cuchulain

Sure. But they have also been warned. And it does become a slippery slope eventually, caving in to what others want while they do not do the same for you. I attended my daughters' school Christmas program last night. The last song they sang was "happy birthday Jesus". Now, I could go rile some feathers and complain that they are promoting a specific religion at a school event, and it would be true. I could claim to be offended, but I am not. But for the sake of argument, let's say I was. I could get lawyers, raise a stink. All because I was offended. But the reality is that I control my RESPONSE, not REACTION. That's the big difference between adults and children, I think. Kids react, adults respond. If a person tells me they are offended by something innocuous that I have done, such as putting a Santa hat on Buddha, they are telling me they had a negative reaction that they failed to control, not that I caused.

agreed.

then on a subject i consider minor and they dont, with the understanding they dont care if they offend me, i conclude they should be adult enough to let something that causes no harm go and i wouldnt be at fault for their failure.

there is a celtic tale about a man trying to enter something of a closed community. they ask what he can do, and he says he's a warrior. they have lots of those, so he says hes a builder. it goes through a long list like that, and eventually he says ah... do you have anyone with ALL those skills, and they let him in.

maybe the point is THEY should also make the attempt to be understanding.

but it would look chaotic and disjointed with all that warring...wait, it IS that way! Zeus forgive me!!! well, that's at least as good as the evidence presented by other religions. i had a christian hand me a leaf as proof of god, once.

i dig. a minor issue for one person could be major for another, and removal would merely be polite. on the issue of fengshui, what if you bought the property across with your life savings and built, interrupting the positive flow? what if its not feasible to move?

we all have a responsibility to peacefully determine what is right and wrong and adhere to that decision, at least until and if we are shown a better way. to change our beliefs and principles for others is to abdicate our own decisions in place of theirs, or to martyr our belief in what's right as lesser than theirs.

I will not martyr myself for others happiness, especially when they seem so unwilling to do that for my happiness.

that sounds very stoic...or stoicism sounds very Buddhist

the thing we overlook in giving ourselves importance is we are not making others more important, or so might say the overly politically correct. i obviously think each of us is equally important, hence your freedom of speech should not be impugned by yourself to conform to anothers idea of what is acceptable.

i would say that if it doesn't cause actual harm, the yard stick is wherever YOU think it should be.

what would santa do?

i believe it to be habit formed over thousands of years of suppression of the average or lay person by the church that consistently denied the lay person the ability to access religion by themselves, which since the advent of the printing press and mass media giving that access, has continued to erode. the more we learn the less we believe. i doubt that before the printing press, anywhere NEAR the numbers of Atheists existed or would have admitted so.

i think politeness should be the new tradition.

If they have to keep records anyway, why not keep the records...and tax them? Why do churches get special tax exemption? I guess they consider their work charitable, and I think that even on individual tax returns you can claim charity exemptions, but I don't see why.

I read somewhere that any act can be an act of meditation, if approached with the right frame of mind. I tend to believe that since meditation is about frame of mind. I think if a person approached doing the dishes with the thought patterns of mediation, they would probably feel better after doing the dishes

My biggest problem with it is this: Each year, I see encouragement for family interaction, I see ads and pamphlets telling people to start new family traditions. It isn't exactly a stolen holiday, since the date in question can be used to start any new family tradition that arises. It isn't copyrighted or anything My problem is that so many people use it as an excuse to merely attack others of different beliefs(namely Christians, whom I don't necessarily agree with by any means). It's a way for the pagans to claim a moral superiority with a typical childish, "I thought of it first!", which of course fails on the basis of its own childishness. I don't like Christians who claim the holiday was theirs originally, but it's few and far between. And who knows what holiday might have been on that day before the pagans laid claim to it? It's not that it's a big deal. It's that it ISN'T, any more than Atheists putting up billboards promoting a new holiday tradition without the religion involved...

I would say the desire, but generally I agree.

names are just words to future generations. nobody considers what Caesar was like to his friends, nor Abe Lincoln, nor Stalin. Just as nobody will be likely to remember the person who intervened in someones suicide attemp fifty years from now. but actions have impact without names as easy as with.

i tend to think fear of no afterlife is a strong motive to try to believe...often enough its not enough motive. for me, i concur with the stoic idea that death is final. our legacy can live on negative or positive, but whether it does or not is unimportant. what matters to me is if i did my best at what i wanted to, namely being a good person.

as i said, i dont believe anyway. the world is full of excuses for things that have no definitive proof, and sometimes things that do have proof. just ask any prison guard.

i dont know if god exists any more than you do. i tend to think not because i believe all things are knowable and nobody seems to know god. but maybe hes just really good at hiding.

funeral.

i get that. but acknowledging its not known to me doesnt make it unknowable in my opinion. theres just way too many times i didnt know and someone else did.