Frazz by Jef Mallett for December 17, 2016

The Christian feast of Christmas was twelve days; from Christmas Day to epiphany (6 January). Advent is not a feast time, it’s a time of fasting in preparation for the festival.Still, it’s all fun.

Jef, Jef, Jef — look what you started…

We all have one thing in common – we are all born atheist – religion of any style has to be learnt – usually along the lines of what the rest of the family believes.

atheists and apathists do not have any organized agenda or point to prove. most of us just want to be left alone. jews, except for the deranged ‘jews for jesus’, do not have an evangelist agenda. most other religions not only want to annoy you with the holier than thou business, but also want to convince you they are more happy and holy. if people just did their worship in church (or whatever holy building they prefer) and minded their own business, the world would be a better place. at least quieter

Maybe he is clueless- but clue me in on his idea.

It would appear, the world needed more teachers of physics and less preachers…

and the secular marketing holiday is 60 days long.

Nice to see Frazz hold Caulfield to a better standard than un-researched griping. Too much contention among neighbors and nations, when individuals believed to be “smart” start jumping to negative conclusions/assumptions with only partial facts. The “smart” people tend to be believed, without anyone fact checking from there, because what they are saying so often FEELS so RIGHT. People have this thing of “My tribe good. Your tribe bad. Is OK me take from/kill you for stuff I want. grunt”. That’s what it seems to me, anyway, as a leftover from “uncivilized” times. I’ve run into these “facts” among my neighbors, and once latched onto, they are NOT easily given up. I have had one screaming (with spittle) in my face, that I was right about what I was saying, but it didn’t change anything, and I needed to shut up and go the $&ck away “before something BAAAAD happens”. We have become quite the CCL community, so….. yeah. . . Frazz, set him straight!

Mallet, you did not do your homework on this one. Hanukkah is the Jewish Festival of Lights and remembers the rededication of the second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

Christmas was created by the Roman Catholic Church – another case of the church co-opting a pagan tradition. In this case, it was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Not related in any way and certainly not created as a reaction to each other’s holiday.

As for the advent calendar, it was simply a method to mark the days until Christmas and again, has nothing to do with the length of Hanukkah.

Atheism is NOT a belief system. We don’t “believe there is no god.” We don’t believe in a god. Big difference.

I think Caulfield’s timetable may be a tad off…

I am a Christian. I have to admire the atheistic faith. It takes more faith to believe(not believe) than it takes for me to believe what I believe.

Hanukkah precedes Xmas by a century and a half or so. It and Pagan winter festivals may have been the reason for the Christians to move the birth from the spring back to the winter, to compete with existing religions. Hanukkah is a festival to remind the Jews of delivery from the tyranny of Greece, kind of like the 4th of July in the U.S.

It all comes down to this: There is a sealed, immovable box in front of you, and people are guessing what might be inside of it.

Christians believe that it is one thing, Jews and Muslims believe that it is something similar, only a different color, Hindus believe that it is multiple things, Atheists insist that the box is empty, so on and so forth.

Everyone is showing faith by stating what they believe is in the box.. As Atheism is making a claim as to what is in the box, (nothing) they are pretty much identical to the others.

Night-Gaunt49

There are none so intemperate in demanding their belief or else as your denomination of atheism. I will still stick with Thomas Huxley’s original (he did coin it) definition of agnosticism as that which can neither be proven nor falsified by the scientific method. Yet you keep going back to that argument against the existence of God while refusing to face the fact that you can’t disprove it by the same standards you demand of others. Watch out for the crocs and hippos, you are in “de Nile”.

religion ruins everything. it destroys everything it touches.

Hi ComicsFan. (Watch this, Folks!). What did they teach you about religion in your grade school?

(Wait for it!). Hee hee hee……..)

exoticdoc2 certainly doesn’t grasp the essentials of atheism.

Maronite Catholics with seven whole weeks of Christmas: gloating laughter

comicsssfan

Even though Patrick lived in what is now Ulster, Britain is separate from Eire, which celebrates it strictly as a religious holiday, not commercial. The only country with St. Patrick’s Day as a legal holiday is Montserrat.

Hanukkah existed for almost two centuries before Christmas possibly could have. Sorry, Jef, you fail this one.

And Advent starts 28 days before the Sunday that is before Christmas (including that Sunday) ….twice fail!

The Star Wars LEGO Advent calendar is 24 days to cheat us out of an extra 4+ toys.

Hanukkah was here first (a remembrance from the days of the Macabees). How widely it was celebrated before the Diaspora I don’t know, but it came before the birth of Christ.

I disagree that agnostics are ‘fence-sitters’; atheism and belief in god are both faith-based, i.e. belief in that which is inherently unprovable. That’s why it’s called ‘faith’ rather than ‘knowledge’. I cannot begin to recall the number of times I have heard some atheists state unequivocally that there “is” no god ( a statement as factually unsupportable as stating that there “is” a god). You can believe whatever you want, but until you can say “in the absence of proof either way there is no way to know” you are guilty at very least of a logical fallacy.

then capitalism comes in and takes up everything past september