I thought conservatives would know some history.

I've been staying at my Dad's house over the holidays.  This exposes me to reading material I wouldn't ordinarily see, like the Wall Street Journal.  Reading the Wall Street Journal is a valuable reminder of why I generally don't.  For example there is this piece by David Horowitz.

The part that caught my eye was this:

"My life experience had led me to conclude that not only was changing the world an impossible dream,..."

Changing the world is an impossible dream.  This is apparently so well accepted by his conservative audience he doesn't even need to mention why he thinks so, he just tosses it off on the way to something else. 

Changing the world is an impossible dream.

Thomas Jefferson, Fredrick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King will be devastated to hear that.  John Snow, Louis Pasteur, Edwin Chadwick and Margaret Sanger will grieve over their wasted lives.  Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase; John Dalton and Antoine Lavoisier; Wilhelm Rontgen and Marie Curie, have not advanced human understanding one iota.  Henry Ford, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Bill Gates have not changed one single thing about the world we live in.

Except, there was a time, not that long ago, actually, when slavery was an accepted fact, women were effectively owned by their male relatives, more than half of all people died before they turned ten, and nobody had the faintest idea why the sun came back in the morning. 

Changing the world is not just possible; changing the world is inevitable.

I stand corrected.

Thanks to the responses to my last post I have become aware that, after publicly chiding Garrison Keillor for not doing his research, I failed to do my research.  I thought that simply being a Unitarian and attending (sometimes) a Unitarian church meant I knew whether Unitarians have a creed or not, and what it was.  My bad.

Unitarians in fact do not have a creed in the sense of one verse that everyone in every Unitarian church recites and professes to believe every part of as a condition of membership.  The verses we recite in unison are chosen by each congregation separately and the one used in my particular church in Knoxville isn't necessarily used in any other church.

I acknowledge the inconsistency and apologize.  I will try to do better in the future.

The rest of my post, however, stands.  I trust it is reasonably obvious that I do not seriously expect that Garrison give up all parts of Christmas that Christians have, over the centuries, picked up from other religions and celebrations and repurposed for their faith.  I simply ask that he quit sitting atop his hoard of repurposed customs and insisting that nobody else re-repurpose them.  After all, I'm sure when he thinks about it he doesn't want to be a hypocrite.