I heard a commercial on the radio the other day that made me shudder with instinctive revulsion. I was forced to listen to a short dialogue between a father and his young daughter; each time her father mentioned a situation from his daily routine, she asked "is that when you thought about it?", and each time, her father responded affirmatively. Of course, the "it" in question turned out to be "the meaning of Christmas," paving the way for the endlessly irritating "one name always comes to mind: Jesus."
At first I thought I was listening to yet another radio-ad for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or some other similar religious institution; and I would have been okay with that, because as we all know, religion is just a money-making conglomerate masquerading as a humanitarian gesture by offering insubstantial eternal salvation and threatening with equally intangible perpetual damnation. I could not, then, allow myself to get too disgrunted by religion running advertisements like every other business.
And then I nearly careered off the road into a ditch when the advertisement wrapped up with the following post-script: "Paid for by Sanders Ford of North Carolina." My brain simply could not fathom the mentality that would induce an otherwise reputable business to produce a commercial that so clearly advertised its religious affiliation; to allow a commercial to play on the air claiming that a fictional character from a poorly-written novel is the meaning of Christmas.
Obviously I can't argue against the idea that the character of Jesus is the basis of Christmas; when Roman Emperor Constantine invented the Christmas holiday back in the 4th Century, he did so specifically in an attempt to align the perceived birth of Jesus with the Pagan celebrations of the winter solstice and the holidays of Sol Invictus and Mithra. So I can appreciate intellectually that the man Jesus the Nazarene is the basis for Christmas; it is, after all, "Christ's Mass."
Unfortunately, calling the holiday Christmas implies that Jesus was anything more than a human being -- just the adopted son of a carpenter -- which spits in the face of logic and reason. Jesus was not a "Christ" -- which was not his last name, but rather a title meaning "savior" (as in "Jesus the Christ" or "Christ Jesus") -- but a man, and to imbue him with more significance by making his perceived birthday -- which is, historically, terribly inaccurate -- a holiday is simply insulting to the intellectual world.
The "meaning" of Christmas -- if it has any meaning at all, in so far as we as a society give it meaning -- is universal peace, coming together for a common goal, and a sense of selfless charity toward our fellow human begins that we ought to be expressing toward one another every single day rather than only during the five weeks from the Friday after Thanksgiving until the day after the New Year.
So when I heard this advertisement, I was prepared to let it go as a freak occurrence and forget about it. I had even written the incident off -- while making a mental note never to shop at Sanders Ford -- as the result of a solitary business that had, for one brief moment, abandoned logic and reason. But then a few days later -- once again while I was at work -- I heard another commercial, this one even more direct than the last. This advertisement forewent the contrived dialogue of a hackneyed situation by addressing the audience directly; the narrator even instructed the audience, "don't take Christ out of Christmas." I strained to listen closely to the next line, which informed me that this message had been "paid for by Davidson Hyundai of North Carolina."
Today, I heard yet another radio advertisement -- once more while I was at work -- that once more amounted to little more than an assault on my better logic and reason. After innocuously declaring The Strike Zone in New Bern to be "a great place for family fun," the narrator proceeded to spit in the face of intellectual progress by announcing that "Jesus is the reason for the season." For my aforementioned reasons, I was willing to ignore the flagrant religious message being forced on the audience. Christmas, after all, is a holiday based entirely in the perceived birth of the fictional character of Jesus; technically, then, Jesus is, in fact, the "reason for the season."
But one more time, the commercial overstepped the bounds of logic by then asserting that "the family that prays together stays together." I'm sorry, but prayer will not fix the dysfunctions that are inherent to an overwhelming majority of families. Honest communication builds trust and unity, which is the only way to address most of the problems that families face; addressing those problems is what keeps families together, not talking to an imaginary character from a poorly-written novel.
My mother and stepfather are a prime example of "the family that prays together" not staying together. For several years, my mother and stepfather practiced devout born-again Christianity and forced my step-brother, half-sister, half-brother and I to pray with them nightly. But after ten years of marriage during which they engaged in some of the most intensely rageful and violent arguments -- something that no child should have to hear at two o'clock in the morning -- my mother and stepfather finally conceded that their marriage was a monumental failure and separated.
The fact of the matter remains that they were two incompatible people, a pair of fractured human beings each with addictions and vices of their own, and they were trying to fix each other when they couldn't even fix themselves. All the prayer in the world wasn't going to make them suddenly capable working together toward building a functional family unit. Those of the religious ilk have historically used this nonsensical maxim to justify continuing failed and abusive marriages by claiming that God is testing their relationship, when in reality it is merely the weakness of the individuals involved that leaves them emotionally incapable of changing their situation.
There is no such inherent thing as "the sanctity of marriage" that exists beyond the effort that two people put into their unity to make it work. Marriage was not "ordained by God" or "sanctified by Jesus" -- the former of which we have adequately established is a whimsical fairy-tale, and the latter of which we have adequately established was nothing more than the adopted son of a carpenter. Marriage is simply a contract between two people that was invented by human society for expressly legal purposes including inherentence, taxes, and adoption. Maintaining a marriage, then, is achieved not by talking to a fictional deity or a human being who died about two-thousand years ago, but by the willing participation of the individuals involved.
Three commercials in a week has forced me to realize that this was not a freak occurrence or fluke; this is a pervasive problem, a symptom of the oppressive theocracy in which we all know we live, though no one likes to say it out loud for fear of shattering our delicate illusion of democracy. The separation between the private sphere of religious freedom and the public sphere of commerce -- what the Constitution meant when it said that the government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" -- has been completely obliterated, and frankly, the result is unconstitutional.
By airing these flagrantly one-sided religious commercials, Sanders Ford, Davidson Hyundai, and Strike Zone of New Bern have infringed upon my right to the "free exercise" of my opinion -- that all religion is nonsense -- because these commercials are not simply encouraging their audience to have a "Merry Christmas" or a "Happy Holidays;" they are purporting to tell their audience that one specific religious belief is true as fact, a clear breach of Constitutional law.
