As a Christian, I shouldn't partake in anything that encourages others to paganism either. However, I help my family of athiests and agnostics decorating their houses every year, because I know there is no part of them that is worshiping the decorations or believing them to have mystical powers. They'd find the idea ridiculous. Even if they did, the modern paganism practised by some here, tracing back to the origins of the winter celebrations, no longer involves bestiality or sacrificing children in boiling couldrons as it may have done when either of our holy texts were written, so personally I wouldn't think it much worse than them subscribing to most other religions. I would imagine that in America too, much more religious than Britain, as commercialised as it is in both countries, Xmas parties are not by definition, pagan, though I can imagine other problems for Muslims attending them. Even modern pagans don't believe in the old yuletide traditions as anything other than a kind of culturally necessary bit of fun, to my knowledge.
I suppose I'm backing up NewMuslim's points.
Don't know if this is getting off topic, but about the spoiled Americans issue. I don't think teaching them about others' poverty would solve the problem. It's deeper than that. If spoiledness correlated with amount of material possessions, all royalty would be growing up to be the most demanding, self-absorbed and unhappy of all. That's not the case from what I can tell. Many royal children seem well-balanced and content. It's never added up for me that you can spoil someone by giving them 'too much'. How much is too much? The answer is usually highly subjective, based on personal experience of what is a 'normal' level of wealth. The least arbitrary definition I can think of is 'more than is necessary for optimum physical health and mental stimulation'. Actually, if you measure it this way, many people the West considers to live in poverty are actually better off than most Americans, who spend their childhoods having their brains poisoned by chemicals in loaves of bread. The West's shallow understanding of wealth means that the older generations complain about how they grew up on farms with no supermarkets, TVs, and few clothes. My view is that they had better diets and developed imaginations, which are massive assets for dealing with life. No one needs more than one set of clothes. No one needs a TV. We feel that these things make us happy because we're given that message all our lives. From the media, yes, but also our media-raised elders. Working such long hours, parents come to see appeasing their distressed offspring with material gifts and promises as a handy quick-fix. Parents in the West don't tend to give their children good philosophies for dealing with unhappiness anymore. They just want to solve the immediate problem and move on, not recognising underlying issues, like the way children view happiness. TV tells them it's something you get from this action figure... no that bicycle... no this better action figure...yet a new toy every week. I know no belief could make me feel less secure. No wonder they measure their parents' love by how much money they're prepared to spend on them. Then they hit the teen years, and maturity makes them start to learn about and consider all the problems in the world. Having always been sheltered from such things and given no advice on how to deal with things like existential angst, it's very easy for them to slip into cynical disillusionment. I've witnessed this with several friends.
Compare these children to those in monetarily poor Buddhist communities. Their drug and suicide rates only seem to rise when they're exposed to Western culture, with all its supposed luxuries. Buddhists are taught that happiness comes from within and that searching in the material world creates only depression. The Abrahamic religions also suggest this, but perhaps not so overtly. If I ever raise children, I will ensure that they are aware of how lucky they are in many respects, when they are able to comprehend and deal with concepts like famine without being desensitised, but also that their dissatisfaction with their environment and the world at large will help neither them nor those they pity. I hope that they will quickly realise how fulfilling it is to know you are living your life in a way that most benefits others and pleases God, and that they'll be equipt with enough philosophical prompts and interest to reject the negative underlying principles of Western society.
Steering this post back on topic, I think the true spirit of Christmas is just another victim of unchecked capitalism. There's nothing intrinsically more shallow about the idea of Christmas than any other religious celebration, but Western businesses saw the potential in something already celebrated by most of the population and involving the exchange of gifts and whipped it up into something purely hedonistic.
That spitting slimeball. lol :jumpclap:
and also they got rid of the bits that said women could be in Church.