The atheist Uthopia, what ae we to expect?

asdasd

or a start, if the entire present-buying culture is going to be moved to say the first week in January, then the 25th is going to be right slap-bang in the middle of most companies' busiest season all year. Do you think they're going to give employees time off for a religious date or close up for that day? Not a chance.

I think you under-estimate tradition. You can move the secular Winter festival to Jan 14th and say it is a present giving day but everybody else will do the 25th, and give presents then. That is what they grew up with. And has been traditional for centuries. That date is in the movies. That day is in Dickens. I would not watch A Christmas Carol, or Wonderful Life except on Christmas Eve when they are set, as would most. There is no point on Jan 13th before Wintereen ( cripes).

You don't throw out perfectly good traditions just because you don't like their roots. Christianity knows that well

Again these traditions are associated with the religious ceremony. On that date.

So you have two options - keep the date which everybody will know is really christmas, and is a long term Christian festival. Or change the date which no-one will bother with.

This would not be an issue with Good Friday, Should we ban it as a public holiday. yes. We all agree. The Atheist state will do it. Public workers will work.

But do they work on Christmas day? Most would take the day off anyway, so might as well make it a public holiday. And yet it is a public holiday with clear Christian roots. it is not a public holiday in Saudi Arabia, nor Israel.

( Some Muslim countries do have it I think, depending on the size of their Christian population).

There's a festival around the winter solstice or ("Mid-winter") which takes place roughly, ...um..., half way through winter.

The clue's in the name.

As does Christmas. Roughly half way through winter. Though not exactly on that day.

Never heard of your festival myself, something I have in common with most people. So to piss on your pedantry once and for all - the mid-winter festival I am talking about is Christmas. I think you knew that.

In any case I am making no straw-man arguments. The whole point of this thread is to tease out exactly how a fully secular State would work. In my view a real secular State cannot give public sector workers the day off on Christmas, no more than it can on Good Friday. Or Easter Monday ( which clearly follows a Church calendar). All, or none.

Be brave enough to ban Christmas in your Utopia, or it will be a very Christian Atheism.

Dades

asdasd wrote: »

Never heard of your festival myself, something I have in common with most people. So to piss on your pedantry once and for all - the mid-winter festival I am talking about is Christmas. I think you knew that.

Your ignorance of winter solstice celebrations does not make robindch a pedant, and you'd do well not to keep up that line of posting.

asdasd wrote: »

The whole point of this thread is to tease out exactly how a fully secular State would work.

The whole point of this thread, was asking what - if anything - one would change, not how one would implement the abolition of every tradition that had its root in religion. That seems to be your sacred cow, and you are doing your damndest to beat that bovine to death.

pH

asdasd wrote: »

In any case I am making no straw-man arguments. The whole point of this thread is to tease out exactly how a fully secular State would work. In my view a real secular State cannot give public sector workers the day off on Christmas, no more than it can on Good Friday. Or Easter Monday ( which clearly follows a Church calendar). All, or none.

Be brave enough to ban Christmas in your Utopia, or it will be a very Christian Atheism.

Why not? just because a religious group dumps their holiday on a date of an existing festival/holiday surely doesn't mean that the state can no longer make it a public holiday. For example if the state picked July 1st as a holiday and a few years later Scientologists declared it Ron L Hubbard day, would that mean that the public holiday would need to be cancelled? Of course not.

As for the exact date (21st / 25th) that's surely more to do with calendar changes over the years, we enjoy a mid-winter festival, the fact that Christianity camped on it is unfortunate, but to say it's defined by Christianity is not true.

seamus

asdasd wrote: »

I think you under-estimate tradition. You can move the secular Winter festival to Jan 14th and say it is a present giving day but everybody else will do the 25th, and give presents then. That is what they grew up with.

You overestimate people's adherence to tradition. Initially yes, most people would continue to do it on the 25th. But as more and more people have to continue working on that day and the older people die off, the adherence to tradition will die too. People will start to realise that using the other days makes more sense and slowly over the course of a century or so, the tradition will change. Traditions do change, constantly. People also make them up all the time.

But then, why force people to change the days? Yes, many people will still call it Christmas and so it will be for a long time, but with a massive reduction in religious broadcasting and iconography and the current social march towards secularism, again the traditions will change. People will watch a christmas carol (it's a great story), people will sing a lot of christmas carols (they're good tunes) and people will probably call it christmas too.

That doesn't mean it would still be a christian holiday.

AtomicHorror

Hivemind187 wrote: »

That is extremely interesting. I wasnt aware that they were seriously considering it as an option however I would point out two minor criticisms of it.

1) The articles make no mention of when the circumcisions took place however application of a little common sesne would tell you that it was (mostly) while men were young or infants. This suggests that the increased resistance to the transmission of the HIV virus from female to male during sexual intercourse is a side effect rather than true provilaxix. It is already less likely for a female to pass the virus to a male or female partner during intercourse and the "toughening" of the exposed tissue on and around the glans is likely responsible (if not the absense of tissue retaining infected cells etc from the female).

No, the protection has a defined mechanism- the foreskin has a higher concentration of the immune cells which HIV infects during its initial stages. It later undergoes a tropic shift towards T-cells with the resulting obliteration of the immune system, but the first step in sexual transmission is the infection of skin-resident immune cells. I'm not sure what you mean by suggesting that the conferred resistance is a "side effect". It is not the effect intended by the cultures that promote circumcision, but surely that's irrelevant to it's efficacy.

Hivemind187 wrote: »

The article also mentions that there is insufficient evidence to support the idea that circumcision is protective against HIV during homosexual encounters.

Well I already pointed out the homosexual thing when I provided the links.

Hivemind187 wrote: »

2) The purpose of circumcision was not to prevent or protect against AIDS and other STI's. It was done as part of a bizarre sacrificial blood rite stemming from stone age tribes. That there are claims that it might have some very minor benefit in terms of resistance is no reason to continue this absurdly mutilative practice on men (and women) when their is a safer, healthier and more reliable provilactive available: the condom.

I'm confused, did you read the articles I linked or a different study entirely? I wouldn't have bothered to cite a single cohort-style study as "evidence" and if you'd read the first paper in full you'd find that I did not. The first paper was a meta analysis that covered three randomised and controlled trials, each of which was published separately before. The ritual you mention is not addressed in detail in the Lancet paper or the JAMA paper and not cited as evidence but as an example of uncontrolled circumcision practices with a high rate of surgical complication. The HIV protection is not a culture-specific effect, nor attached to some confounding secondary factor, it is a real and reproducible effect. The question we are left with has nothing to do with the science, the science is solid. It has to do with whether cultural acceptance is relevant in allowing or promoting such a procedure.

To which my response would be a firm "I dunno" :pac: