The Hall of Fire

Lacrosse.

-m

And I'm somewhere in between the two of you. Heh--Well, I'm perfectly willing to concede that people have certainly often used "they feel left out" to try to enforce a blandness and censor others and that's not right, whatever it's applied to--not just religious things, but skill-levels, ...

I think her point is a lot more reasonable than telling anyone to not be public about Christmas. She's pointed out that Christmas is very public and is not complaining about that. She's simply saying that to want more is pretty arrogant. She used Jerry Falwell because he is at the forefront of the v...

In short, he's making excuses for her, rather than admitting his own arrogance. I like that in a guy :) LOL! And he just gets better/worse. It seems strange that Austen writes women so cattily. It seems to me that the Men are so far coming out better than the Women in her estimation. In fact the me...

That is such a sad story IE. The happy ending, though, is that you have Christmas back now. I mean, there are plenty of things that you lost, but there are always things that are lost. You can build your own traditions and know that your children will be full of traditions. You can't really get it &...

What a great article.

To me (and this is of course just me) opposing discrimination based on any religion is opposing discrimination based on all religions. I don't see why opposing discrimination against Christians would lead to the conclusion that you are in favor of discrimination against Jews, or Hopis, or athiests,...

ETA: I keep thinking about this and I think what bothers me about the whole thing--not just the situation with Anthy but the whole issue of the thread--is that it keeps concentrating on the specific religion. So you have people looking out for whether Christianity is protected or Judism is protecte...

'Course, that wouldn't help the Hopi women all that much, because they probably had 40-50 "religious" days a year, and I doubt the government would allow that many to be guaranteed. I always had my doubts about how many of those days were truly religious, btw. No proof was ever asked for,...

It is ludicrous to think that singing an equal amount of songs from each holiday is somehow "balancing things out." It is even more ludicrous to sing Hanukkah songs and not sing Christmas songs at all, for fear of offending someone. Exactly. Balanced does not mean everything but the holid...

So what bugs me? I guess it's just that the prevailing message these days is that "Silent Night" is unnecessary as long as you can belt out a hearty verse of "Up on the Rooftop." Something's lost. Or maybe I'm just turning into one of those cranky old people. :D Well, that's bou...

Christ was allegedly born in something like March anyway, wasn't he? Perhaps something to do with how shepherds tend their flocks at that time or something? It was put on December 25 because there was a Roman holiday on that day and they were trying to make everyone switch over to Christianity. Pers...

Today? :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: * recovers from a mild heart attack * Hanukah starts on December 25th this year. The Chanukkah bazaar at my synagogue is not even until Sunday. LOL--I thought I was going crazy and people were lying to me for some reason. Not that I am usually up on when Hannu...

Well, I can't say I exactly disagree with you, but this is something very close to the heart of a large number of Americans. Calling them foolish does no good. Some of them may well be fools, but a lot of them aren't. Most of them. How we get out of this box, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure it wo...

That's one of the things I love about Austen, that her writing is so clean. You always feel like you've got room to breathe and everyone might as well be modern people. Lizzie, especially, really could easily be someone you'd hang out with today, and she'd be telling you the story about Mr. Darcy be...

They believe it is disrespectful to Christians. That's the kind of childish self-absorbtion that should result in some coal this year. It's like complaining that the stranger in the store greeted you with "Hello and welcome!" without using your name. And then claiming they should just gre...

Is "happy holidays" actually considered a sign of a bad thing anywhere? To me it seems like a good habit to get into--like when Americans post on mbs and need to get into the habit of not assuming everyone is American so, for instance, referencs to the First Amendment may not apply. Actual...

Someone (I don't remember who) was skeptical of the assertion that Christians don't have a public voice in America. Certainly high profile Christians have a very loud public voice, from President Bush to the high profile televangelists, to the newly elected members of the Kansas school board. But d...

It speaks to me of equivocation and capitulation, which is something different from tolerance and compromise in my thinking. It points to a particular mentality which has no 'center,' no first principle other than expedience. And that mentality - the mentality of expedience - alarms me when I see i...

I was thinking, actually and pretty specifically, about a passage in Elie Wiesel's Night where the Jews first read that they have to wear a yellow star. Weisel relates his father saying, "Oh well, you don't die from wearing a yellow star." And Weisel answers, in retrospect, forty years la...