1. 'God Is Not a Moderate'

Comment #18689 by Edutheria on January 22, 2007 at 12:24 pm

A quibble:
"the evidence against religion is too strong to say "yes" to it and still call yourself a rational human being."

I would substitute "rigorously rational" for "rational". Atheists shouldn't give moderate theists a free ride any more, but we shouldn't hyperbolize by calling them fools either (especially thoughtful men like Mr Sullivan). Except for the clinically insane, all humans are both rational and irrational to some extent.

2. 'God Is Not a Moderate'

Comment #18582 by Edutheria on January 21, 2007 at 7:09 pm

Andrew wrote:
"You say others cherry-pick the Scriptures, but you have done some of the more egregious cherry-picking in describing the priorities of Christianity. No, Sam, the Gospels really aren't, to any fair reader, about owning slaves, the age of the planet, or the value of pi. They are stories about and by a man who preached the love of the force behind the entire universe, and the need to reflect that love in everything we do."

A theory doesn't have to be "about" a false contention for it to be discredited by it. If a corollary of string theory was that falling objects decelerate, the fact that falling objects don't decelerate would discredit string theory, even though string theory isn't "about" how things fall. That the Bible makes ANY explicit claims which are demonstrably false should make us extremely skeptical of its other claims: including the ones which can't be disproven and especially the ones we fervently want to believe (like the existence of a loving force behind the universe).

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

3. 'God Is Not a Moderate'

Comment #18423 by Edutheria on January 20, 2007 at 5:42 pm

If you read Mr Sullivan's book (The Conservative Soul) and blog (The Daily Dish, linked to above by sandipchitale), you'll find that he is incredibly intellectually honest. He was able to admit he was wrong in supporting the Iraq War. Hopefully, with Mr Harris' help, he'll conclude that he's wrong about this as well.

4. How the Great Atheist got polite society standing

Comment #14802 by Edutheria on December 25, 2006 at 7:47 am

It seems that much of the British press is trying to be hip and grab attention by being contrarian about Dawkins. It's pathetic, really.

5. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14657 by Edutheria on December 24, 2006 at 1:00 am

Niels,
You're quite welcome. I hope you enjoy it. I know I'd rather watch a thought-provoking documentary on Christmas Eve than "It's a Wonderful Life" for the umpteenth time. :)

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

6. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14648 by Edutheria on December 23, 2006 at 10:42 pm

FrostbitePanda,

You generalize. I was born and raised in a small, southern town, but things aren't what most people see.
...
In general, I would be hard put to live in the suburbs [i]anywhere[/i], in California or Georgia. They're simply horrible in my opinon. No diversity (In anything... people or places to go), no culture... nothing.

Now it's your turn to generalize I suppose.

Myself, I wish Christians would proselytize to me more often. Those are the only times I can debate them without them accusing me of attacking them.

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

7. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14616 by Edutheria on December 23, 2006 at 5:55 pm

Logicel,
I am so very pleased I could bring that site to your attention. I would be happy to discuss the series with you.

Blaine,
You wrote,

Whenever a position is supported by a premiss that person X supports it, it is not a fallacy of any sort to argue against that strut

Goodness me. The post by which you accuse me of rhetorically invoking authority is rather short. I am surprised you were able to misconstrue it so completely.

Here it is again,

If anyone here is the least bit curious about the power of freedom and individual choice, please watch Free to Choose, a wonderful PBS documentary by the late, great Milton Friedman. It's streaming for free (perhaps only temporarily) in honor of his recent death at http://www.ideachannel.tv - It just might change your life. (The video streaming is excellent btw, with absolutely no buffering, at least in my experience.)

At which point in that paragraph did I even argue anything, much less invoke the reputation of Dr Friedman to prove a point?

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

8. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14499 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 6:26 pm

blaine,
If you actually watch Free to Choose (the 1980 version), you'll see Dr Friedman in a debate, rebutting a protectionist businessman just as vigorously as he rebuts his pro-regulation opponents.

But if you want to question motivations, every policy has winners and losers, and there is no partisan monopoly on venality in the halls of power. You could just as easily attribute unemployment-causing labor regulations to AFL-CIO money, or our failing education policies to AFT money. You can try to win the case by discrediting the witness, but that knife cuts both ways. So instead you might try debating the ideas, if you can.

I also believe that corporate lobbying is a problem, but for the opposite reason. Corporations and industries, through their lobbying, have been a chief enemy of the free market. I think I have a pretty good non-governmental solution to that problem, however: what I call an "Anti-Favoritism Pact": http://edutheria.com/2006/11/20/anti-favoritism-pact/

-Edutheria

9. I love the commercialisation of Christmas

Comment #14435 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 12:36 pm

Jiten,

Edutheria,if I had said to someone else the short answer is natural selection and the long answer has been more than adequately provided by Darwin (and later eloquently refined by Dawkins and others) what would have said? Would you have made the same spurious analogy? I think not as you would have rightly pointed out that theirs was a reasoned argument backed up by evidence.Do you then believe that Marx's arguments are not reasoned arguments backed up by evidence?

If I had regurgitated Marx in my own less elegant words would you have then taken my argument to be 'inteligent',one worthy to be in a 'clear thinking' forum?

If you were to just say, "Go read your Darwin," to a creationist, then I would say, yes, you are being dogmatic. Darwin happens to have been right, but that doesn't change the fact that you were appealing to ideological authority instead of reasoning and evidence. And I would say that, as such, you were doing a disservice to Darwinism. The Origin of the Species isn't a holy book. It's the first presentation of a beautifully true notion. Its beautiful truth deserves being told and retold, not pedantically invoked.

As for the ideological merits of Marx...
Science is rooted in philosophy. Philo=love, Sophia=wisdom, so I think of philosophy as the rigorous love of truth. If you really love truth, you will be very demanding of any pretensions to truth. The most rigorous tests of truth are twofold: reason and evidence. That is why there are two chief schools of philosophy: rationalism and empiricism. But you can't have one without the other. Marx is just one in a long line of philosophers who relied too much on rationalism and not enough on empiricism: who got caught up in spinning elegant ideas, without being skeptical enough to make sure those ideas have a firm bearing in the real world. That line goes all the way back to Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was so enamored by the elegance of whole numbers, that he fabricated an intricate mysticism, under which you could go to heaven if you thought about math enough! The elegance of this ideology was so compelling to deep thinkers that it engendered a huge following, which included Plato himself, who loved the elegance of regular geometric solids so much that he insisted the universe was made out of them. These schools of thought scoffed at the work of contemporaries who based their theories on both reason AND the real world: contemporaries like Anaximander, who postulated that life spontaneously arose and that humans were descended from animals, and like Democritus who proposed that everything in the world must be made up of tiny invisible particles he called atoms. These ideas were too earthly, not elegant enough for people like Plato. Plato thought Democritus' works should be burned. (He eventually got his way. Democritus was prolific, but hardly anything he wrote survives today.)

In the same way, Marxists are too caught up in the elegance of their ideas. They too have constructed an elaborate mysticism around that elegance which purports to know all, and to even foretell the future. And just like Pythagoreanism, Marxism has produced a dogma that is impervious to evidence. The fact that every single attempt at Marxism has produced famine and misery doesn't bother them overmuch, because they care so much more about the elegance of their reasoning than the demonstrations of the empirical real world. That is wholly unrigorous, unskeptical, and unphilosophical. It does not connote a love of truth.

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

10. I love the commercialisation of Christmas

Comment #14408 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 9:56 am

(Sorry for the crosspost)

If anyone here is the least bit curious about the power of freedom and individual choice, please watch Free to Choose, a wonderful PBS documentary by the late, great Milton Friedman. It's streaming for free (perhaps only temporarily) in honor of his recent death at http://www.ideachannel.tv . It just might change your life. (The video streaming is excellent btw, with absolutely no buffering, at least in my experience.)

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

11. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14405 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 9:49 am

If anyone here is the least bit curious about the power of freedom and individual choice, please watch Free to Choose, a wonderful PBS documentary by the late, great Milton Friedman. It's streaming for free (perhaps only temporarily) in honor of his recent death at http://www.ideachannel.tv - It just might change your life. (The video streaming is excellent btw, with absolutely no buffering, at least in my experience.)

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

12. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14394 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 9:04 am

Dawkins and Harris have attracted the ear (not sympathy) of the intellectual elites who had become accustomed to kow-towing to religious nonsense.

I don't think it's just the intellectual elites. I think it's also moderate, regular people who are apalled at the recent fruits of religion: September 11, legislative bigotry (the Terry Schiavo grandstanding, the attempts to enshrine homophobia in the Constitution, etc), and the narrow-minded faith-based certainty of our President, and the havoc it has wreaked in Iraq. In comparison, they then look at the recent fruits of science and open inquiry: the medical breakthroughs, the ever-shrinking gadgets, the ever-expanding possibilities of the web and other information technologies. They are also looking at the Ted Haggarts, Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells, and Anne Coulters of the world and seeing how cynical, hypocritical and manipulative such people are. The disgusted moderates are now open to somebody who can explain such folly to them with honesty and intelligence. And some have found such a person in Richard Dawkins. Some of these people are already atheist, but not forthrightly so. Some of these people are agnostic, but now leaning toward atheism. And some of these people are actually moderately religious, like Julia Sweeney (writer/performer of Letting Go Of God) was right before she converted.

And the recent elections have demonstrated that the political influence of the religious right has probably peaked. Carpe Diem, but how?

Come out of the closet, that's how. My deeply religious sister recently asked me over the phone if I had been to church lately. In the past, when faced with such a situation, I would have given a quick reply and tried to change the subject. But Dawkins inspired me to stand up for my beliefs. So I presented to her arguments from Epicurus and David Hume, and I challenged her regarding the god of the gaps and the blind watchmaker. My sister is an emotional person, and even much less controversial topics have been known to make her cry. But I presented my arguments in an open-minded and kind-hearted manner, trying to display a love of pure reason more than a hatred of god. Instead of crying, it seemed her interest and curiosity was piqued. The next time I saw her she actually expressed interest in reading something by Bertrand Russell! Of course I'm skeptical that she'll ever actually convert. But I think she has a newfound respect for me and for atheism in general. Instead of just mean-spirited contrarianism, she has seen some of its philosophical basis.

I think that approach, writ large, will do a lot more good than banging on about legislating this and regulating that. Convert people by force of reason, not with the reasoning of force.

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

13. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14305 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 1:53 am

JohnC,
Right now this burgeoning atheist movement that we're all part of has the American public's sympathies, judging from Mr Dawkins' and Sam Harris' book sales. And its largely because of public exasperation with the religious right. You want to know how to turn that around? Go ahead and do what you seem to be espousing. Start over-reaching, just like the religious right did. Start getting thuggish, coercive, and all regulatory on us. Stop writing books and start writing legislation. That's the quickest way to a backlash.

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

14. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14293 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 12:56 am

I don't really see how arguing amongst ourselves is going to accelerate humanity to rationality.

You're right, Niels. But classic liberals aren't going to give people like JohnC a free pass when they attack individual freedom, even if it is ostensibly for the sake of atheism. There are plenty of leftist atheists. But there are lots of classic liberal atheists too (Ayn Rand was one, after all). I've met a surprisingly large number of them on this very forum. So if, pluralistically we're going to move humanism and rationality forward, we would do well to avoid alienating each other. I won't hijack the atheist cause for the sake of liberalism, so long as others don't hijack it for the sake of attacking liberalism.

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

15. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14289 by Edutheria on December 22, 2006 at 12:24 am

John C,
You should take my silence as a concession to your point regarding that data, not as disrespect for facts. And I wasn't quote-mining. I was citing a secondary source, which itself might have been quote-mining. Now that I think about it, I should have either linked to that secondary source or checked the primary source, but I wasn't trying to deceive.

You wrote:

avowedly atheist Americans are defending the right of Christian parents

Does that stick in your craw, the fact that in a pluralistic society one group of people can stand up for the rights of a group they disagree with? Excuse us if we don't have your illiberal tendencies.

As for public schools, the perpetual cycle of reform, reinvestment and recrimination has accomplished nothing. Socialized education is failing us. And it always has. People harken back to a mythic time when public education wasn't so bad—when public schools were churning out plenty of knowledge workers. But public schools were bad even back then. They just had fewer demands placed upon them, because we didn't really need THAT many knowledge workers. But now that we truly have an information economy, the paltry number of knowledge workers our inept public education system is able to wring out isn't cutting it anymore. And public schools in other countries are no better. We only think they're remarkable because we absorb much of whatever measly knowledge labor they're able to squeeze out, because most of the rest of our economy (besides the all-important primary and secondary education part) is fairly liberalized.

In America, we let the market work absolute wonders in every field it touches. But we insist on keeping it entirely separate from education. Socialism has failed in every endeavor it attempts. And we wonder why it's failing us so miserably in our schools.

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

16. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14283 by Edutheria on December 21, 2006 at 10:29 pm

John C,

"I agree parents should not have the right to deny their children science education (including biology), but sadly they do... society has a responsibility to provide free, universal and secular public education for all children and that parents have a legal responsibility to ensure their children attend such schooling."

You are misconstruing Sancus. As I understand it, he is saying that neither parents nor the government have the right to coerce kids. In contrast, you are saying that the government ought to, nay has the responsibility to coerce parents into coercing their kids to be educated as the government sees fit (which, of course, may vary depending on the character of the regime the hapless family happens to be under at the time).

"I agree parents should not have the right to deny their children science education (including biology), but sadly they do - after all, that is what home schooling is all about."

That's funny, because I happen to think that the government should not have the right to deny our children science education (including biology), but sadly it does - after all, that is what the incompetent public school systems are all about. And denying Darwin is not what American home schooling is all about. There is a significant secular home school movement in America. As a private tutor, I've worked with a great many home schoolers. Given that I work in one of the most leftward areas in America, how many of them do you think are religious nuts? And how many of them, in spite of the progressive leanings of the area, are just fed up with the failure of public schools?

"From the point of view of political theory, a free society is not simply a the summation of "free individuals"."

That's an interesting statement. Do you know somebody who is the personification of "political theory"? Did he write a book, or did you ask him what his "point of view" was? Or have all political thinkers throughout history inexplicably come to such an exact agreement on the matter? If the individuals of the society aren't free, then who or what is? You seem to instead be talking about a "harmonious society". Well if you think there are necessary tradeoffs between harmony and freedom, then say so. But don't try to tell us you'd somehow be making us more free by taking from us our freedoms.

-Edutheria, http://edutheria.com

17. I love the commercialisation of Christmas

Comment #14261 by Edutheria on December 21, 2006 at 5:33 pm

Jiten,

You wrote,

"Edutheria : the long answer has been more than adequately provided by Marx"

Thank you for providing yet another fascinating parallel between the religious right and the economic left: the habitual recourse to authoritative dogma. When challenged, a dogmatic theist retorts, "Go read your Bible," or "Go read your Koran." And here, in a forum that was meant by its founder to be a clear-thinking oasis, a dogmatic socialist has the nerve to say, "Go read your Marx." Hang the evidence. Hang reasoning and discussion. Just "Capitalism is destroying the world," and "Go read your Marx."

Fascinating.

Edutheria, at http://edutheria.com

18. CBC Segment on Evangelist Christians

Comment #14255 by Edutheria on December 21, 2006 at 4:59 pm

JohnC,

"Americans, in short, just don't seem to understand that the social limits to individualism are a matter of collective agreement not government imposition."

What is the difference between collective agreement and government imposition? How does a collective agreement have an impact on affairs if not through government imposition? If the collective agreement expresses itself through voluntary decisions, then how is that different from the free market?

"Surely this individualism has got to be an essential part of explaining the dominance of "free enterprise" evangelical outfits of which the video gave us only a tiny sample."

Surely you are correct; the individual freedom of the evangelical movement is the key to its success, which is only a testament to the power of individualism. It only shows how free individualism is more dynamic and powerful than coercive collectivism. So it is a pity that Darwinian education in America is such a coercive collectivist affair. Imagine how powerful science and clear thinking would be if its method of dissemination were not dominated by an inept civil service.

"Look closely at the ID propoganda: you'll see naked appeals to wisdom and beliefs of ordinary folk versus the arcane materialism of the scientific elite."

Ordinary folk have more reason and skepticism than you might imagine. They also have irrationality and credulity. Unfortunately those who appeal to our worst parts are doing a superior job than those who appeal to our better parts. In a free country, the answer is not to persecute the former, but to unfetter the latter.

"Well, I'm sorry, but there is nothing democratic about science; the butcher does not have the same competence as the biologist to decide what goes into a science curriculum. But in the US system, the butcher, joined by the baker and the candlestick maker, get to decide the content of the curriculum without any reference to the biologist, if they so choose."

Are you talking about parents? Do you want to force parents to submit their children to what an elite group considers proper teaching? I'm just asking, because you said, "Now no one here, least of all me, is suggesting censorship or thought police or a dictatorship of the enlightened." And what you're intimating seems to be just that.

"Now that's not how things are done elsewhere in the world, where generally a professional civil service administers a curriculum whose content is determined by the relevant academic experts. And guess what, such systems deliver better - and more equitable - outcomes than the US school system."

America has socialized primary and secondary schools, and so does the rest of the world. So if you proclaim that much of the world is doing a better job with such schools than America, it's not very instructive, even if true. Let's compare something we actually do differently from one another: higher education. Europe's higher education system is run by the "professional civil service" you claim to prefer. America's is not. First, let's look at over-all performance. America's higher education system is the envy of the world. It attracts all the best students from across the globe, and it is the most productive, in terms of both high-achieving graduates and cutting-edge research. The higher education systems of Europe (and in Australia for that matter) pale in comparison. Now before you call me a crude, capitalist who only looks at productivity and popularity, let's look at equity. A good measure of equity might be what proportion of the population of a country between the ages of 35 to 64 hold a college degree. In America, this proportion is 39%. In Britain, 25%. In Germany, 23%. In France, 19%. In Italy, 10%. (Source: National Centre for Public Policy and Higher Education). 19% in France! Not exactly liberté, égalité, fraternité, I should say.

Oh well, at least we agree in our mutual admiration of Richard Dawkins. He is a truly great educator, right? A paragon of reason in the fight against superstition. Only, he's an Oxford don isn't he? And Oxford is a private university. Hmm, that has to make you wonder, what about the other great educators who profoundly broadened scientific understanding in the general public? Carl Sagan? Harvard and Cornell. Stephen Hawking? Cambridge. Richard Feynman? Cornell and Caltech. Stephen Jay Gould? Harvard. So much for your professional civil servants making the world safe for science awareness and understanding.

-Edutheria, at http://edutheria.com

19. I love the commercialisation of Christmas

Comment #14218 by Edutheria on December 21, 2006 at 2:05 pm

Jiten,
We ask theists to support their claims with evidence. Then given that evidence, we must compare their paradigm with other paradigms, each of which has its own set of evidence.

So first of all, what is your evidence that capitalism is destroying the world? Secondly what are your alternatives to capitalism? The elimination of private property and individual freedom of exchange? What effect would that have on the world? Would it be better or worse than capitalism? Let's look at the one source of evidence for generalizations about human affairs: history. Which societies had general economic liberty, which did not, and how did they fare respectively? I would argue that from the beginning of civilization up until late modern times, practically the entire world was economically illiberal: there were huge government restrictions on property and exchange. And throughout that same period, malnutrition and infant mortality was an ever-present high probability for everybody on the planet except for a tiny elite. Since governments began to liberalize the economies that they were previously lording it over, there has been progressively fewer diseased adults and starved children in those economies.

So we have the following historical circumstances...

A. Ancient, medieval and early modern times:
1. Property and exchange greatly hampered by state agents (emperors, kings, dukes, bureaucracies, clergy, etc)
2. Mass starvation and suffering, even in peacetime

B. Late modern times:
1. Not nearly so much of A1 in some places
2. Not nearly so much of A2, in those same places

Now you might argue that this is correlation, and not causation. But economics and common sense present very convincing causal mechanisms for why A1 causes A2 and B1 causes B2. If you don't believe me, I can go into them.

Or you might argue that it was the industrial revolution that decreased starvation and suffering so much, and not economic liberalism. Then I would point to societies which embraced industrialism, but shunned economic liberalism, and what became of them (famines in Russia, China, Ukraine, Cambodia, India, North Korea, etc).

I assume that your solution to the problem you see would be to remove individual freedom of economic choice for most everybody, including me. I happen to like my freedom to make my own economic choices. So before you take it away from me, and perhaps cause innumerably more problems than you solve in the process, I simply ask that you convincingly prove your assertions. We would ask no less of theists. So I ask no less of you.

20. I love the commercialisation of Christmas

Comment #14216 by Edutheria on December 21, 2006 at 1:58 pm

Blaine,
There are interesting similarities between the economic left and the religious right. Both hate free individual choice. And in my opinion, both are unskeptical, unempirical, and unrigorous about their assertions. I think the comparisons are enlightening enough that they should be fair game in a forum such as this. And keep in mind that the anti-commercial comments came first. I'm just responding.

And there is the all-important question of what to DO about widespread theism and credulity. Dawkins is rightfully worried about how parents indoctrinate their children with superstition. He considers religious education a form of child abuse and even seems to suggest it should be regulated. He's got the problem right, but the answer wrong. Instead we should be DEregulating secular education. The vibrant and nimble private religious education and evangelical church movements are beating the hell out of secular education, because the latter is hopelessly flabby, having been monopolized and cosseted by the government. Empiricism and reason are naturally stronger than superstition and dogma. Science will beat religion in the marketplace of ideas, if you allow the marketplace to exist.

If secular education were deregulated, science teachers would be permitted to say such politically incorrect, but scientifically valid things as, "God almost certainly does not exist", as Dawkins so honestly and bravely proclaimed in his book. Enlightenment will make no real headway until science teachers are allowed to say that. But so long as schools are under government control and religious people have the vote, we will never have intellectual honesty in the science classroom. We (obviously) will never disenfranchise people for their religion. So we need to start deregulating the school system. The dirigsme-loving wing of the atheist movement is fundamentally opposed to that, so for the sake of allowing atheism to punch at its weight in the marketplace of ideas, I must oppose them.

21. I love the commercialisation of Christmas

Comment #14215 by Edutheria on December 21, 2006 at 1:57 pm

Yorker,
Would you rather the worker have to resort to her second-most favored available employment choice, which presumably is worse than her first (perhaps prostitution or even more squalid subsistence farming)? How is not buying the shirt helping the worker in any way?

22. I love the commercialisation of Christmas

Comment #14132 by Edutheria on December 21, 2006 at 8:40 am

Is it wrong to buy things that you enjoy? To buy presents which your loved ones enjoy? Is it wrong to sell things that people enjoy? What is wrong with commerce? Anti-commercial moralizing is just as unfounded and "holier-than-thou" as religious moralizing.

23. The Grinch Delusion: An Atheist Can Believe in Christmas

Comment #13467 by Edutheria on December 17, 2006 at 10:08 pm

I'm an atheist who loves Christmas AND commercialism.

From something I wrote a few days ago...

In America it seems that Christmas has become the season to moralize. And it's coming from both the political right and left. On the right you have culture warriors denouncing the slightest hint of secularism. "That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown," Linus said after reading a Bible verse. On the left you have progressives bemoaning the crass commercialism of the American Christmas shopper. "My own dog's gone commercial," cried Charlie Brown, after seeing Snoopy decorate his doghouse for a display contest.

It seems that unless you're either a devout Christian or a bleeding heart anti-capitalist, you don't truly understand Christmas.

I say bah, humbug.

I don't need a religion or a social justice ideology to justify the warm feeling in my heart I get around this time of year. All I need is to be human.

As a human, I like to be around family and see festive decorations. And it just so happens that there is a tradition in my culture, called Christmas, in which families get together and deck the halls. I don't need to believe in the stories about the origin of the tradition to take part in the tradition itself.

Also, as a human, I like to exchange gifts, especially with loved ones. If I could afford to give everyone I love an iPod or a Nintendo Wii for Christmas, I would. And I would thank you very much for not trying to make me feel guilty for it. Commerce is human. And anti-commercialism is just as anti-human as self-loathing religious piety.

So to the Christmastime guilt patrol, I say, "at ease." Have the courtesy to let everyone be merry howsoever they choose. In other words, have a libertarian Christmas.

Edutheria.com