Mayor Rahm Emanuel lit the Chicago Holiday Tree. The Holiday Tree will delight Secular Puritans - The Progressives. Will Rahm next light the Holiday Candle - that big brass receptacle for seven candles? How about that Old Devil Crescent Moon?
Mayor Rahm Emanuel continued a Chicago tradition by flipping the switch to light the 55-foot Colorado spruce in Daley Plaza Wednesday night, but unlike Mayor Daley, Emanuel will be lighting a "holiday" tree.
The city's first Jewish mayor originally abstained from calling the festive display a "Christmas tree," although the city refers to Wednesday night's event as the "98th Annual Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony" on its website.
Emily Soloff, associate director for interreligious and intergroup relations for the American Jewish Committee, told the Chicago Tribune that the mayor's word choice was admirable.
"Those for whom it isn't a religious symbol relate to it for the symbol of happiness and joy that we all as Chicagoans can experience this season," Soloff said. "That adds to our civic pride and our feelings of being a community that we all share in a part of this season."
Huffington Post naturalmenteWe are enjoying Secular Puritanism's last kicks at the collective Christian Cat.
The other day Atheist activists and ACLU at some level of support and encouragement ventured onto Camp Pendelton to make sure that Marines removed a cross at a make-shift chapel to the fallen of Iraq and Afghanistan. Another Pyrrhic Progressive victory got notched up.
The Secular Puritans continue to put religion, largely Christianity, into the blocks and halters with the cheerleaders like Bill Maher and Hollywood types swinging the censers filled with Progressive frankincense. When President Barack Obama won in 2008, children of Dewey went dancing in the aisles. Obama ushered in an age dedicated to Science and Certainty and Logic, they argued.
Children are tissues!Things are not looking all that great for the Science, Certainty and Logical Presidency.
Here in the Obama 2012 epicenter, Chicago, Mayor Rahm lit the Holiday Tree. It was Rahm getting in the faces of people - little man disease. Little people, both physical and psychological go all terrier on people in an attempt to intimidate them.
People who are self-assured do not need to intimidate. Intimidation is generally attempted by persons with low-self-esteem. Little man's complex often goads a smaller person to swagger and act the bully with people perceived to be bigger than themselves or somehow an imagined threat.
Little Intimidators go after the bigger targets, in the mistaken notion that there are no real consequences to their actions.
The
Chicago Sun Times , with great regularity, features the front page story of a little man marinated with giant killer -Mr. Booze - who was punched by a larger man. Fatal error, that.
There are things larger than us no matter how big, or powerful we might be, or become - that's in Darwin by the way.
Darwin opened the door for Hegel, Fichte, Nietsche and Dewey. Where biology was once the province of Czech Monks looking to make better beans fro the Augustinian monastery and cashiered British Army officers, who robbed the regimental funds to pay off gambling debts and were now consigned to battalions of butterflies, Darwin allowed economists and romantic social engineers to play God.
Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is a book which contains the basis of natural history for our views.
Karl Marx on Darwin's On the Origin of SpeciesDecember, 1860
Karl Marx wanted to dedicate his Das Kapital to Darwin, but the Beagle voyager declined
Dear Sir:
I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.
I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin -Letter from Charles Darwin to Karl Marx
October, 1873
Sorry, Charlie, but I think you and Herr Marx merely fueled the fools.
Science was the means of overturning the study of metaphysics - the study of Being. What is
there and what is
it like? Spirituality can not be measured but we sure recognize that there is a
there -
there.
I never met my great grand fathers, but I have great faith in their existences - in County Kerry. If I trust public documents, I can reach a greater certainty on this issue, but again I am locked into trust or faith.
Getting rid of faith diminishes the individual. In the 19th Century, leading powers that have been, worked to diminish the individual and promote the community. That is the essence of Progressive ism -control.
Rahm lit the Holiday Tree, but the problem remains - HOLIDAY means Holy Day. There's that damn religion again!
Taking down creches, crosses and all manner of religious icon is the act of bullies and little people. They are impious. They not only get in the faces of people, but they thrust their noses and mouths heavenward. Piety is the recognition of something greater than our selves.
In his great History of Western Philosophy, an early example of Great Thought for Dummies, Lord Bertrand Russell, an agnostic, took John Dewey apart. The Father of American Education was a little man who never worried about consequences. Dewey believed that inquiry was the same truth.
Bertrand Russell called John Dewey's Hegelianism "'cosmic impiety,'
the temptation to treat truth as a means of control, leading to an intoxication with scientific power, and the dismantling of checks on human pride and hubris. Russell called cosmic impiety the greatest danger of his time. It is a danger that shows no sign of passing and I think the new atheists are only deepening it" ( Mark Vernon).
Philosopher and agnostic Mark Vernon expanded on this scientific bit of data to underscore the meanness of Secular Puritanism, The parish churches of this country may or may not be emptying but the medieval cathedrals are filling up ??" because beautiful music and sublime architecture speaks to people of this ultimate mystery.
There is still alot of There, out There!
Light that Holiday Tree Rahm and then Light that Holiday Candle - learned ignorance is still ignorance and very bad manners. There are consequences - lots of them.
This I know, Darwin, Hegel, Fichte, Sorel, Marx, Dewey, and Progressives are the foundation for the Holiday Tree, X-Mas, and the Obama 2012 Campaign and that is a pretty shaky foundation. It ain't no Rock.
http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/index.php?post/2007/08/22/696-the-rise-of-atheism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics