"Happy holidays" is bull**** Christian normativity.

Yet you only criticize one religion. What a coincidence!

I am religiously atheist and culturally jewish. I don't believe in god above, and I certainly don't believe in your little baby jesus. Furthermore, as someone who vividly remembers getting the crap kicked out of him in middle school for being the only jewish kid in the class, I can personally tell anyone who wants to say "it's just being nice! there's nothing wrong with it! it's just PC bull****." that otherization and the attempted normalization of one religious ideology has real world consequences for real people. It's not just you being nice, it's you actively participating in a system of control that is hurtful and offensive.

When you say happy holidays, what you are actually saying is "I think everyone should be celebrating Christmas right now, and I will make you celebrate it with me with a thinly veiled code word for Christmas."

This is true for two reasons. First, when you wish me happy holidays, you are only demonstrating your ignorance of the fact that the "Holiday" I am supposed to be celebrating ended roughly 2 weeks ago. If someone were to wish you happy holidays on January 9th you would look at them a little funny and wonder what they were talking about. I don't have to do that, because I know what you're actually talking about. You're talking about Christmas. Stop with the patronizing, faux-inclusive bull****.

The other reason it is true is because Hanukkah is not an important holiday. Like, at all. It is minor as all hell. In terms of important holidays Hanukkah is about as important as boxing day is. To Americans. It just happens to be almost exclusively the only Jewish holiday that Christians know about. It's almost as if this is because they trot it out to act like their Christmas celebrations are somehow secular. They sing 6 Christmas carols and 1 Hanukkah song at the kids "Holiday concert" and they go home in their nice little subaru foresters marveling at how cosmopolitan they all are.

From now on I am going to start wishing Christians "happy holidays" around Yom Kippur and then when they look at me funny explain to them that we're celebrating our important holidays together, so I was wishing them a wonderful St. Andrew's day. Thirty days in advance.

Seriously. Just stop it.

I'm not entirely convinced that you're not just pulling Planta's leg here, but anyway: I am an atheist. My atheism means that I lack an active belief in god. I could also actively believe that there cannot be a god (for whatever reason, probability, science, purely emotional eg hatred of organised religion, etc), but that wouldn't make me 'more of' an atheist or anything like that. It is simply the fact that I do not actively believe in a god that means I am an atheist.

Lol what a stupid thing to say. Athiests have no faith whatsoever

Nah, he doesn't.

It's not a religion in the sense that others are called religions.

Atheism has far less religious meaning in its own right then the importance of, say, Star Wars or the TV show Friends.

Atheism basically says God is not sufficiently proven. You can point to physical or mental phenemonon but you don't have a proof that God made them.

Unlike, say, Star Wars or Friends, atheism doesn't necessarily say that being atheist should make you a) try to be more of anything in your life
nor b) try to be less of anything in your life.

When an atheist does think about a best way for OTHER people to live their life (or a best way to live their OWN life), they hopefully realise that, like Star Wars or Friends (or, arguably, a religion) what they are trying to do is create a community or fanbase - whether that's a community of one if they're deliberately a loner who gains a thrill from having an original interest that no others or only a few have - or a community of a few carefully chosen people or a community of many.

Some say that a higher percentage of people employed in intellectual occupations tend to be atheists.

Well firstly I must put across an oppostite view which is that might be the case for an 'everyday' genius if one can be called that but that some (not all) 'supergeniuses' might be more inclined to believe in God- or at least to want to believe in God. If genius is something that they wish to preserve - or something that they do not feel has been properly rewardded in this life- then of course they are going to want an afterlife.

Fortunately, some of those also realise that does not, in itself, mean that God does not exist. All it means that, on AVERAGE, people who have the WILL, MEANS, OPPORTUNITY and SUPPORT to end up employed in intellectual occupations tend to call themselves atheists, who might allow that 'I don't or can't know whether or not God exists' HOWEVER, going beyond mere agnosticism, the combination of that lack of being able to know and the evidence of the world leads them to BELIEVE that there is no God.
A belief that, unless other evidence arises, they could argue it is reasonable to say is consistent with other long held beliefs such as that it will be relatively safe to leave the house in a morning because gravity will not suddenly cease to exist. Therefore atheism becomes less like a belief and more like a 'this is how it is. I'm aware of gravity existing every day and I'm aware of not experiencing unicorns nor God'.

If you say atheism is a faith then you must also say that not belieivng in a flying teapot in the sky is a faith and that leaving the house on a morning and not expecting once friendly seeming people to kill you is a faith.
And, sadly, that's exactly what life is. The more faith we seem to have in others, the more likely they seem to have in us.

But the more faith we have in God the more faith God has in us is a leap that, whilst many do hold it to be a true,, for an atheist might as well be a trip in to madness- or at least a childhood regression, a naive, harmless and charming thought of imaginary friends.

And if anything you celebrate Xmas, Christmas refers to the birth of Christ which Christians celebrate. Xmas is just an excuse for atheists to get some presents and time off school.

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You all believe there is no god.

Evidence would strongly suggest there is no god - at least no god in the sense of the ones we have been banging on about for millennia. Therefore I don't actively believe there is a god, and I even lean towards it being highly likely that there cannot be a god of any kind - though the latter depends on definitions, and it isn't what makes me an atheist.

That also doesn't mean I fill the gaps with my own hypotheses. It's quite easy to just not come to conclusions where there is no evidence to draw conclusions from. The only way in which religion and deities are relevant to my life is the way it makes other people act. Otherwise it is entirely possible to just not think about it. At all. I don't actively believe anything on faith.

There's no evidence of a god, but there is also no evidence there is no god either.

OK you're trolling. That's fine. Carry on.

That was the only comment I made in this thread that's not a troll.

Christmas is a holiday that Christians stole from the pagans. Enjoy your Christmas tree, I'm sure Jesus loved his.

While you are partly correct in saying we stole the christmas tree from the pagans. Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ and seeing as the pagans did not believe in Christ we did not actually steal the holiday itself from the pagans.

Well Jesus was born in spring or summer, not winter.

I guess that you either don't believe in God OR don't think that believing in God / claiming to believe in God has generally been a good thing for the world whether or not God actually exists.

But to say that the idea of God is offensive?

That doesn't compute. If God created everything then it's God's ball game. God would get the right to INVENT what is good and bad.

Plus God would get the right for supposedly bad things to happen to supposedly good people and vice versa.

For it would be God who would be the objective decider of how the grand scheme of things will pan out- in this world AND an afterlife.

You can still have your own ball game within God's (or society's) ball game. But it can be difficult. It's easier, if you're moral, to go along with the idea that there is a God who has a ball game. Otherwise the immorality of others will start to drive you mad with anger.

However- I don't currently believe in God. So that might partly explain why I'm mad with anger with the world and with a lazy band of 'intellectuals' (or not to intellectual) who lack, say, Dawkins's erudition, who, unlike him, feel smug looking down on believers without feeling that they have to justify why belief, for them personally, is an error.

I fail to see why God would have any rights over me just because he created the universe.