Sure, I love holiday lights, having a Christmas tree and exchanging gifts. But as for real holiday spirit, I had a system collapse this year, the worst ever. I tried rebooting by watching a ton of religious programming on the tube -- ranging from midnight mass at the Vatican to hours of biblical archaelogical palaver on the History channel. I was trying to rekindle that sense that religion (whatever I might think of it in terms of substance) can inspire lofty moral standards and sometimes noble action. But in this past year I've gotten fed up with religion as never before. Whether watching fundamentalists launch new Crusades or Roman Catholics and Episcopalians fumble around with sexual issues that should have been solved long ago -- I get the feeling I am being sucked back into the Middle Ages and forced to divert more and more attention from the real issues of the material world to the idiotic phony issues conjured up by the religious imagination. All in all, not conducive to that holiday glow.
Carl
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