Thanksgiving
Ok, we all know that the ritualized Story of the First Thanksgiving is bunk.
The Pilgrim story was created as cultural mythology to explain the beginning of our nation. The Pilgrims didn’t come to this country for religious freedom, they came because they thought they could make some money. If they were interested in religious freedom at all, it was the freedom to make an even stricter and more religiously pure society for themselves. The Natives who taught them which foods were good to eat probably did so out of basic human kindness, because they had caught the English settlers robbing graves and storehouses, but they themselves had been decimated by plagues and the survivors were traumatized, so there were other motivations, too.
Despite that, Thanksgiving is still a holiday that resonates for me, that celebrates some things that I think are worth celebrating and thinking about.
The biggest one is Religious Freedom. The First Amendment came into being because when the colonies were set up, religious belief , church membership and attendance was prescribed into the local laws. That’s why people were exiled from Massachusetts and executed for being Quakers. When Thomas Jefferson was born in Virginia, it was required to be a member of the Church of England, and illegal to be a Baptist. To change this, to codify into our legal documents that government has no jurisdiction over the contents of our heads or the convictions of our hearts - this was a stark departure from the way that things had been in the colonial period and for most of Western European history. Religious Freedom is a precious thing. I am profoundly thankful for it.
This is why I get so aggravated over things like prayer in public schools and religious symbols on public property. It is necessary that we do not impose our religious convictions on one another in an official capacity in order to preserve the religiously neutral component of our system of government. This is not infringing on your rights to believe as you see fit, to pray and worship in the way most meaningful to you, to adorn your house and your yard with large and expensive Flying Spaghetti Monster decorations. If you get bent out of shape because “they’ve” taken prayer out of school, nativity scenes out of the public square, and the Ten Commandment plaques out of the courthouse, do the mental exercise of pretending that the religious display you like is replaced by a symbol of a religion that you do not like. Would it still be OK? Replace the prayer at the football game with the prayer/praying style of a religion that you don’t like. Would it still be OK? If it wouldn’t be, then there is your answer as to why the one you like is not OK.
(Honestly, I have problems with seasonally decorating public buildings at all, for any season. Why do we even do this? )
The Pilgrim story was created as cultural mythology to explain the beginning of our nation. The Pilgrims didn’t come to this country for religious freedom, they came because they thought they could make some money. If they were interested in religious freedom at all, it was the freedom to make an even stricter and more religiously pure society for themselves. The Natives who taught them which foods were good to eat probably did so out of basic human kindness, because they had caught the English settlers robbing graves and storehouses, but they themselves had been decimated by plagues and the survivors were traumatized, so there were other motivations, too.
Despite that, Thanksgiving is still a holiday that resonates for me, that celebrates some things that I think are worth celebrating and thinking about.
The biggest one is Religious Freedom. The First Amendment came into being because when the colonies were set up, religious belief , church membership and attendance was prescribed into the local laws. That’s why people were exiled from Massachusetts and executed for being Quakers. When Thomas Jefferson was born in Virginia, it was required to be a member of the Church of England, and illegal to be a Baptist. To change this, to codify into our legal documents that government has no jurisdiction over the contents of our heads or the convictions of our hearts - this was a stark departure from the way that things had been in the colonial period and for most of Western European history. Religious Freedom is a precious thing. I am profoundly thankful for it.
This is why I get so aggravated over things like prayer in public schools and religious symbols on public property. It is necessary that we do not impose our religious convictions on one another in an official capacity in order to preserve the religiously neutral component of our system of government. This is not infringing on your rights to believe as you see fit, to pray and worship in the way most meaningful to you, to adorn your house and your yard with large and expensive Flying Spaghetti Monster decorations. If you get bent out of shape because “they’ve” taken prayer out of school, nativity scenes out of the public square, and the Ten Commandment plaques out of the courthouse, do the mental exercise of pretending that the religious display you like is replaced by a symbol of a religion that you do not like. Would it still be OK? Replace the prayer at the football game with the prayer/praying style of a religion that you don’t like. Would it still be OK? If it wouldn’t be, then there is your answer as to why the one you like is not OK.
(Honestly, I have problems with seasonally decorating public buildings at all, for any season. Why do we even do this? )