Dec 07 2007
No Christmas Doggy Treasts for Christians
Pets of Christian families who choose to go with Dr. Dobson’s list of where not to shop for Christmas will be left out in the cold this winter. Petsmart is listed on Dobson’s “The Bad” list and PetCo committed an even more serious crime on Christmas and was listed on “The Ugly” list of stores Christians shouldn’t shop at.
Why is he boycotting these stores? Because Jesus wouldn’t shop there either, after the stores shifted their focus from Christmas to The Holidays.
“The Bad”(Best Buy and Borders etc.) and “The Ugly” (the GAP family of stores, Barnes and Noble, eBay, Discovery Channel Store, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and other), “depend on the Christmas season to generate a high percentage of their profits for the year, and yet they want to do it by distancing themselves from the traditional Christmas story,” according to Dobson.
How deluded do you have to be to think that the stores who use the term “Christmas” in their ads have a different goal in mind than profit. If retailers had data to show that their neutral holiday language was going to drive Christians away from their stores, they would use Christmas instead. All retailers are focused on revenue and based on their customer profile they know what language would work best with the customer without endangering their revenue.
Best Buy, Borders and Barnes and Noble were quoted for their “no-solicitation policy.” In other words, they don’t allow those dudes in funny outfits to shout Merry Christmas and expect donations for it. That was their big crime on Christmas.
However, if you want to do a charity thing this Holiday season, I encourage you to stop by Borders (”The Bad”) and donate to help with children’s literacy, or buy something from the (RED) campaign at one of the GAP stores (”The Ugly”).
5 responses so far
These boycotts would be more effective if the religion itself were not such a farce. I mean, seriously, here is a group of people who will buy into persecution right up until it is actually time to shop. Maybe there is something to be said about the moderate theists, when push comes to shove, they don’t really want their kids to learn about Creationism, and I imagine, when push comes to shove, they don’t really want to avoid shopping at Borders, or preventing their kids from seeing Golden Compass. In the end, materialism will always win out, as long as the moderate luxury of materials is available. Religion can only trade in impossible promises, and demanding a boycott of stores during Christmas for spurious reasons will only serve to promote. Publicity is a commodity that organizations like Focus on the Family fail to use wisely.
I know I’ll be shopping at the local Borders, and I always donate to charities directly, as to avoid giving money to organizations that see it fit to feed people with bibles. Beyond Borders and Papa Murphy’s literacy program is solid, and the added benefit of a better informed citizenry, to which literacy equates to religious inoculation.
Sorry, I’m not as anti-theist as I come off… Romney’s diatribe really did shake me a bit… I’d also like to add that I’ve read Dr. Dobson’s work on Child Development, and I am thoroughly unimpressed. His reductionism pro approach to psychology is effective in damaging the honorable science. No true scientist, (not to be confused with the True Scotsman argument a priori) uses language that simply denotes an opinion on observations. His documentation, for instance, of Denmark’s failing heterosexual marriage was sound up until his conclusion used the information to promote his version of the traditional marriage structure (pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen). Dobson is a clown, and an embarrassment to the developmental psychology field, for which I already have ill feelings toward (one cannot study metaphysical moral changes in humans, they should focus on the real numbers). His conclusion fits every generalized Reductio ad absurdum of theists.
X has lead to Y.
X is bad.
Y is bad.
Superior Moral Teaching of (random deity) leads to Z.
Z is good.
Force Z on progressive society with repressive congressional acts, all-the-while convincing people you like the idea of limited government.
I shouldn’t even be ranting about him. This is the author of such sanctimonious nonsense as “What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women” and cleverly prophetic “When God Doesn’t Make Sense” (There should have been a one sentence answer to this conundrum).
Focus on the Family indeed, keep them away from books and secular science, that’ll make your kids competitive. I seriously could go on… I’ll stop.
Every now & then Christian groups will get their panties in a knot over some movie. They make a huge fuss, appear on the news, take out ads, and urge everyone to boycott the movie.
What they still haven’t figured out is that all their noise only increases the publicity over the movie, arouses people’s curiousity, and even more people end up seeing the movie than if they had simply kept their yaps shut.
Quite frankly, Christian groups don’t seem very intelligently designed.
It also has something to do with what I affectionately call “The Stern Effect”. How many times have you heard people say “I wanted to see what he would say next.”
Right… we are gluttons for the perverse. Our repressive nature towards our own sexuality, brutality, fantasies, wishes, and desires costs us dearly in the realm of balanced common sense.
To top all this off, I believe the single most disgusting movie in the past 20 years was actually the “Smashin of the Christ”. Watching hordes of these families bringing their kids to watch it, was, in a word, mesmerizing. (I personally only saw clips from The God Who Wasn’t There)
I often unleash the wrath of the religious and that’s when the craziest stuff gets said, the classics on this blog are, “demons exist” and “Mutation is nothing more than movement of molecules.., ONLY GOD KNOWS how people can believe that we came into existence by random movements of molecules.”
Dane, the Stern effect is a good way to call it. Isn’t the Coulter effect the conservative version of the Stern effect? Say and do the most outrageous things to get attention?
“Dane, the Stern effect is a good way to call it. Isn’t the Coulter effect the conservative version of the Stern effect? Say and do the most outrageous things to get attention?”
Coulter has it’s own field of study. That woah-man is a force unto itself. The conservative version seems to attempt to imitate. It’s like watching “Red Eye w/Greg Gutfield” on late night Faux News try to pull a Colbert.
I can change the comment distribution if you like. I have a small army of passionate non-believers at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2204609276.
You are dead on about the Christians failing to lift the veil. On Facebook, the atheists have all but “won”, much like Youtube and YTMND. The most comments on any Christian forum at any time are by Atheists, no exceptions. We are the blood in the veins in the culture war. Like Paine’s “Common Sense”, lifting the veil, with utter disregard for our own privacy, exposing society’s failure to offer a basic foundation of equality of conscience. We are the echo of Jefferson’s prophetic and enduring oath, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind.”