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Good Day, Everyone!
You most likely have 2010 goals in mind, if you’ve not already pretty much fixed your goals from what you’ve experienced during 2009. Good for you! I, on the other hand, allow daily practices of calling people and doing tasks to show me at the end of the day what my goals were. Voila! I feel satisfied most of the time.
Staying Awake in 2010 will continue delighting in exposing intuitive experiences, psychological points of view, conspicuous Solar Cycle 24 activities, cosmological possibilities, the performing arts; and poligious ambiguities and deceits, particularly the menaces of evangelical fundamentalism’s lofty bravado. Staying Awake is fascinated with following the money, and whenever possible, it will disclose journalists’ or writers’ articles and essays about covertly financed reprehensible activities and decisions enforced in the name of USA. Staying Awake will publish once monthly, maybe more or less.
The following two exposés each express various concepts for which I applaud the authors’ keen perceptions: the sermon was written in 1891, and the trinkets piece was written just the other day.
A Christmas Sermon
“The good part of Christmas is not always Christian— it is generally Pagan; that is to say, human, natural.
“Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition hereafter.
“It taught some good things—the beauty of love and kindness in man. But as a torch-bearer, as a bringer of joy, it has been a failure. It has given infinite consequences to the acts of finite beings, crushing the soul with a responsibility too great for mortals to bear. It has filled the future with fear and flame, and made God the keeper of an eternal penitentiary, destined to be the home of nearly all the sons of men. Not satisfied with that, it has deprived God of the pardoning power.
“And yet it may have done some good by borrowing from the Pagan world the old festival called Christmas.
“Long before Christ was born the Sun-God triumphed over the powers of Darkness. About the time that we call Christmas the days begin perceptibly to lengthen. Our barbarian ancestors were worshippers of the sun, and they celebrated his victory over the hosts of night. Such a festival was natural and beautiful. The most natural of all religions is the worship of the sun. Christianity adopted this festival. It borrowed from the Pagans the best it has.
“I believe in Christmas and in every day that has been set apart for joy. We in America have too much work and not enough play. We are too much like the English.
“I think it was Heinrich Heine who said that he thought a blaspheming Frenchman was a more pleasant object to God than a praying Englishman. We take our joys too sadly. I am in favor of all the good days—the more the better.
“Christmas is a good day to forgive and forget—a good day to throw away prejudices and hatreds—a good day to fill your heart and your house, and the hearts and houses of others, with sunshine.” ¹
| Two Talks: Creed and Hope by Robert G. Ingersoll duration 4.03 minutes |
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Seemingly Harmless Trinkets
Archaeologists working in Akron, Ohio, claim to have found the world’s oldest three-dimensional representation of Santa Claus. Known as the “Blue Santa,” the object was made circa 1884 by The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company, which burned to the ground in 1904. The figurine is 2½ inches tall.
Hover Here to see the figurine. ²
“What a fascinating relic. The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company creates the child avarice market by mass-producing penny toys to feed the desire of children less than rich, and in doing so, created a monster. Now we have a nation of greedy, wanting individuals whose early years were composed of a whirlwind of want and acquisition centered upon birthdays, and ultimately, Christmas. Here we celebrate [the] birth of an impoverished infant in a cow stall who grew up to preach disdain for all material things, and we celebrate that birth by the purchase of mountains of worthless sweatshop and machine made crap which fills the shelves of countless stores in strip malls and catalogue outlets across the land. The legacy of those raised upon the crummy products which followed in the wake of these seemingly harmless trinkets is to have grown up to destroy the world, essentially. It’s only fitting that the chore of making this crap has fallen now to the Chinese, who will no doubt replace America as the hegemonic “superpower” by the neat trick of shoveling more and more trash into the greedy, slavering hands of unwaiting kids in the states, as they secure their final diagnosis of near-autism, ADD, ADHD, etc. and subsequent drugged-into-submissive-consumerism ‘treatment’.
“Someday that little toy museum will be seen for what it is—a memorial to a place where imagination, common-sense, and sufficiency went to die in the service of buy-it-and-throw-it-away. How lovely that the factory burned to the ground—ahead of the curve.
“Excuse me now, my Christmas cookies are burning.” ³
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