Meanwhile, Steve Benen reports that The War on Christmas has begun again. Even though it's August. Apparently Sam's Club released a Christmas advertisement that didn't call it Christmas, but just used the generic term "holiday." As Benen puts it:
The horror. At this rate, people may not remember what Christmas even is.
I remember what Christmas is. It's when I can get nearly empty slopes at Aspen mountain for a whole morning while my Christian friends are doing whatever it is they do. How's that for some Judeo-Christian expression?
For those of you who are wondering, I plan on posting Part II of the interview Tuesday evening (or more likely, very early Wednesday morning).
What strikes me as bizarre about Ms. Harris' comment is that she seems to assume that no one starting from basic propositions other than the New Testament could possibly arrive at the same moral conclusions as Christians. Aside from suggesting substantial weakness in the theoretical underpinnings of Ms. Harris' brand of Christian moral theory, this strikes me as completely wrong. As I understand Jesus' teachings (and I admit that it has been a few years since I've studied them in any detail), his basic moral theory seems to be the Golden Rule. This is a widely accepted (if not always widely applied) axiom in America. I suspect that Ms. Harris is really worried that non-Christians do not widely accept the pronoucements of the apostle Paul, who moved Christianity from Jesus' standards-based approach to morals to a set of rules. In this she may be right, but she misses the point. Isn't it time for people of aith to re-examine Paul's rules in light of Jesus' standards?
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