The first time I ever heard of this wasn’t from a right wing media pundit, it was from my dad. As a Christian and professional educator, he was angry that the term “Christmas Concert” was being phased out at his highly multicultural school to be replaced with something less Christ-oriented. While he recognized that there were many people who were not Christian in his school, he was outraged that anyone would take offence to a Christmas Concert. They were not expressing that Christianity was the one true path and that anyone who would dissent from this opinion was destined for hellfire, so what was the big deal?

This happened when I was still a practicing Christian, but even I could see that what was happening wasn’t fair. By the school holding a concert aimed at only one religious tradition implied that it was playing favorites. To avoid that stigma, they opted to try to make the event a celebration of the winter school holiday that was days away. But my dad would have none of it. He began to comment at great length on how Christians were the most discriminated-against group on earth because it was okay to rob them of all their traditions and kick them like curs.

I can understand this perspective. If you worked in an office where all the women drank water and the men got free hot chocolate and suddenly it was proclaimed that everyone had to drink water for things to be equal, then the men would no doubt feel like they were being persecuted, but that is hardly the case.

Of course, my dad didn’t see it that way and still doesn’t. I even received from him one of those “ZOMG 911 HAPPENED BECAUSE THEY MADE JESUS NOT GO TO SCHOOL” emails, a strange choice given that he knows me to be an outspoken atheist, and I have to wonder if he was asking me to react. At any rate, he’s not alone.

I would hope that thinking people would look at this whole War On Christmas crap and see that it’s the bobble-headed brainchild of people like Bill O’Reilly and the rest of the right wing frighteners. Sadly, they don’t. Christians truly believe themselves to be threatened by the nasty atheist army who refuse to let them wish anyone a Merry Christmas. This is patently ridiculous. Nobody cares.

I have yet to encounter an atheist who has told me that they would be offended at being wished a Merry Christmas. Speaking solely for myself, when people wish me a Merry Christmas, I say it right back. I don’t see Christmas as a Christian holiday. Obviously there is the traditional Christmas meant to remember the lovely story of Jesus’s birth, but it’s been so dramatically perverted by modern culture that I can have a Christmas dinner, exchange Christmas presents, and drink some Christmas cheer with nary a thought to the birth of someone else’s savior.

We are not waging war on you. Nobody is, at least not on this topic. And when it comes to these so-called rights that are being stripped from you like your “right” to have a dedicated Christmas concert, to pray aloud in schools, to force religious doctrine into science classrooms, and on and on and on, we are not persecuting you. We are levelling the playing field which for many, many years you have controlled and manipulated.

Jim