discarded until you have kids my ex-wife has a PhD in anthropology and she's half Jewish and when she was married to me she was highly motivated to raise our child our then hypothetical future child with absolutely no celebration of Christmas today I am the divorced parent of a five-year-old daughter who has four years of memory of Christmas being celebrated it's a problem what's that you say but even the most hardcore intellectual atheists here on YouTube who posture as some kind of I know extreme secularists who are out to transform study even they say that the celebration of Christmas is just no problem at all why it says secular as the American Constitution or um taking your vows on a stack of Bibles when you go to court it's perfectly secular there's no problem with that there's no problem with Santa Claus Santa Claus isn't in the Bible these same people these secularists and atheists would never make the same excuses for raising their children with the annual celebration of a Muslim holiday if you actually look at some of the Hindu and Buddhist holidays what actually happens in them thinking of a certain Hindu celebration in Nepal that involves slaughtering and sacrificing large numbers of cattle we still have that going on in some sects of Judaism also you might be surprised at the durability of animal sacrifice as a concept in the 21st century you wouldn't have your children participating in any of the supernaturals moreover whereas it is genuinely disputed and contested today whether or not Jesus Christ ever was an historical figure or if his origins are entirely mythological whereas it is disputed whether or not Moses ever was an historically real person or if he's just a mythological figure there's no debate about Adolf Hitler and there are certain segments of society who celebrate the birthday of Adolf Hitler there are still segments of society who celebrate and revere Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong Lenin your choice why why would you want to keep your child separate from all of these these holidays all these celebrations have any of them killed as many people as Christianity do any of them really have as much blood on their hands as long a record of genocide as Christianity and yet I find here on YouTube especially there's a spirit of really kind of phony celebration and self-congratulation that Christianity has been beaten that the war for the future of hearts and minds in the decadent West has already been won have you tried to explain to your kid why they don't have a Christmas tree and the other kids do it's easy if you're Jewish part of my family is Jewish part of my family is not let me tell you something a lot of Jewish people are raised with a very simple very fundamental myth being inculcated into them from an early age the reason why you don't get a Christmas tree they say is because you're better than the other kids because you were born special because you're one of the chosen people there are kids who grow up Hindu let's just say specifically they're Brahma Hindus from northern India they get told there's a really good reason why you don't get a Christmas tree and that's because your ancestors go back to this incredibly early period of time when the Vedas were first recited in ancient Sanskrit and that the Vedas are these magical texts that if they're not recited literally the world will end the Sun will not rise they're so fundamental to the fabric of the universe and the concept of karma and everything else there are Buddhists I think fewer and fewer today who grow up with a traditional cosmology that likewise makes the preservation of Buddhist texts and customs and rituals seem like the most important thing in the world or at least a valid excuse for why you don't have presents under the Christmas tree like other kids and the cold hard truth of rational nihilistic atheism is that there are no excuses the Christmas tree has to be thrown on the dustbin of history along with circumcision burning witches conversion by the sword so many barbaric regretable traditions that existed and were respected for centuries or millennia as the case may be they just have to be looked upon now as errors and the challenge is not destructive but creative because if you have a child you're not trying to replace Christianity with nothing your challenge is to replace Christianity with something better and that's why it is so much easier to raise a child Buddhist and just replace Christianity with Buddhism is to raise a child as a skeptical secular nihilistic atheist with an appreciation for the importance of history and the progress of science there is no holiday for that there is no Kwanzaa there is no simple substitution where you can replace Christmas with some other custom and I'm gonna tell you straight I think that people like Jacqueline Glenn are letting us down here on YouTube I think that people like the amazing atheist TJ Kirk are letting us down here on YouTube they've really participated in and even to some extent created the social fiction that all you need to do as an atheist to beat Christianity is sit back and laugh is sit back and point the finger and revel in your own smug sense of intellectual superiority and it's not enough you're not just competing with the Christmas tree you're competing with the Sistine Chapel you're competing with the assembled beauty and sculpture and works of art and architectural accomplishments and traditions and songs and poetry of centuries and millennia and what are you gonna replace it with what are you gonna offer your own child that's better it's the same thing it's an imperfect comparison but it's in some ways the same thing with veganism where you look at the reality of a culture that's built on meeting eat eating meat pardon me eating meat wearing leather drinking cow milk you can't just look at this destructively as a destructive challenge like you just want to destroy a factory farming you have to look at this as a creative challenge as something productive we say I want to replace the poisonous and cruel elements of this culture with something that's really better I'm in the process now of inventing a new holiday that I don't expect anyone aside from my own children to ever celebrate I'm taking on a strange grade of challenge to prepare a series of stories songs rituals puppet shows whatever I can do to make it more entertaining built around the life and death and philosophy of Socrates and the overall sense of importance of the brief period of history when Athens really represented the progress of democracy and to some extent human reason and rationality however flawed the point of this exercise is not to represent Athens as Paradise Lost but let me tell you something Socrates was a real person unlike Jesus he's not just a myth and Socrates represents something he certainly raises important questions that I think are more meaningful to atheists and skeptical people today in contrast to Jesus in contrast to Moses and in contrast to odious political figures who are celebrated by different you know political extremists so much like religious extremists still this time and you know I don't feel I'm stepping into the shoes of anyone else who's who's made this effort before that's the that's the weirdest thing if you come on the internet and say you want to start a new fad no idea you'd normally you have a lot of precedents to look around at and there are all these people who've been engaged in all these different you know pseudo movements you know and some of these people is so cold you know I don't know skeptical intellectuals they have cruises and dinner parties and fundraisers and you know they make up these little monikers to promote their lecture tours and their books there's all this smug self-satisfied celebration going on and I don't see that basic creativity I don't see that challenge being met creatively for the full life-cycle of people in the 21st century that includes birth and childhood and retirement and old age and death ultimately when you get buried or when you get put into a sack and I don't know cremated rolled down a hill thrown to the ocean whatever whatever it is you want let my own father my own father wasn't just an atheist he was a communist extremist and in a lot of ways my philosophy is a reaction against that I rejected communism and when it came time for him to die he had years the planet you know we got the medical diagnosis and he burned out slowly so he had years to plan it it blew my mind when my mother told me he was he was in a in a church cemetery his lifelong dream was to burn down the church literally and figuratively he supported he supported Mao Zedong when Mao Zedong burned down the Buddhist temples in Tibet he applauded that and supported that and said yes that's what he thought there should be more of planet Earth and here he is with his bones buried in the earth in a church cemetery with his last rites spoken by a priest who my mother was assured me was my mother assured me he was a real nice guy this particular praise start thinking about the future guys I mean death is the easiest part to handle because you know dead men tell no tales you think it's harmless to raise your kid celebrating Christmas then why don't you think it's harmless to take them down to the mosque and raise them with Islam why don't you think it's harmless to raise them in in Hinduism you think it's harmless because it's familiar you think it's harmless because the constant barrage of advertising has made this particular religion its particular superstitions lies cultural values irrational and entities seem so familiar that you think you can pass them on to the next generation without harm but just as invisibly as circumcision has pervaded our whole culture and society the harm is all the more real because it's ubiquitous and the creative struggle ahead of us is all the more difficult and terrible because the vast majority of people are blind to what it is we're struggling against