Is Christmas About Jesus? Residential Christmas Light Displays Offer a Clue

To what extent is Christmas about Jesus? On evening of Dec 18, I conducted a survey of Christmas lights in south St. Louis. I walked through neighborhoods to photograph residential Christmas displays. I walked through several neighborhoods (in the vicinity Ted Drews, for those of you from St. Louis).

I photographed every front yard that had a person or a thing on the front yard, excluding houses that merely had Christmas lights without figures. I also excluded houses with only Christmas tree images and those displaying only angels. I wanted to know the percentage of homes that displayed Jesus or the Nativity Scene. If a house displayed Jesus plus other figures, I counted it as a house that displayed an image of Jesus. I'm fully aware that this was not a scientific survey. There are likely many religious people who choose (for many reasons) to refrain from displaying images of Jesus in their Christmas front yard displays.

Out of 164 Christmas displays I photographed, only 13 (8%) displays a representation of Jesus.

At the end of this article I’ve listed many of the other personalities and objects you’ll find on neighborhood lawns to celebrate Christmas. In addition to Santas and reindeer, these figures include Harry Potter, penguins, unicorns, pigs wearing sunglasses and the Grinch.

Why would I do this survey? I was not trying to point out America’s loss of religiosity. I’m an atheist. My position is to each to his or her own. Feel free to follow a religion or no religion as long as you celebrate the right of all other people to celebrate their own religion (or no religion).

My purpose was inspired by the following passage by Thomas Sowell, from Knowledge and Decisions (1980):

Perhaps the most important feature of the first half of Knowledge and Decisions is simply its analysis of decision-making processes and institutions in terms of the characteristics and consequences of those processes themselves—irrespective of their goals. As noted in Chapter 6, this approach rejects the common practice of “characterizing processes by their hoped-for results rather than their actual mechanics.” “Profit-making” businesses, “public interest” law firms, and “drug prevention” programs are just some of the many things commonly defined by their hoped-for results, rather than by the characteristics of die decision-making processes involved and the incentives created by those processes. So called “profit-making” businesses, for example, often fail to make a profit and most of them become extinct within a decade after being founded. In Knowledge and Decisions the owners of such businesses are defined not as profit makers but as residual claimants to the firm’s income—that is, to what is left over after employees, suppliers, and others have been paid. Put this way, it is dear from the outset that what is left over may be positive, negative, or zero. There is no more reason to expect "drug prevention” programs to prevent drug usage or “public interest” law firms to serve the public interest than to expect that most “profit-making” enterprises will in fact make profits. Whether any of these organizations do or do not live up to their expectations or claims is a question of empirical evidence. Pending the presentation of such evidence, such organizations can be analyzed in terms of what they actually do, not what they hope or claim to achieve.

Is Christmas about Jesus? Somewhat, but evidence abounds suggesting that Christmas is, mostly, for most Americans, about other things, including an orgy of consumerism. A Martian anthropologist who objectively studied Christmas behavior, including America’s choices in Christmas lights, would probably agree with me. Yes, Jesus is discussed in churches, but where are figurines of Jesus in grocery stores and hardware stores? Is Jesus discussed to any meaningful degree at family dinner tables? How often do people spontaneously discuss Jesus at cocktail parties?

Christmas, as a national institution, is mostly not about Jesus. It’s mostly about other things. It is my belief that it has become more and more about things since my childhood (I was born in the mid-1950s) and it has been a slow imperceptible drift. Jesus is the frog in the pot.

But the institution of Christmas is merely one example of many such drifting institutions. It appears to me that most American Institutions have been hollowed out over the years. They no longer do what they claim to do. Hence, the caveat offered by Thomas Sowell.

Wikipedia, which claims to offer a “neutral” point of view, is one of these hollowed-out institutions. And see here. 

Also note this about Wikipedia's annual budget:

Consider also the FDA, which is almost completely captured by pharmaceutical money. Consider the Department of “Defense,” which has waged numerous wars of discretion for decades, all of these wars supported by corporate media marching in lockstep.

And speaking of the corporate “news” media, it is clear that one can expect mostly to be misguided and propagandized by these institutions, not well-informed. Here are more than 300 examples of that.

Is a school functioning as a school?  You need to dig in deep to figure it out.  Don't just read the word school on the building and assume that children are being educated inside.

In conclusion, I refer back to the wise words of Thomas Sowell. Don’t ever assume that an institution actually does what it claims to do. I’m from Missouri, the “Show Me” state and I recommend that we all take on this attitude.

I decided to do my Christmas light survey because it was easy: people reveal in lights what is on their mind about the reason for the season. It’s much more difficult to tell what is really going on with most other institutions. Whenever institutions make claims that they are doing good things for society, demand that they open up and show you. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Merry Christmas to all, whatever that might mean to you!

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We Can’t Get the Corporate Media to Even Mention this COVID Vax Data

Nicolas Hulscher offers this disturbing data (some of it from Ed Dowd), but US Corporate media apparently hasn't been given permission to dig into this data:

None of the following "news" outlets have even mentioned Ed Dowd's work ever: NYT, WaPo, NPR, MSNBC and CNN.

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About Those who Seek to Censor Us

For several years, it has been made clear (by the Twitter Files and through the works of Mike Benz, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and other courageous journalists) that America's censors are well-to-do people with degrees from fancy colleges who hide within enormous federally funded bureaucracies. Now consider these words of Matt Taibbi:

So let me pause to say something about America's current intellectual class from which the anti-disinformation complex works. By the way, there are no working class censors. The dirty secret of content moderation all over the world is that it's a tiny sliver of educated rich correcting everybody else. It's telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it, basically.

The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Hadens, John Brennan's, James Clapper's, Mike McFall's, and Rick Stengel's who make up America's self-appointed speech police. In pre-revolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword fight to the death.

Our aristocrats pee themselves at a mean tweet. These people have no honor, no belief, no poetry, no art, no humor, no patriotism, which is unique to them, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They are simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off. They may have one idea, and it's not even an idea, but a sensation. Fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat. They're afraid of each other. But they're also terrified of everyone outside their social set, and they live in near constant dread of being caught with even one original opinion.

I just finished posting the following on FB, where I often piss off the sheep and where many well-meaning people are afraid to say what they think:

BTW, you'll rarely hear about these words of Matt Taibbi of the works of other amazing independent journalists from corporate media. They have by and large decided that their job is not to provide you with facts so you can make up your own mind on issues. Instead, they serve their corporate masters by telling you what to think. They feel that it's their job to fool you by hiding relevant facts from you and by making shit up on a grand scale in fairly lockstep coordination with other corporate outlets. I know this is hard to hear for many of you. I know that you might prefer to remain in blissful ignorance rather than do the hard work of growing a spine and telling these propagandists and censors to fuck off because they are Anti-American.

For more on how censors think, consider the words of Robert Corn-Revere, author of The Mind of the Censor:

The message of the censor is clear and unmistakable: I (or we) know the truth, and must control the ideas or influences to which you may become exposed to protect you from falling into error (or sin). Truth may be revealed by whispers from god, by political theory, by popular vote, or by social science, but once it has been determined, the time for debate is over. Anthony Comstock did not invent censorship, but his DNA may be found in the genetic code of every would-be censor who walks the earth. As Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy put it: “Self-assurance has always been the hallmark of a censor.” In this respect, he echoed Mencken’s assessment of vice crusaders that “[their] very cocksureness is their chief source of strength.”” . . .

There appears to be a psychological dimension to the censor’s dilemma as well. What can one say about the type of person who devotes his or her life to denouncing certain types of expression and advocating its prohibition while choosing a profession in which he immerses himself in it? Purity crusaders claim to hate the stuff they want to suppress and argue that it will ruin all who are exposed, but invariably they can’t get enough of it. They search it out, collect it, study it, categorize it, archive it, talk about it, and display it to others, all for the ostensible purpose of making such expression cease to exist. . .

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Scales Falling from Democrat Eyes

The scales are rapidly falling off of the eyes of many people. They are now free to talk about the Democrat party cult of ideology. You are invited to start saying what you are really thinking. Join me in doing this. You'll find it refreshing, healthy and invigorating. Unlock the door to your own mental prison and come on out into the sunlight. Politics is corrupted when it is treated like a religion. Up is again up. 2 + 2 = 4 again. Lindy Li is a recent example:

From this post by Bad Hombre:

Kamala campaign advisor Lindy Li quits the Democrat Party: "I don’t want to be part of this tent anymore. I don’t want to be part of this craziness. I want to be part of the team that treats me with common decency."

Li says she’s been the target of a smear and cancel campaign because she dared to ask questions about Kamala’s mismanagement of donor money that Li helped her raise.

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