When I was young and my heart was an open book, I used to think I would go to hell if I sang a Christmas carol in December.
Now I'm older, and I'm pretty sure Bill O'Reilly and possibly Dennis Hastert are going to hell, if for nothing else than their insistence that we celebrate December 25 as Jesus's birthday.
I was raised in a fundamentalist-style church, the Church of Christ. (Not the United Church of Christ, that's a completely different group of heathens Sadducees.) We were known as scholars of the Bible, and some of our ministers were very smart men. (Women couldn't speak in the church, a fact which bitterly disappointed me when I was four and had decided I wanted to become a preacher.) Our ministers told us what the Bible said, and what this meant, in language we could understand. For instance, there was a passage in the Bible, (Joel, maybe?) that said you should use only your voices to praise God; therefore we allowed no musical instruments in our church.
I still have funny feelings when I hear organs and pianos and guitars in some of the other services I've attended. Like I want to go take a bath or something.
About those heathenish Christmas carols...since obviously no one knows when exactly Jesus was born, celebrating his birth on any day, particularly December 25, is wrong. Why? Because there's a verse in the Bible (Revelations, maybe?) that says specifically, "Don't make shit up and sell it as gospel, or I WILL send your ass to hell."
(Or possibly arrange for you to be swallowed by a great fish, but this is simply a nuance: hell is the real threat here, and you don't want to go there. Trust me.)
So in our house no angels, nativity scenes, and especially no Baby Jesuses were allowed at Christmas. We had Santa all right, and reindeer, and my father was even an elf. (He made train layouts at Christmas for parents who were too lazy to do it themselves.) We sang "All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth" and "Jolly Old St Nicholas" but never, ever "The First Noel," except once in a while in July when the church songleader would ask us to sing Joy to the World. We would, lustily, having been deprived of such an anthem during the winter months.
One December I remember sitting in my first grade class, taught by a scary, scary woman, and being told we were now going to sing Away in a Manger and Joy to the World. I was horrified! My choices were: go to hell, or defy a woman I was deathly afraid of, and likely get paddled. I chose to mumble every other word or so, and hope God wasn't listening real close.
Bill O'Reilly wants to stamp out the generic and mostly secular "happy holidays" and replace it with a more Christ-centered "merry Christmas." He sees himself as a defender of Christmas, against, I guess, my church. And now Dennis Hastert wants to replace the "holiday tree" at the capital with a "Christmas tree." This is getting dangerously close to doing exactly what God said don't do: adding to the good book. (I suspect they are both playing to an audience. Not only did God probably say don't do that, especially on Fox where the audience are all particularly susceptible to false prophets, but this will backfire, proving they don't know us fundies very well at all.)
Maybe Bill O'Reilly thinks God isn't listening. But I know better. In fact, I now know there isn't a God, or people like Bill O'Reilly would have been turned to salt a long time ago. That's what happens to people who defy God's word.
Really. It says so in the Bible.
