'Tis the Season

We must be close to Christmas--everyone is arguing about religion.

First, you have Lowe's Home Improvement coming under fire from a conservative Christian group for sponsoring the TLC show "All American Muslim".  Then Lowe's comes under fire from everybody else in the world for dropping its ads from the show.

Why a large, successful corporation like Lowe's would kowtow to a fringe group like the Florida Family Association is beyond me.  I'd provide you some information on how many people actually belong to this group--but their website has removed pretty much all of its information--except the link to donate money to them (SHOCKER!).  I doubt the membership is more than a couple thousand people.  Their reason for hating "All American Muslim": It doesn't have any characters plotting attacks against the US.  The FFA contends "All American Muslim" doesn't "accurately portray" American Muslims--because it shows people who do the same things nearly all of us do in our everyday lives. 

If you are to extend the FFA argument against "All American Muslim" to all other programming--then every show featuring Evangelical Christians should include characters that are skimming money off the top at their tax-exempt mega-churches and shows featuring Catholics should also have a child-molesting priest or two thrown in the mix to "accurately portray" those religions as well.

Meanwhile, the hard workers at the Freedom From Religion Foundation are busy as usual this holiday season.  They have filed lawsuits to remove religious symbols from public grounds in several states.  But they are missing the mark with their approach to protesting the Capitol Christmas tree and a nativity scene in the rotunda in Madison.  The "counter nativity" display put up Freedom From features a female "Baby Jesus", the goddess Venus as Mary and what it calls the "3 Wiser Men" of Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin.

Unfortunately, Einstein and Darwin were not atheists.  In fact, Einstein stated that his theories--which solved a lot of the astro-physical questions that had previously been answered with "God did that"--actually reaffirmed his belief in a higher power.  You could say that Einstein was the first proponent of "intelligent design."  If Freedom From wanted to be a bit more accurate, Einstein and Darwin should be replaced with Stephen Hawking and the recently-deceased Christopher Hitchens.

Or better yet, they could just drop the whole "counter nativity" display--as I think it's rather juvenile--and use what those of us who base our lives on science and the laws of man do best--provide people with the facts.  Hand out copies of Hawking's A Brief History of Time or Darwin's On the Origin of Species at the Capitol.  Better to educate the masses--than try to sway them through insult.