Rational Holidays

by Megan

It’s the holiday season again, and I’m feeling the same awkward discomfort that I’ve felt increasingly over the past few years. Everyone in my family is (as far as I can tell) a Christian, so everyone celebrates Christmas. I still enjoy the traditions of decorating trees, baking cookies and singing songs; as the year comes to a close, celebration seems appropriate. Yet participating in a holiday that commemorates the birth of a god seems ridiculous, given that I am an atheist. Jason and I have decided that the best solution to this dilemma is to create a rational holiday of our own to celebrate.

Holidays are important: they mark the passage of time in our lives, and they help us build fun traditions to bind us to the ones we love through the years. While good things should certainly be celebrated as they happen, there is also a place for yearly, more general celebrations as well. A hard-working person should take time to relax and enjoy the fruits of her labor, rather than pushing herself to more and more achievements without taking time to savor them.

Looking at how Christmas itself was created will help us see how to make a new holiday. Long before Christianity began, people celebrated holidays around the winter solstice by decorating evergreen trees to celebrate fertility and commemorating the birth of a sun god on December 25th. In the fourth century, the Christian church adopted December 25th as the birthday of its own god, allowing many of the earlier traditions to continue. This choice allowed Christians to celebrate with the other people in their culture while still maintaining the radically new beliefs that were important to them.

The winter solstice and the end of the calendar year seems to be an appropriate time for a rational holiday as well: it is a time to remember and celebrate the accomplishments of the past year, and to look at how far one and one’s loved ones have come. Certainly this holiday could be marked by decorating one’s home with winter-themed decorations, and it should most definitely involve purchasing gifts for loved ones to show appreciation for their abilities and for the value that they bring to our lives. What it should not involve is the kind of deception that parents often commit when they allow their children to believe in Santa Claus—rather, parents should admit that the gifts come from them because they are proud of their children’s growth and development and because they delight in their children’s existence. Another tradition that I would like to introduce is to have each family member write down what they are most proud of each other for in the past year, and leave the notes somewhere for the other family members to find the next morning. This more literal element would help everyone remember what they are really celebrating.

Jason and I aren’t sure what to call this winter holiday, but one name we’ve been discussing is Setting Day, because it occurs at the end of the year and therefore the image of the “setting” of the sun seems appropriate. New Year’s Day, then, would be the Rising Day, on which we begin a new year by making goals (something a bit more substantive than “resolutions”) for the coming year and encouraging each other by helping each other plan for those goals. Perhaps there could be a way of recording the goals somewhere in the house, so that everyone could see them throughout the year.

Another idea that I have for a rational holiday is a day when each person picks a historical person who had an extraordinarily successful and productive life, and shares something about his or her life with the rest of the family. Then, everyone could talk about what they could learn from that person’s life and apply to their own lives to be happier and more successful. Family members could also share small gifts that somehow relate to the historical figures they’re discussing. I think that March 1 would be a good day for that holiday since the weather is so dreary at that time of year, and everyone needs something to celebrate. I can’t seem to think of a name for this day either—perhaps “Inspiration Day” or something like that.

The point of all this is that holidays should be something meaningful and rational, rather than something based on faded, irrational beliefs. This does not have to mean avoiding traditional holidays entirely; rather, it means adapting the celebrations of one’s culture to make them more rational. Claiming one’s celebrations as one’s own is an important part of happiness.

The Meaning of Marriage

by Megan

For those of you who are not yet aware: Jason and I are getting married in about six months. We’re really excited about our wedding, but of course we also want to think carefully about what marriage really means before we enter into it. It’s all too easy to get caught up in celebrating the marriage and forget about what it really means, but hopefully writing about it a bit will help us stay focused.

Marriage has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but there is one basic element without which, it seems to me, a marriage would not be a marriage in any real sense. This essential element is a commitment to putting one’s husband or wife at the center of one’s life. This means, among other things, making major decisions with one’s spouse rather than on one’s own. Further, decisions must be weighed not only with regard to the impact that they have on oneself and one’s spouse as individuals, but also with regard to the impact that they have on the relationship. However beneficial something might be for Jason or me as an individual after we are married, it would be wrong for us to pursue it if it could endanger the relationship to which we will have committed ourselves for the rest of our lives. I think that this commitment is all that a marriage really is.

This sort of mutual commitment requires a delicate balance between unity and independence. Unity is what makes two people married; it means planning your life together with the benefit of your family in mind, rather than the benefit of all of the individuals in the family. Independence, too, is important because even when two people are married, they are two people: Jason and I each have our own unique preferences, goals, and needs, no matter how close we might be. I think that it is important for spouses to spend time apart from each other once in a while, to regain their sense of self-sufficiency and remember their unique goals and abilities. Further, it is important to realize that one’s own commitment to the relationship is only half of the battle, and one’s spouse always has the freedom to lose interest in the relationship. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

I think that one of the most important things to recognize about marriage is that it is not a promise to love one’s spouse for the rest of one’s life, if love is meant in the sense that denotes an emotional response. It is impossible to make a promise about the way that one will feel in the future, given how complex emotions are. Because Jason and I are still independent people, there is always the possibility that one of us could make choices in the future that could greatly upset the other, perhaps even to a degree that would end our feelings of love for each other. But marriage is a commitment, which means that it is binding whether or not one “feels” like upholding it: if one stops loving one’s spouse, one must exert one’s full effort toward rebuilding that love, unless it is clear that one’s spouse will be directly harmful to one’s wellbeing for the foreseeable future. As circumstances in our lives change over the years, there will probably be times when Jason and I feel more love for each other than we do at other times. But marriage means recognizing the bad times when they happen and working to fix them instead of giving up or denying that a problem exists.

An important implication of such a commitment is that people who are married have the joy of living their lives with someone. One’s spouse acts as a witness to the moments of one’s life, someone to mark their occurrence and recognize their meaning. Once Jason and I are married, my quietest moments and my hardest decisions will be supported and shared by Jason: we will rise together every morning, and every evening we will retire to our home together to share the events of our days. When I am seventy, there will be someone who has witnessed the progression of my life in intimate detail, who knows me as a whole and who is a part of everything that I am. And of course, I will have witnessed his life in the same way.

I think that I have a long way to go toward a full understanding of marriage, but this is at least a start. Look for more to come!

And Slavery Returns to the USA...

by Jason

Slavery can safely be defined as one person being forced to work for another's interests with no benefit to himself.

Economic redistribution is the process of the government taking wealth from some individuals and giving it to others, whether directly in the form of cash payments (e.g. welfare) or indirectly (e.g. universal healthcare).

Stripped of all of its attendant baggage, economic redistribution is slavery.

Now, slavery was allegedly abolished in the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, which reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Unfortunately for us, slavery seems to be returning to the United States!  Worse, though, is that it seems that it is the will of the people that it should be so!

Plato warned us over 2,000 years ago of the tyranny of democracy.  Aristotle further warned us that some people are natural slaves.  Never did these men consider that the culmination of these two ideas would be a state whereby it was decided by the majority that the demos should become slaves (much as what happened in National Socialist [NAZI] Germany).

The day is dark indeed for the men of the mind.

If we wish to avert the swelling tide of statism and its culmination in slavery, we must do more than merely proclaim: Laissez-nous faire!   We must argue that the very policies being advocated right now run counter to the very principles this country was founded on.  Moreover, we must argue that these new governmental programs, this movement to slavery, are constitutionally illegal.  

Although the day is dark, it is not too late.  However, we must strip the argument down to its true fundamentals: freedom v. slavery.