Parenting Win

A conversation I had with my dear father:

Me: I love Christmas in the same way I love any public holiday. It's an excuse to see friends and family, make a pig of myself and get very drunk. There's nothing religious and spiritual about it to me.
Dad: How can you say that? Where's your Christmas spirit?
Me: What? All the memories I have from Christmas are related to presents, sunshine, food, family and basically being a big greedy slob. The whole religious thing has never even come into it.
Dad: So there's nothing even remotely special or spiritual about Christmas to you?
Me: Not any more than any other public holiday or big get-together.
Dad: I feel like I failed as a parent...
Me: No way, dude, that means you succeeded as a parent.

My parents are funny people. Both were raised religious (my father especially) but their involvement in faith in general has been pretty minimal, mostly limited to Dad's Catholic guilt that flares up around Christmas and Easter. It also makes him feel guilty for relaxing, which is bizarre. As a result, church, Jesus and basically all things involving an active participation in religion were more a mild inconvenience or mad folly of Dad's that peetered out pretty much as soon as my sister and I were old enough to utter the phrase "nuts to this." I was pretty ambivalent to religion in general until the middle of high school, where I did a bit of reading, a bit of thinking basically turned into a full on, "faith is dumb" positive atheist. The kind who angrily blogs about how stupid everyone who isn't an atheist is. A charming person, really, he says deluded and sarcastic.

We find another Christmas upon us, and I hear chatter of a "war of worldviews" in the US, with god-botherers up in arms about the greeting "happy holidays" over "merry Christmas," but I'm so detached from it I just can't conceptualise it as serious. To someone so separate from the whole issue, it just seems like a big, semantic joke. I mean, it's the same sentiment, really, one just references a specific name for the holiday that not everyone is celebrating. Of course, try telling that to a Christian... I've heard the argument that only Christians should get a holiday on Christmas, which is fine if every religious group gets their holidays off and we stop identifying as a "Christian nation," but that ain't gonna happen either. Why? Because every religious person is a hypocrite. Every. Last. One.

That seems harsh, but back up a second and consider; every faith (bar modern, new-agey stuff like Ba'hai. Maybe that should read "every major faith") has something in there about being the one true faith, all the others are pretenders, believe them and you'll be punished, yadda yadda yadda. So every adherent, by default, is decrying the merits of all the other faiths while touting the brilliance of their own, despite the fact they all have equal amounts of evidence for their accuracy (no, shut up. They're all as unlikely as each other. I've heard every argument, try me. They're all as unlikely as each other) and demand blind faith to follow anyway. It's basically a "who's the loudest and most obnoxious" argument for dominance.

So, Christians are in the majority here, so it must be a "Christian nation." Yeah? Is it a "female nation?" Is it a "white nation?" Go on, I defy anyone to call Australia a "white nation" without sounding like a racist dick. Calling any nation an "insert religion here nation" is a bigot, demanding special treatment for themselves while demanding others get marginalised for doing the exact same thing as them.

What does that have to do with my secular Christmas? Well, like I said to my dear father, he didn't fail as a parent, he succeeded. He succeeded in drawing me away from the gaping hole of hypocrisy and bigotry that is religion. He succeeded in making my memories of a special time of year about family, food, gifts and fun, not about dogma and piety. He succeeded in making me care about what happens here, in the real world, not in some fictional afterlife. He succeeded in making December 25th special without divine providence, but by making the world better for me by himself and with my family and friends.

December 25th may have been a religious thing for such a long time, but I'm claiming it for humanism. A big middle finger salute to any bigots that find that offensive, this is a season for love and celebration, not for your grovelling subservience and "baby's first philosophy" moral code. The heathens are happier, douchebags. Get on board.