In their fight against Christ
Just how vast is their search?
Have they come for your house?
Have they come for your church?
Have they come for your neighbors,
Your family, your friends?
In this fight against Jesus,
Just what are their ends?
I hear you complaining;
You pout and you moan,
“If only those bullies
Would leave us alone!”
It’s more than a good
Christian village can bear!
The nerve of those bastards—
They’ve asked you… to share!
For fifty long years
You have owned the Town Square;
Your nativity scene
Was the only thing there;
Lit up with a town-supplied
Spotlight at night
But, you see, this is privilege—
It isn’t your right.
The square isn’t yours;
It belongs to us all,
So you’ll have to make do
With your church, and the mall,
And your house, and your neighbors’,
And broadcast TV
The things owned by you
Which are not shared with me
Town square, though, is ours—
It is not yours to claim—
So you can’t claim to speak
In the village’s name
This pain that you feel
Is your privilege waning…
So, hey, Merry Christmas,
And quit your complaining!
An Indiana town of less than 3,000 people is engaged in a battle against a leading atheist organisation over their annual Nativity display.
Brookville has presented a Nativity scene for Christmas for the last 50 years, but the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) considers the display a violation of the separation of church and state.
The scene sits on the Franklin County Courthouse square, and features a manger display. There are statues of Mary and Jesus, lambs, a ram, donkey, camel, and calf, the Three Wise Men, shepherds, and baby Jesus.
Fifty years of privilege. I’ve said before, if your house had a hole in it for 50 years, do you give up the right to repair it? If you finally catch someone who’s been driving drunk for 50 years, have they earned some sort of forgiveness?
Brookville resident Wayne Monroe said he doesn’t know what the fuss is about.
“If people don’t like the look of it I think they can look the other way, or don’t look at all,” he told WLWT. “It’s been a tradition here for many, many years and I hope it’s for many more years. I think we deserve the right to put up what the community wants and I don’t think anybody else should tell us what to do.
“I think it’s going to take a lot more that some outfit from Wisconsin to have it removed,” he continued.
Oh, yay–Look the other way! The solution to all of life’s problems.
Commissioner Scott McDonough said the FFRF is misinterpreting the Constitution.
“They use the misconceptions about the separation of church and state to make everyone afraid of getting into the middle of a lawsuit, when the Constitution does protect you,” he told FOX & Friends on Thursday.
He also encouraged others on the receiving end of FFRF threats to stand firm in their faith.
“Stop letting them bully you,” he insisted.
Fifty years, they’ve been taking your lunch money. It would be bullying to make them stop now.
The photograph at Christian Today shows the three wise men visiting Jesus in a stable.
(1) The bible refers only to “wise men” and never says there were three of them. There may have been only two, or ten or twelve. The bible doesn’t say.
(2) Also, the bible says nothing about Jesus living in a stable. In Matthew 2:11 it is clearly stated that the wise men went into a house to see Jesus.
(3) Over the years I have come across many Christians who think that “manger” is another word for “stable” but that is not the case. A manger is an animal food bin about the same size as a baby’s cradle. If we put Matthew 2:11 and Luke 2:16 together we can see that Mary and Joseph probably didn’t have a cradle on hand when Jesus was born, so they took a manger into the house and used it as a makeshift cradle – and Jesus was lying in that manger when the wise men came into the house to see him.
“Stop letting them bully you”
Isn’t that the point?
GOF @1
It’s worst than you describe: years after the birth of Jesus (if it even took place) various people told stories, of which we have a couple. In the minds of the writers J was associated with Nazareth, but their close reading of the OT meant that he just had to be born in Bethlehem.
The ridiculous totally un-Romanitas census and the no-room-at-the-inn-ishness and the Shepherds and the manger was one tradition.
The Magi and their three gifts, and Herod out-heroding himself, and a nice little reference to the OT Egyptian episode was a pretty-well incompatible one, which was set years earlier (and with a J who, far from being a new-born, was up to 2 years old!)
Every group should be able to put up a display or no-one should. If they don’t like it they should look the other way.