Just that.
I’ve personally been hit by some unexpected shit, this week, particularly financially, but hearing the neighbours up the street party it away, all day and all night, yesterday (and yes, I really, really considered trying to crash it. Just ended up feeling more alone, though, lol), reminded me, perhaps it did in the same way as one of you the other day, that this is a time that really brings people together, and is about far more than spending money and decorative seasonal tat. Today, in Aus, so happens to be the solstice.
I don’t know “where” I’m going with things, and I don’t know what my Christmas will be like (thrifty, if nothing else, lol), but I sincerely hope you all have good, relatively smooth and unstressful Christmases (or whatever you celebrate) and New Years. Remember what the holiday was supposed to be truly about.
That’s all. Keep it real.
Excuse me, brother, he cannot be a true Muslim, because saying Merry Christmas is worse than fornication or drinking alcohol or killing someone.
I think, unironically, partly why Islam has survived is because it is like an “all-encompassing” identity, in a sense (for most Muslims, if not all)…
It’s more important to them than national identity (to some extent), career, or other “defining” traits.
Which is how we get “Islamophobia” as an “-ism”, of sorts…
Whereas Christianity, now, at least in the West, is, as you say, so diluted, cowed and secularized that most people only view it as a minimal defining part of their identity, if at all…
Which, when you consider the fact that we have people losing their jobs over the simple fact that they are members of a Church (in Australia, twice recently), a logic which would never be applied to a Muslim (or probably even a Jew), is probably not all that surprising…
I actually do think that people like Trudeau and Dan Andrews seem themselves as “at war” with traditional Christianity, even while claiming Christian faith at the same time…
We can speculate as to why, but I suspect it’s not all that dissimilar to the way the Church was and is treated in many Communist countries…
Can’t have plebs having loyalties to an “ideology” other than the State, now can we?
It survived because they kill the infidels, including those "in the family".
Merry Christmas 🎄