The following post by Beginner stood out last week about the topic 'At this time of Christmas'. Perhaps you already partake in Atheist Shrewds board exchanges? No matter. So with this edition of Post of the Week, let's sit back and enjoy some Shrewd'm magic.

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The time of year, the winter equinox, with light starting to get stronger and last longer, again, as we swing around the great sun that energizes our lives, I am grateful. It will be six months till we begin turning toward this place again. Comforting to know that some things can be counted upon -- hopefully.
I say hopefully because so much of what i've counted on has been shown to be more variable than I thought. The viability and nature of the country i've lived in all my life and took for granted, it seems, is changing in ways I hadn't expected and scares me. I've learned that wisdom is to expect change, but I really thought it would be more personal and less universal.
The city I lived in for 32 years, also burned down and our family office burned with it. Pretty much in the middle of town. In a town peopled by those with immense wealth. Wealth doesn't matter. Good to know. Where you live doesn't matter, either. Also good to know. Things you thought would always be there, people and places, change. Sometimes all at once--in a single day. A community that stood for over a hundred years was gone in a single day. That community will not come back to the way it was. And another one, across town, burned down, too. An old one, with houses of river rock and wood, great trees of olive and oak, green and verdant, are now gone and burned black.
A place near where I grew up.
I no longer drive up mountain roads in California and see vistas of canyons and green, I see places of danger and look for escape routes. My husband recently visited a house in Montecito, that covered the top of a hill like a great museum amidst oak and chapparel with a great infinity pool that merged with ocean and sky. Instead of celebrating our friend's good fortune and sense of design, he looked for the egress he might need if the road was blocked.
These are the changes that have happened, lately. We've had a pandemic. For me, 74 years old, I never experienced one before. I only read about jack-booted private armies, and now i see masked men with guns rounding up people in my city. People I know are afraid of our government. In the land of the free. I am afraid. I am half mexican. You can't tell, but i know. I know what it's like now, to be afraid for people my mom used to tell me about. The Japanese that went to internment camps.
I see people with crosses around their necks on TV and sometimes in real life. Many voted for these masked men. Some crosses are big as hockey sticks they use to sweep away any who would stand in their way. My friend said she heard the voice of god when she was 15. My mother-in-law wore a cross with diamonds that now my sister-in-law wears. No small cross. large so you can't miss it. The tiny crosses on the necks of ladies on tv, newscasters and press relations executives, gleefully telling us that people are not wanted here. they will be found and deported. Beware. Beware. Beware.
I see crosses and I see someone trying to distract me from what they do. I wore one once, when i was a teenager. It was in my mother's jewelry box. Someone asked if i were christian and I had to think. Am I? I went to church when i was a child. A few times. But i tried to kill myself when i was seven because i was not wanted. and my family was poor and troubled. and their families were, too. And a friend gave me a crucifix, which i put under my pillow, and she gave me a missal, which i also put under my pillow, and I learned the hail mary full of grace. Thankfully. It was the only comfort I'd ever read -- or felt -- up to then. So I believed in God a savior.
But when i didn't die, and the violence and the stupidity continued and my cousins went to prison, and my cousins were murdered and had babies out of wedlock and people lied and cheated. and i thought, how can there be a god if "he" lets this happen?
Didn't make sense. The long road of critical thinking to consciousness that there are some things that we cannot see, yet they do exist, and some things that we cannot see because they don't. Wisdom is learning the difference.
I believe in reality, various, wonderful and terrible. I try to hang with the wonderful and am in awe at my existence. Existence of everything as it is. It's just more pleasant around wonderful.
I heard Charlie Munger use a great phrase at an annual meeting, once. something about mixing raisins with turds. Everybody laughed. but it's true. Religions do it all the time. They tell you a truth and then tell you a lie or a myth, if you want to give it a mystical spin. but the literal thing they say is untrue. Like the virgin birth. But to get get the good stuff, like thou shalt not lie, is mixed with a lie, the virgin birth. so you need to swallow the good with a bit of shit. and it you don't you are bad. you are judged by the powers, the priests, as bad. so if you want praise, you have to swallow the shit with the good. And if you do, then they have you. You have forsaken your critical and independent thought for someone else's approval. And if you do it once, you will do it again. you surrender your power to another.
That is the great evil of religions and the great weakness of the religious. The religions control and the religious are cowed and controllable. Christianity uses its symbol: the cross, like a hypnotist. See this symbol and obey. See my cross, obey what I say for I am the servant of God. And a nice person, a sweet person, who has been indoctrinated maybe before they ever had a critical thought of their own, is cowed to stop thinking for themselves when it comes to god. When it comes to an authority with a cross. Because they don't want to be bad. They don't want to risk the wrath of God.
Anyway, I write this as a thank you note to Christmas. That it comes so near the winter solstice, where the real earth passes farthest from the real sun and the real light is weakest and it is time for real rest for the living and to marshal our strength we start back towards the light.
Forcing people to eat raisins mixed with turds comes from ignorance and cheating. Reality demands that they be processed, first, turned into fertilizer, and then we eat only the product of it.
Religion is a pale imitation of reality and is a screen from it.
I am grateful for the wonder of my consciousness of existence, that i can look and see what exists around me. Whatever it is. That i can keep learning, while i have breath, without ever knowing everything--and still be happy, that today, I am not a rock. That is the miracle of whatever this is. I have legs and eyes and ears. That I experience what is around me and share it with others who do the same.
Merry Christmas, everybody!!!