Dancing on Heads of Pins

The battle over Christmas is almost ludicrous if it weren’t representative of a deeper dysfunction in religion today. All the saber-rattling and threats over using Christmas vs. Holidays masks deeper schisms, schisms that the gay community has been aware of for decades. There’s a religious intolerance afoot and a very un-Christian hatred brewing. I heard one comment that no one ever bought a “holiday tree.” Well, actually 1500 years ago or so, they did. Long before the tree was claimed for Christmas by the Roman Catholics, it was a pagan symbol. To see people outraged at society robbing Christmas of it’s symbols is outrageously ironic to me. I heard that early Puritans even made the celebration of Christmas illegal in some communities.

But this all begs the question, what does all this bluster hope to accomplish? Will Target’s use of “Christmas” make the world more Christian? And is the world being more Christian a good thing? Will it bring more souls to Christ? Will it even make Christians individually more faithful? When did intolerance become a “Christian” value to so many religious people?

There are other ways to make the world a better place, a more accepting and loving place. I was happy to see that Ford made a clear statement embracing its support of the GLBT community and outright rejecting any appearance of kowtowing to the AFA which had demanded a boycott of the company for placing ads in gay themed newspapers. I’m sure Jesus would be so proud of the AFA bully tactics (NOT!). It’s hard to even begin to imagine Jesus bullying anyone. He didn’t even advocate the boycotting of Roman, the political tyrant of his day.

NPR is running an ad for a radio program Sunday evening. The host talks about how the portayal of God by so many as the worst tyrant ever. His touted judgments of eternal damnation make all other human persecutions pale by comparison. What is Hitler’s murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others compared to God’s claimed damnation of billions upon billions of people? Hussein’s atrocities are insignificant compared to the rapturous murder that some call upon God to perform.

And there are so many who are sure they are in the group that will be spared, be they Muslins, Jews, Southern Baptist or the uber exclusive Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s a lot of confidence to expect from a mass murderer on an unprecedented scale.

And why do they claim God is such a tyrant? Discipline? To punish those who won’t step in line? To reward the few through the eternal torture of the majority? Some odd sense of judgment that would condemn sinners all to the same dismal fate? An ethnic cleansing? Righteous outrage? A venting of omnipotent anger? An opportunity to brag that 'I told you so!'

Debating over who will go to hell and who will go to heaven is probably even less productive than trying to determine who will survive a nuclear war.

For me, I wish hell upon no one. I pray to a merciful God to be magnanimous with his mercy. I believe he is. I see hell as not a place God sends us to, but a place where we go to escape God. It is self-imposed because God cannot save us there. He will not drag us out of hell if that’s where we choose to be.

Yet, to those who desire to live with God, he will welcome them gladly, and I don’t think it matters to him all that much how you find your way, but that you find the truth, the word - Christ as described so beautifully by John. And I’ll leave that for later.

So I suggest we quit quibbling about which of our brothers or sisters are our father’s favorite. And I suggest we quit squabbling over which pagan symbol belongs to God or which banner at Wally World is more holy and remember that the season is supposed to be about peace, not conflict, unity not divisiveness.

May our gift to each other not be mere tolerance, but full loving acceptance of every person God created.