Dropkick me, Jesus….

Recently, a local guy (the ex-mayor of my town, actually) wrote a letter to the newspaper detailing how upset he was to be greeted in a local store with “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Of course, he wrote this two weeks before Christmas, but smack dab in the middle of Hannukah. So in response, let me say, get over it! Jesus is your personal lord and savior? Fine. Great. But the operative word in that phrase is “personal.” The rest of the world shouldn’t be forced to acknowledge your god. It’s a personal thing, not something that needs to be played out in the entrance foyer of big-box retail outlets or on the op-ed page of the newspaper.

By saying “Happy Holidays,” the store is choosing not to dismiss Christ, but to include other religions in the seasonal merriment. Nobody is saying that Jesus doesn’t exist (although I’m not saying he did either; that’s an entirely different conversation). Instead, they’re giving a nod to the fact that we live in a multicultural, polyreligious society, and that it’s better to err on the side of inclusion than exclusion. How would the letter-writer feel if he walked into the store at various times of year and was greeted with shouts of “Happy Purim!” or “Merry Ramadan!” During the other 11 months of the year, does he think that a simple “Hello, welcome to WalMart” is really a bone being thrown to the atheists, because it excludes religion altogether?

My point is that religion really doesn’t have a place in the world’s retail centers. And that people need to lighten up. If your faith in your god is so weak that it can’t take a little heckling, needling, or outright naysaying by others, then you need to be shoring up your faith, not tearing down those who don’t share your (weak) beliefs. If you truly believe in a god, then what does it matter what some smock-wearing retiree making minimum wage says while he points you toward the shopping carts?

That said, here’s a hamburger made from a sacred cow…