You may have noticed that I closed yesterday’s entry with the words ‘Merry Christmas’. Without wanting to sound like a miserable git, to be honest I was in two minds about doing that. I still feel, quite strongly, that religion is an oppressive, repressive force: a collection of myths used to tell people what to think and how to act. If that is true, then it follows that whenever we make statements like ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘God bless you’, we play into and reinforce that system of social control. We – perhaps inadvertently – help the church maintain it’s unearned social authority by perpetuating the fictions that authority is based on. By closing yesterday’s entry like I did, it occurs to me that I was thus being a tad hypocritical; I was playing into a cultural phenomenon I claim to oppose. Then again, not to have done so might have seemed too bleak and cynical, so perhaps I better just chill out over this.