Reply to If you are not Christian, do you resent holidays like Christmas and Easter?

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Reply to "If you are not Christian, do you resent holidays like Christmas and Easter?"

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[quote=Anonymous]My family is agnostic/atheist, and we really enjoy the decorating and cooking aspects of Christmas. At Easter, we really only enjoy the candy.  I think the fact that people like us embrace some observances of Christian holidays while passing on the religious content is not surprising considering that many of these observances are things that Christians also adopted and re-purposed from other religions/traditions (Christmas trees, Easter eggs, a winter solstice holiday, a spring/passover season holiday).  That said, I don't begrudge Christians their religious understanding of observances in any way -- if they bring folks closer to their God, then more power to them.

I will second the idea that what probably sometimes comes across as resentment is really just a certain level of discomfort at what we (maybe wrongly) perceive as a slightly too insistent wish that we (non-Christians) participate in Christian religious observances.  For example, it might seem resentful or rude to Christians when non-Christians don't want to bow their heads during prayers and say "amen" afterward.  Christians probably consider those things just good manners.  To non-Christians, they seem like religious acts, and the perceived pressure to bow and say "amen" can seem kind of rude, even though it is not meant that way.  In the same way, it would definitely have been perceived as rude and unacceptable for a guest to refuse to cover his head in the very traditional synagogue I went to as a kid, so this is by no means an exclusively Christian issue.[/quote]

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