The Reason for the Season

    Despite what we atheists think about the ridiculousness of religious claims, we must recognize that December 25th is an important date and we should not simply brush aside the reason for why we get this time off. Even if we don't believe the religous aspects of his existence, we should at least give him pause and thanks for letting us have the time off. So in this spirit, I deeply thank Deus Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun god, whose Roman followers likely started the religous celebrations on December 25th. We must all be careful of those will try to distort this holiday for their own religious ends, and in particular Christians, who have somewhat recently tried to claim the holiday as the supposed birthday of their "savior". Churches in Ireland let the pagans have December 25th all to themselves until the 5th century, churches in Jerusalem until the 7th century, and those in Slavic lands until the 10th century. Listen Christians, how would you feel if people didn't celebrate your birthday for almost 1000 years and then said "ahh shit, we don't know when this happened" and then decided that your birthday should be on the same day as a sun god, so that they don't have to throw two parties in a year? The giving of presents, mistletoe, even the christmas tree are all traditions that were stolen from the pagans. I say get your own holiday and traditions and let other people have theirs.

    On a different note, those of you who didn't see The Daily Show last night should watch this. O'Reilly tried to make it appear that Jon Stewart's show was part of the horrible "War on Christmas" and used a year-old clip as if it had happened the day before. Bill O'Reilly also called Comedy Central "Secular Central", to which Jon responded that he preferred "Godless Central". A truly great segment.