@JackDouglas That's about right. I didn't mean "will accept" in the sense of "you need to do something", but more along the lines that some secular people object to being greeted with "merry christmas" as an imposition of religion (silly IMO), so I was being hyper-sensitive. Sorry. :-)

Anyway, I'm back now -- shavua tov (good week). :-)

@MonicaCellio How silly it is depends on the context.

It's a bit like the statement "I'll pray for you". It can be a pleasant statement of well-wishing, or it can be a passive-aggressive attack by a religious person who's just lost an argument to an atheist.

@TRiG There are so many ways in which Christians who have power oppress minorities (like trying to impose their Sunday restrictions on the rest of us, or bringing their prayer into public schools, etc), that by comparison a stray "merry christmas" from the cashier at the grocery store isn't worth getting worked up over.

@TRiG Ok, I'll grant you that. Any expression can be obnoxious in the right context, but I assume that most people wishing holiday greetings are running on auto-pilot. If it's someone close to me or with real power over me I may find a way to have the "your defaults are not my defaults" conversation, but the rest I let pass.

@MonicaCellio I've never experienced this myself, but I have heard of some people using that greeting deliberately to annoy people.

@MonicaCellio I was brought up to respond to "Merry Christmas" with "thanks". And that's pretty much what I still do.

@TRiG that's what I do too. And if someone is trying to be annoying, he can do it with "have a nice day too". It's not the words so much as when, how, and why they're delivered. Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying "when I say 'shabbat shalom' I'm not trying to be that guy". :-)

@MonicaCellio I'd've thought you'd established your credentials well enough that the disclaimer was unnecessary, but I suppose it's no harm to be on the safe side.

@TRiG yeah, as I said, it was overkill -- I was in a hurry and overthinking it. :-)

> In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, yet He shall rise and His kingdom shall cover the Earth. …*

@MonicaCellio Republican state Sen. Dennis Kruse of has introduced a bill that would allow Indiana public schools to require students to recite the Lord’s prayer each morning.

@TRiG yeah, that's the sort of thing I have a problem with, and that's far from a unique case. :-( If a morning prayer (of any sort) is important to parents, they should make sure it's done at home or send their kids to a private school that is free to enforce things like that.

@MonicaCellio Your First Amendment protects you from a lot of the weirdness, doesn't it?

(The first words to our constitution are "In the name of the Most Holy Trinity".)

@TRiG The first amendment says Congress shall make no law. While the courts have said "yeah, states and local governments too", that doesn't stop people from trying. Plus you get the ones who argue that whatever practice is being proposed isn't really limiting others' free exercise of religion (you can just sit quietly), or that it's universal (the ten commandments are good ideas) so not really religious. It gets weird. :-(

@TRiG Where are you? (Your profile doesn't say.)

@MonicaCellio America has a lot of weirdness, doesn't it?

@MonicaCellio Ireland, Republic of.

@TRiG Ah, so you've probably got some challenges too, though different ones. :-) Yeah, the US has lots of weirdnesses, and I get the impression that our per-capita weirdness is off the scale...

My EL&U profile gives my location, because it's relevant there.

@TRiG ah, that makes sense. This room offered SO as your main one so I went there.

@MonicaCellio The North is a lot weirder, religiously, than the south. We have almost no Protestant fundies (the Protestants in the south are Church of Ireland (Anglican), Methodists, Presbyterians (fairly liberal ones). And the Catholic church, after a number of scandles, has lost a lot of its power.

Northern Ireland is, well, it's the people who started the fundie weirdness in your country. Ian Paisley and suchlike.

@TRiG Ah, thanks for the explanation. It seems to me that the fundies are generally the catalysts for, and often sources of, weirdness. (I don't just mean Christians either; in Israel it's the fundie right that causes a lot of trouble with, e.g., segregated buses.)

@MonicaCellio And, almost always, hatred of women dressed up as respect for women.

@TRiG I'm glad you don't have fundy problems where you live (or at least not major ones). Here it's the southern part of the country that's more prone to that. I'm in the north, so while it happens it's not as bad as if I lived in Alabama or Texas.

@MonicaCellio That said, have you heard of Savita Halappanavar?

[Trigger warnings for medical misconduct leading to death.]

@TRiG Indeed I have. It's a very sad case; the abortion law was there to protect the fetus but in that case the fetus was already dead, so strict application of the law killed the mother too without helping anyone. Regardless of how you feel about "elective" abortion, that particular one was probably not what the law had in mind. :-(

@MonicaCellio The existing law is just far too vague; the courts have told the politicians they have to clarify it, but any time they make any move to do so, the church starts growling. Within the existing ambiguities of the law, as clarified by previous court cases (we live in a common law country, so courts can clarify law), an abortion would have been permitted in the case, but the doctors were scared to do it because the law wasn't clear enough.

@TRiG wow, I sure hope they get that cleared up, and that there are people in the church willing to say "yes in principle abortion is wrong but this isn't that and it needs to be legal".

@MonicaCellio Personally, I'd prefer the church to shut up and/or the politicians to start ignoring them. After Enda Kenny's speech about child abuse, I thought perhaps we were getting somewhere, but apparently not.

@TRiG yeah, I'd prefer that the politicians consider equally the needs of all their constituents and not just the loud powerful ones, in both our countries. But since that won't happen any time soon, a next-best step would be for those within those powerful religious blocs who disagree to speak up. Ah well, wishful thinking probably.

@MonicaCellio Well, this is why I read Slacktivist. It's a deliberate effort to remind myself that not all religious people are my enemy (though the loud ones usually are).

Here's Enda Kenny on the Cloyne Report.

@TRiG Any community has nut-cases, highly-reasonable people, and lots of folks in between. The extreme ones get the airplay and it's easy to get the impression they represent everybody.

Transcript of Cloyne Report speech

@TRiG thanks.

@TRiG Thanks for sharing @TRiG ! I want to say the current Eastern Orthodox Bible used that as a baseline for their translation but I wasn't aware that it was public domain. That's awesome!

@DanO'Day I'm on the WEB mailing list, for some reason.

Have been for years.

very cool

@DanO'Day I actually e-mailed him about some of the problems I've heard about "putting things into the public domain" (some say this is not actually legally possible). He said that a prominent statement that the work was in the public domain was sufficient.

@TRiG That's very interesting and good to know.