Following up on my previous post. Last night I was one of a lineup of musicians playing at a folk music monthly concert. I was third in the lineup and pointed out that it was Winter Solstice Night and that the holiday season stretching from Oct 31 to Jan 15 is full of holidays for many religions. Two groups later, a singer announces that she is going to play a song that she thinks expresses the real meaning for the season.

I have no problem with the “Keep Christ in Christmas” slogans so long as its proponents remember it is an admonition to Christians, not the rest of the population (you can’t co-opt non-Christian Yule celebrations and then claim “Keep Christ in Christmas”). Furthermore, it needs to be limited to Christmas the religious holiday, and is not expanded to Christmas the secular holiday and the religious holiday of Christmas is limited to December 25.

Somehow I just cannot pass up this series of tweets: Pope Francis: “SocialJustice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labor rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others.” Jordan Peterson (a Psychology Professor at University of Toronto): “There is nothing Christian about SocialJustice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul.

A peer-reviewed study found Christians hold more animosity towards atheists than atheists hold toward them. The going in assumption of the researchers was that both groups would be more favorable to their own in-group but it is actually asymmetric. The atheists do not really view Christians any worse than they view other atheists. On the other hand, Christians view atheists as worse than Muslims or convicted criminals. Unlike some other studies, this one took a cross section of the American population rather than just getting samples from atheist organizations and samples from Christian churches.

After the leaked draft of the US Supreme Court decision yesterday, I decided to share this post from Lynn Ungar, a UU minister. Source: https://www.facebook.com/shirley.worth/posts/10159952661629483 OK, this is going to take a minute, but hear me out. I am pro-religion. I’ve been an ordained minister for 30 years, and not the kind of ordination you buy online. I believe in people coming together in community, being accountable to one another, and to something that is larger than our individual whiny selves.

Warning: Very Long Post and Very Deep Rabbit Hole about something that doesn’t really matter. Elon Musk has publicly said that we’re most likely in a simulation. Before we get into anything, please note that this is a hypothesis, not a theory. What is the Simulation Hypothesis? The super simple description of the idea that the universe could be a simulation is you assume unlimited computing power and God/aliens create a sufficiently complex version of the Matrix, Inception, Minecraft or the Sims and we are just the characters running around inside a computer program.

Written for a friend thinking about the meaning of God.