The actual Christmas that marks an extraordinary event so many centuries ago and not the contrived and convoluted cobbling of bits of fiction that salve the anti-religious.
That Christmas.
Try as the bribed press and the communist parties of China and its vassal state, North Korea, might, people still believe and still will celebrate Christmas:
The Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and Leger recently released findings from a survey that looked into how Canadians kept their faith during the pandemic when many places of worship have had to close their doors or severely limit capacity to comply with public health rules. The survey was conducted through a web panel between Nov. 19 to 21, with 1,565 Canadians 18 years of age or older. The results of the survey are compared to a similar pre-pandemic survey of 2,215 Canadians that was conducted in May 2019.
The most significant finding of the 2021 survey is the decrease in Canadians attending religious services since the pandemic began. Respondents who said they never attend services increased from 30 per cent pre-pandemic to 67 per cent. The survey also found that 60.5 per cent of Canadians who say they strongly believe in God never or rarely attended a religious service since the beginning of the pandemic.
So, people stopped going to church because they were denied access. But people still believe in God.
I believe they tried this in the former Soviet Union and were shocked to see how many people went to church after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
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With Christmas upon us, a number of Canadians will not be able to attend a church service to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, and those who can attend might choose not to do so due to caps on attendance or fears of contracting COVID-19.
All provinces and territories in Canada except Saskatchewan are imposing restrictions on places of worship, with at least Nunavut having decided on Dec. 24 to close churches altogether due to eight active cases.
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Scorning it as ‘Western spiritual opium’ and the ‘Festival of Shame’, China has cracked down on Christmas in recent years as the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) increasingly vociferous brand of nationalism rejects any outside influence or ideas.
Christmas may not be traditional or officially recognised in China, but there are tens of millions of Christians in the country who celebrate the occasion while much of the general public enjoy festive rituals that are common worldwide - be it shopping for gifts or going out with friends.
(Sidebar: SEE: Zen, Cardinal.)
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The pastor of a Protestant house church in Guangdong said local police contacted him on Dec. 22 to ensure his church did not organize for the annual holiday.
"In our town, we're not allowed Christmas gatherings, not even parties," who only gave his surname Chen said. "This is also happening in Henan and other places, using the pandemic as a pretext. We can only meet online now."
A pastor in Shandong mentioned similar restrictions are in effect where he lives.
"They warned us in the run-up to Christmas that there are to be no activities," he said. "We can only have underground activities."
Bob Fu, president of China Aid, told RFA that the country would soon implement regulations censoring religious activity.
The new rules govern any form of religious content online, as well as fundraising "in the name of religion." They require police, state security police, internet censors, and religious affairs bureaus to "supervise and manage" all online religious content.
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Mr Cho, who now works for Open Doors, a charity who help support persecuted Christians, said: "I'm sure they will be hunted down.
"That is in no doubt.
"Kim's regime will be urging the people to show their complete loyalty to the Kim family.
"Within this time, if anyone is arrested for secretly celebrating Christmas, they could be killed straight away.
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In Manger Square, hundreds of Christians - mostly those who live, work or study in Israel and the occupied West Bank - gathered near the tree and crib to sing carols and bring some cheer to the scene outside the Church of the Nativity.
But Joseph Giacaman, whose family has sold souvenirs around the square for a century, said business was around 2% of pre-pandemic years. “We were closed until three weeks ago. I have sold maybe two or three olive wood cribs. In normal years, we’d sell three or four each day throughout the year,” he said.
The back streets were virtually empty.
Star Street had been renovated in recent years in the aim of drawing crowds, but here as elsewhere the Omicron variant dashed those hopes in November when Israel began closing its borders.
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Christmas brings out the especially nasty:
A court in Uganda has charged 15 people - including a pregnant woman - with terrorism over their alleged role in several attacks in the country.
Most of the defendants were accused of being members of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a militant group which is part of the Islamic State group.
Officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo say at least six people have died in a suicide bomb attack on a crowded restaurant in the eastern city of Beni.
Police prevented the bomber from entering the building, but he blew himself up at the entrance killing himself and five other people.
Another 13 people were injured.
The officials blamed Saturday's attack on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a militant group said to be linked to the so-called Islamic State (IS).
So far no group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
More than 30 people were celebrating Christmas at the In Box restaurant when the bomb went off, two witnesses told AFP news agency.
Children and local officials were reportedly in the restaurant at the time.
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Two members of the international humanitarian group Save the Children were missing Saturday after Myanmar government troops rounded up villagers, some believed to be women and children, fatally shot more than 30 and burned the bodies, according to a witness and other reports.
Purported photos of the aftermath of the Christmas Eve massacre in eastern Mo So village, just outside Hpruso township in Kayah state where refugees were sheltering from an army offensive, spread on social media in the country, fueling outrage against the military that took power in February.
The accounts could not be independently verified. The photos showed the charred bodies of over 30 people in three burned-out vehicles.
A villager who said he went to the scene told The Associated Press that the victims had fled the fighting between armed resistance groups and Myanmar’s army near Koi Ngan village, which is just beside Mo So, on Friday. He said they were killed after they were arrested by troops while heading to refugee camps in the western part of the township.
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Sometimes, it's not about blowing up people but trying to ruin things because of one's own tunnel vision:
Against the Grain Theatre’s new interpretation of Messiah, Messiah/Complex, hoped to support Indigenous and underrepresented voices within their mandate of presenting familiar pieces “in innovative ways and in unusual venues.” They decided to present Handel’s orchestral music as originally written, to be performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, but they hired all Indigenous, Black or racialized singer soloists, 12 in total.
I thought they said the made-up word, "racialised", but what I really heard was that they couldn't sing the actual chorus of Messiah and decided to morph it into something unrecognisable.
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Wait - aren't people supposed to write things on cakes or else?:
The management of Delizia, a Karachi-based bakery chain, has responded to an incident at a branch in DHA in which one of its workers refused to write ‘Merry Christmas’ on a cake.
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Look after your own poor from now on, India. We're done:
Effigies of Santa Claus were burnt in Agra on Friday, claiming the mythical figure to be part of a "strategy" by Christian missionaries to convert people.
The incident took place at the intersection of St John's College on Mahatma Gandhi Marg on Christmas Eve. Members of the Antarrashtriya Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Bajrang Dal took out a procession carrying effigies of Saint Nicholas, more commonly known as Santa Claus.
These effigies were then set ablaze while activists raised slogans like "Santa Claus Murdabad".
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Festive celebrations were disrupted, Jesus statues were smashed and effigies of Santa Claus were burned in a spate of attacks on India’s Christian community over Christmas.
Amid growing intolerance and violence against India’s Christian minority, who make up about 2% of India’s population, several Christmas events were targeted by Hindu right wing groups, who alleged Christians were using festivities to force Hindus to convert.
In recent years, Christians have increasingly faced harassment around Christmas but this year saw a notable surge in attacks.
In Agra in Uttar Pradesh, members of right wing Hindu groups burned effigies of Santa Claus outside missionary-led schools and accused Christian missionaries of using Christmas celebrations to lure people in.
“As December comes, the Christian missionaries become active in the name of Christmas, Santa Claus and New Year. They lure children by making Santa Claus distribute gifts to them and attract them towards Christianity,” said Ajju Chauhan regional general secretary of Bajrang Dal, one of the right wing Hindu outfits leading the protest.
In Assam, two protesters in saffron, the signature colour of Hindu nationalism, entered a Presbyterian church on Christmas night and disrupted proceedings, demanding that all Hindus leave the building.
“Let only Christian celebrate Christmas,” said one of the men, in a video filmed during the disruption. “We are against Hindu boys and girls participating in Christmas function … it hurts our sentiments. They dress up in church and everyone sings Merry Christmas. How will our religion survive?”. The police have subsequently arrested both men involved.
You have a billion Hindus. Relax.
The new vampires:
Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt mauled a young Christian woman, Mary, to death after they saw her cross.
Also in Egypt, Ayman, 17, a Christian student, was strangled and beaten to death by his teacher and fellow students for refusing to obey the teacher's demand that he cover his cross. When the school's principal was informed of the attack, he ignored it and "continued to sip his tea."
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In the space of a couple of decades, Quebec became the region on the continent where religious practice was the weakest and where the largest proportion of couples lived out of wedlock. The birth rate fell from 30 per thousand when I was born to less than 10 per thousand today. The Catholic church lost all influence, to the point where in the early days of the pandemic, the province’s bishops could not even get the premier’s office to return their calls.
Quebec is propped by the government. Were it a COVID patient in New Zealand, we could pull the plug and not feel badly about it at all.
That's what happens when you throw away your religion and culture.
Quite the opposite of late twentieth century Poland who found solace and strength in its faith:
The Polish government turning on its own people was one of the darkest hours of the Cold War. In an example of how genuine leaders respond to tyrants, U.S. President Ronald Reagan made an eloquent Christmas address to the nation, an impassioned plea for Poland’s liberty and a promise of concrete consequences for Moscow. He invited all Americans to put a candle in their windows — a Polish custom — that Christmas Eve, as he had done at the White House.
Ten years later, on Christmas Day 1991, the hellish inferno that was European communism was extinguished. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The evil empire expired.
John Paul was not one to gloat about the total annihilation of Soviet communism and the liberation of a continent, a history-shaping project of which he was a leading protagonist. Yet he did offer a sustained reflection in 1991 about what the defeat of communism meant, reflections most relevant to the Post’s Capitalist Manifesto series. ...
The formidable pastor from Poland knew that. Bread is important, but not bread alone. For John Paul, how man gets his bread was of vital importance.
Bread is a combination of a natural endowment — the wheat and the land — and human ingenuity in the cultivation of crops, the harvesting and transport of them, along with the milling and baking and selling that produces loaves on the shelves. The empty shelves in communist shops were a sign that such ingenuity was suppressed.
John Paul marvelled that human freedom could provide bread in abundance. More important, though, was that free provision requires producers to think about the needs of others — their customers ultimately, but also their suppliers, and those with whom they collaborate. The “market” punishes those who ignore their customers or maltreat their employees; economic freedom gives customers and workers choices about what to buy and where to work.
“The modern business economy has positive aspects,” wrote John Paul in 1991. “Its basis is human freedom exercised in the economic field, just as it is exercised in many other fields. Economic activity is indeed but one sector in a great variety of human activities, and like every other sector, it includes the right to freedom, as well as the duty of making responsible use of freedom.” ...
St. Paul did not have economics principally in mind when he wrote that, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1), but economics is included. If the human person is not free in his economic arrangements, which consume most of his day, then it is very hard to be free elsewhere.
As eastern Europeans of all stripes discovered and reacted to.
Another reason to banish Facebook:
A festive greeting ad posted on Facebook by a Conservative MP was removed for not complying with the company’s “discriminatory practices.”
Mark Strahl, who represents the riding of Chilliwack-Hope in British Columbia, says his holiday greeting message to his constituents was censored by the social media giant before he successfully appealed to have it reinstated.
“Today, Facebook declared that my ad to wish my constituents a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays ‘didn’t comply with their Discriminatory Practices policy,’” Strahl said on Twitter on Dec. 21.
According to Facebook, “Discriminatory Practices” means ads posted on their platform “must not discriminate or encourage discrimination against people based on personal attributes such as race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family status, disability, medical or genetic condition.”
Strahl argued that the content of his message did not violate any of the discriminatory practices as defined by Facebook.
DEAR AMERICAN PEOPLE, DEAR FRIENDS, for two years now, a global coup has been carried out all over the world, planned for some time by an elite group of conspirators enslaved to the interests of international high finance. This coup was made possible by an emergency pandemic that is based on the premise of a virus that has a mortality rate almost analogous to that of any other seasonal flu virus, on the delegitimization and prohibition of effective treatments, and on the distribution of an experimental gene serum which is obviously ineffective, and which also clearly carries with it the danger of serious and even lethal side effects. We all know how much the mainstream media has contributed to supporting the insane pandemic narrative, the interests that are at stake, and the goals of these groups of power: reducing the world population, making those who survive chronically ill, and imposing forms of control that violate the fundamental rights and natural liberties of citizens. And yet, two years after this grotesque farce started, which has claimed more victims than a war and destroyed the social fabric, national economies, and the very foundations of the rule of law, nothing has changed in the policies of Nations and their response to the so-called pandemic.
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