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The Huffington Post | Raw Feed —

The context in which Christianity, and thus Christmas, was formed was the Roman Empire. The Romans honored Saturn, the ancient god of agriculture, each year beginning on December 17. In a festival called Saturnalia, they glorified past days when the god Saturn ruled. This festival lasted for seven days and included the winter solstice which by the Julian calendar fell on December 25. During Saturnalia the Romans feasted, postponed all business and warfare, exchanged gifts, and temporarily freed their slaves. Such traditions resemble those of Christmas and are used to establish a link between the two holidays. These and other winter festivities continued through January 1, the festival of Kalends, when Romans marked the day of the new moon and the first day of the month and the beginning of the religious year.

Each year as the days got shorter, early cvilizations feared that the sun would disappear completely. They celebrated the 25th of December each year because the days began to become longer 4 days after the winter soltice. Science has now clearly explained the seasons as a phenomenum caused by the movement of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the earth at 23 degrees relative to the sun.
As Isaac Asimov comments in his Guide to the Bible, “Converts could join Christianity without giving up their Saturnalian happiness. It was only necessary for them to joyfully greet the birth of the Son rather than the Sun."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas

I recently posted an article called “Organized Religion and God.” The post was actually meant to be a commentary about the early belief systems of civilizations before science had advanced enough to explain unexplained phenomena. Modern science has explained and swept away many of the fears of the past including the imminent disappearance of the sun. Many of these fears have been adopted by religion as a means to explain what has not yet been understood by humans and someday may be explained by observation and science. The most prominent fears that religion tries do deal with are death and the meaning of life. Both are not yet understood in tangible scientific terms.

The recent debate about whether it is appropriate to say “merry Christmas” or “happy holidays” is yet another argument made by thoughtless religious people. It is yet another means to create a debate about the nature of Christmas in America. Those who advocate saying “merry Christmas” to a Jew or a Muslim are inconsiderate, thoughtless, and are advocating the superiority of their religious beliefs. Many of these people believe that the Founding Fathers were religious Christians. They were not. Most of them were Deists and abhorred the very teachings of Christian fundamentalists. A Deist is one who believes in the existence of a God or a supreme being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason. Christmas was not even a national holiday until 1885.

It is amazing to me how much American religious tradition has regressed since the “age of enlightenment.” That was the period in which both the American and French Revolutions occurred. It was a time in which the power of centralized religion was rejected. It is also a period in which many social movements began to advance the cause of humanity here on earth. Hopefully, the rest of the 21st century will bring upon us a rebirth of the enlightenment period in the spirit of our Founding Fathers. And when our Supreme Court Justices try to interpret the meaning of “freedom of religion” as written into the Bill of Rights, they will think about the intent and beliefs of those who were the writers of our Constitution. They were in the main Deists who rejected the dictates of organized religion.

Godlorica —

UNDERNEWS — GARY YOUNGE, GUARDIAN - There are two things people really want to know about the cartoonist Aaron McGruder. The first is precisely what he said to Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, at an awards ceremony three years ago. Rice and McGruder, 32, were both being given an award by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the oldest civil rights organisation in the country. Beforehand, McGruder had told anyone who would listen that Rice was a mass murderer (it was not long after the invasion of Afghanistan) and that he would have no qualms about telling her so to her face. With McGruder's help, rumors about their subsequent exchange became legend. "I was never as cavalier with her as I sounded," he says now. "I had a brief encounter with her and I knew I had to say something. I said something like: 'I don't want you guys to kill me so I'm just going to mind my own business.' I was eminently aware when I met Condi that she could make my whole family disappear. I have never been fearless. I've always had a healthy fear of this government."
 
The second is precisely how a young, left-wing African-American has managed to sell the Boondocks, a syndicated cartoon strip that combines the messages of black power and liberal-left politics, blended with hip-hop humour, to more than 300 newspapers. . . At the beginning of our interview, the question of how McGruder has managed to pull this off prompts a shrug. By the end of it, he has what seems like the beginning of a thesis. "When you consider how quickly and how forcefully the extreme right came into power in the last few years - not just in terms of war but the clampdown on American journalism . . . well, ultimately, some counter-voice gets through. It will always be somewhat limited and marginalized. It's just fortunate for me that my voice was allowed to continue. There is a silent majority that is opposed to the direction of the country and my strip gives them a small outlet every day to feel like they're not crazy. . .
 
McGruder also has the dubious honour of creating the strip most likely to be censored. During the Rice episode, the Washington Post pulled the strip, claiming it was inappropriate. The Post's editor, Leonard Downie, said in a statement at the time: "The Boondocks strips in question commented on the private life of the national security adviser and its relationship to her official duties in ways that violated our standards for taste, fairness and invasion of privacy." The paper's ombudsman disagreed, arguing that: "The sequence of strips [was] within the bounds of allowable satire.". . .
 

A Man with a Ph.D.- Richard Gayle's Weblog —

Studying the fate of drugs in wastewater. Acetaminophen is the most widely used pain reliever in the United States, and a study of 139 streams by the US Geological Survey found that it was one of the most frequently detected man-made chemicals. Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have found that the drug readily reacts in chlorine disinfection to form at least 11 new products, at least two of which are known to be toxic. [EurekAlert! - Biology]

The presence of pharmaceuticals in our environment will become a much more question over the next few years. People will be getting drugs in ways that we do ot expect. And these drugs will also be altered in ways that are hard to predict.

Beyond the Beyond —

If you've got time to kill today, check out the interactive web graphics on this "Gapminder" site. Never mind the data, which is interesting enough: just check out the color choices and the interface. Man, who are those guys? Why haven't they already redesigned everything on the net?

http://gapminder.org/ Bells and whistles that actually work

Bootleg fark.com rss feed — Disaster survival cookbooks the next big thing. Enjoy some "Shiitake Happens Mushroom Soup," or "Duck and Cover Tortilla Bake"