Christmas and Christians Recognized as Important

You know, I have to wonder three things about the House resolution recognizing Christians and Christianity as important to the development of Western Civ, and Christmas as an important holy day in this religion: a) where did anyone, ever, get the notion that being a person of faith (any faith) would or should be without struggle?; and b) the resolution reinforces that childish fantasy by redacting the phrase that would actually (though without force of law, it's just a resolution, really just words) commit Christians to adbiding by the creeds of their faith and the comandments of their prophet; and c) if I remember my Jesus correctly, in the New Testament that new covenenant Jesus brought to humans, it was the social and economic underdogs he sided with (the poor, children, women -- anyone the top dogs felt justified in kicking), and perpetual war was just so way out of bounds.

So, congratulations, everyone, on a resolution that has yet, lo these millennia later, to have content.

Related digression: I'm just not sure what all this suspicion and hatred of the Enlightenment is about out there in C-land. We do not live up to the most rigorous demands of our faiths, the E and its secular humanism came along to correct that in many ways (on the grounds of Reason since faith wasn't getting it done), it failed too (though it's only had about 400 years of its own test run), that failure is widely recorded and analyzed and absorbed in what is called the postmodern moment which is in part a reaction to economic forces and collosal shock of death camps in Germany under that psychotic, elected, fascist who justified the whole waking nightmare (as they all do) with the rhetoric of his faith and the "reason" of the E and to greed too. So, PoMo says, maybe Reason isn't the path either, if it can get us to justify an attempt to wipe a whole people from the earth. (Since, recall, most big time PoMo thinkers grew up with, suffered in, and survived that war -- it shaped and reshaped their childhoods, teen years, and college educations directly, they did not watch from a distance as civilians did in the US.)

These are utterly imaginary battles. Noisey, violent, hateful, self-justifying distractions from the real battles.

The roadblocks to a good life here on earth are the same since we started thinking about it: us, our fear, our greed, our too little conception of the human and the possible, our terrified refusal to be the grown-ups our faiths and most enlightened laws ask of us. Me included.