- Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found
time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in
a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots,
at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put
up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of
the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national
Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
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- Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes
from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When
I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people
were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown
accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of
many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time
from our harried lives to give them thought.
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- The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our
connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together
for 2,000 years.
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- In our culture the individual counts. This permits an
individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle,
to become a reformer and to take on injustice.
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- Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western
civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense
of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors
can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products
and new occupations.This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western
civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all
other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law
and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle,
but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual's
soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the
individual, Christianity gave him a voice.
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- The result was a land of opportunity. The United States
attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their
own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.
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- In recent decades we have begun losing sight of the historic
achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political
roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high
schools, colleges and universities or respected by our government. The
voices that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture
are being silenced by "political correctness" and "the war
on terror." Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious
symbols from public life. Constitutional protections have been diminished
by hegemonic political ambitions.
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- Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values
and are dismantling the culture. There is plenty of room for cultural diversity
in the world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no
culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a
Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides
no basis for law except the raw power oof the pre-Christian past.
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- All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether
or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of
the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power
is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard.
Millions of people were exterminated by National Socialists in Germany
and by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of
a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political
authority.
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- Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing
traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made
this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as "unlimited
power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything." Our government's
drive for hegemony is resurrecting unaccountable power.
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- Christianity's emphasis on the worth of the individual
makes such power as Lenin claimed unthinkable. Be we religious or be we
not, our celebration of Christ's birthday celebrates a religion that made
us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion
as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
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- December 24, 2011
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- Copyright © 2011 Paul Craig Roberts
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