Judging from the e-mail I received on last week’s essay—A Contrarian Look At The “War Against Christmas”, I thought I should expand a bit more on the notion of the secular Christmas holiday season.
The term “invincible ignorance,” originally taken from Catholic theology, nowadays refers to a logical fallacy whereby the arguer defends a position simply by refusing to acknowledge the force of the arguments supporting the opposing view. In another sense, it is also a version of the “faulty authority” fallacy whereby the arguer uses himself as the sole authority of everything in the world. When faced with facts and reason that differ from his own, the typical response of the ignorant is to sweepingly claim that these different ideas must come from faulty sources themselves, simply because they belong to someone else. Put one more way, it is merely an inherent inability to accept the truth even when it’s staring you right in the face.
Quite often, the invincibly ignorant don’t read much and don’t stray much from their view of the world, formed when they were children. If they do read, it is the same type of material they have been reading for years.
OK. With that out of the way, what does invincible ignorance have to do with the “War on Christmas”?
The Left has long made a practice of either rewriting history, or, in a more subtle way to effect change, uses its former stranglehold on the media to create new terminology, in an effort to obfuscate.
Abortion becomes “choice,” homosexuality becomes “gay,” outright Marxism becomes “progressive,” and attacks on the prevailing Euro-Christian basis of the United States become “diversity.” In its efforts to promote an atheistic society, attacks on all religion, and even all tradition are dubbed “tolerance.”
But, there are a few problems here. First of all, perfect tolerance can never exist, since someone’s rights or at least interests must always be violated, in the case of a truly diverse group. In this case, it is the interests of the Christian majority. More importantly, to impose a bland “holiday” season in the place of Christmas requires levels of denial virtually impossible to achieve.
Why is there a holiday on December 25th anyway? When it could be proclaimed openly as Christmas, there was no doubt that it was the day chosen in the third century to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Even in our present circumstances, shrouded in secularism, any fool knows the reason for the season, and all attempts at reeducation will prove futile. Ironically, one of the few places in the entire world where Christmas really is a secular holiday is Japan, a country with its own strong religious tradition of Shintoism.
Try as they might, they just can’t “educate” us on what Christmas is about, or what marriage is about, for that matter. Only, they don’t seem to get it.
Beyond just Christmas, the Left’s vain attempts to portray the founders of our country as anything other than (by today’s standards) religious gun nuts are doomed to well-deserved and often hilarious failures.
And then there’s the attitude of most of the Democratic Party, and certainly all of the Left, that despite the miserable election record they’ve racked up in the last many years (with far-from-true-Leftie Bill Clinton being one of the only bright spots), there’s no reason to change a thing.
Now, THERE’S invincible ignorance.