Let's take Christ out of Chri$tmas

Tom Ascol has a blog, and on it, he made a post about American Family Association's boycott of companies who "ban Christmas." It's a very good post; you should read it. For the record, I don't believe that going to the mall on Sunday is necessilary bad.

I also was a receipiant of said email, albiet it was forwarded to me from someone else. I just groaned when I read it. If for nothing else, the "boycott" will have absolutely no affect because here is a list of companies that you Should Not Do Business With during the holidays:

"Kmart, Sears, Kohl's, Home Depot, Lowe's, Target, JC Penney, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Kroger, Office Max, Walgreens, Staples, BJ's, and Dell."

Also, there's an update:

"Lowe's has removed all "Holiday Tree" signs and now refer to ALL trees at [sic] "Christmas Trees."

[sarcasm]
Whew! Thank God Lowe's calls them "Christmas Trees" now. Looks like the forces of Heaven have triumphed over Satan and his demons!
[/sarcasm]

I would love for there to be an interview of the people who sign the boycott. I wonder what percentage of them actually refuse to shop at all these stores. My guess is that the percentage would be somewhere between 0 and 0.5%

But that's not the main reason the boycott is so stupid. Here's something I think many Christians miss: there is no command in the Bible for anyone to celebrate the birth of our Lord. But even if there were, why do we get mad if non-Christians don't do it? Let's just go all the way and get mad that they aren't playing the latest Chris Tomlin music from their store PA system. It is absurd for Christians to get their feathers ruffled at seeing non-Christians act like non-Christians. Why should we expect the world to honor Christ (1 John 2:15-17)? Please, someone out there who signed the boycott, answer that for me!

Another interesting thing about the post is that somebody named Shick made this comment:

"I say go ahead and ban Christmas from unbeliever's marketing strategies. Marketing Christmas cheapens the real 'reason for the season'. It equates to Christmas=$$$. I would much prefer the Holidays=$$$. If the third Friday of November became known as the busiest day of shopping for the Holidays that would be fine by me. Stop cheapening "Christ's" name by using it as a marketing tag. Think of it this way, retailers have come to the realization that using Christ's name no longer brings in the money. Praise God!"

This thought is intriguing. Let's take "Christmas" and therefore "Christ" out of all the marketing and advertizing that the holiday season brings. Why get up in arms if a display for a new video game system at Best Buy has "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" on it? From the AFA's point of view, we want all of the consumerism that America can dish out to be assoicated with Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord. How about we go ahead and let Best Buy sell that new Sony Playstation 14 with a "Happy Holidays" or a "Season's Greetings?" Let's quit trying to force an association of the name of the Son of God with vacuous American materialism.


Rather, let's put Christ back in the church, where He ought to have remained in the first place.


UPDATE: 2005-12-04 00:28 CST

Tom Ascol has written another blog post about the AFA boycott.

Also, I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I would like to make a prediction. I predict that within the next 5 years, evangelical Christians will get up in arms when retailers start to remove Santa Claus from their holiday items and marketing. They will see the removal of Santa as something just as wrong as "taking Christ out of Christmas."


But I might be wrong.

A funny thing happened to me about 10 years ago. . .

About 10 years ago (I think it was when I was a junior in high school), our National Honor Society took a trip during the Thanksgiving break. By my calculations, that would have been around this time in 1995. We went to Colonial Williamsburg, Washington DC, New York City, and Intercourse Pennsylvania, and probably some other places that I can't remember right now.

My most memorable moment during the trip involved a small shop in Chinatown. We'd just finished eating supper (it was one of the first times I'd eaten Chineese food), and they let us go around to some nearby shops. I wanted to by a "Rolex" watch, so I was on the lookout. At the first place we came to, I asked the young Chineese boy if they had any Rolex watches. He said they did, and he went in the back of the shop to fetch them. I knew how to tell a fake Rolex from a real one. On a real Rolex, the second hand moves more than just once per second. I don't think it's continuous, but it moves at least twice a second. You might think of it as a "half-second" or "quarter second" hand. Fake Rolexes, like most other analog watches, have second hands that move only once per second (click . . . click . . . click at one second intervals). Well, the young boy returned with his Rolex collection on a cheep plastic tray, and set the tray on a table. I was hoping to get a fake watch for under $30, so I was happy when he said $15 for a "Rolex." Well, I picked one up and looked at it (fully expecting it to be fake), and lo and behold, the second hand moved like a real one! I rubbed my eyes and looked at it again. Sure enough, as far as I could tell, this was a bone fide true Rolex! (After reading the Wikipedia entry on Rolex watches, I now know that some fake Rolexes actually mimic the movement as well as the design of Rolexes, so in retrospect, this might not have been a real one, but I like to think it was). Before I knew what was happening, a much older Chineese man came over from the back of the store. He said something harsh sounding to the young boy in Chineese, and then he yanked the watch out of my hand. Indeed, he took the entire tray from the table and started picking watches off of it. He took out about 5 or 10 watches and left the majority of them (probably 25) on the tray. Then, he returned the tray to the table and let us look at the watches again. I picked up every single watch that was left. Not a single one was real. The only thing I can come up with is that the stolen watches accidentaly got mixed up with the fake ones!


I paid $15 for a fake Rolex that broke before the trip was over.

One of my favourite quotes from the Entergy days

"There's a lot you can do with twenty pounds of pinto beans."

- J.J. Jones

The Center for Baptist Pumpkins?

On I-12 between Baton Rouge and Hammond, there is an exit for two communities. One of them is called "Baptist", and the other is called "Pumpkin Center". Unfortunately, the exit sign on the east bound section of I-12 looks like this.

Predestination vs. Free Will

To all my blog commenters:

This is one of the classic questions of philosophy and religion.


What do you think?

The 1967 Camaro

My dad has an original 1967 Camaro that he's partially restored. It was my mom's car before, and she gave it to him after they got married. The original engine was a straight-6 230 cubic inch, but it now has a much more comfortable 270 hp 350. He let me drive it last week when we stopped by.

Random thought

Another good name for a blog (besides the best name possible, "the jigawatt blog") would be "The Penguin's Progress".

Sign in the guys bathroom in the EE building

Ok, this is a little disturbing.


I do like the parallelism, though (that's the 2nd "to").

Sign outside Arby's near LSU

Now Hiring
Any 2
Subs
For $5



For the record (and so Ray's comment makes more sense), let me say that I updated this post to accurately reflect what the sign said. I originally had "sandwiches" instead of "subs", which is not correct.

Random thought about motorcycles

There seems to be more people with motorcycles in Baton Rouge than in Little Rock. At least, it seems that way to me.

Of course, Baton Rouge is bigger than Little Rock, so it sould be expected, but that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that I think that there are more motorcycles per capita in Baton Rouge than in Little Rock. Put another way, if you took the total number of people who own motorcycles in the city and divided that number by the total population of the city, you would wind up with a number much closer to 1 with Baton Rouge than with Little Rock. I hope this makes sense. It makes sense in my head.


That's what I'm saying.

The joys of graduate school

Well, I've had my first round of tests (mid-terms) in my first semester of graduate school, and I've found that graduate school is quite peculiar.

I'm taking 3 classes
1. Random Processes I
2. Digital Signal Processing
3. Digital Communications

In the Random Processes class, I made a 75 on the first test, which sounds mediocre at best, but it's not too bad considering that the class average was 57.

In the DSP class, I made a 100. I'm quite pleased.

In the Digital Communications class, I made a 35. This sounds awful, but again, with a class average at 40.7, it's not too bad (in the "B" range).


I've never been so happy about a 35 in my whole life.