Thursday, April 13, 2017

Sticks and stones?


I see that there's a storm brewing over an ad made by Tesco for beer and cider that ruffled a few religious feathers. As is usual with religious "offence taking", no one can actually explain why this particular phrase is bad. Some say that "Good Friday" is a corruption of "God's Friday" (still don't see what's bad?) some say that it's a "Holy day" and therefore referring to it in this way is "crass". This objection is presumably coming from the same set of people that whinged about Cadbury not advertising the word "Easter" on their chocolate egg signs (I wish these Christians would make their flippin minds up!) What most Christian commentators seem to miss here is that "Easter" only means something religious to less than half the population, and whilst I would never condone the persecution of any minority this advertisement is clearly not that, and is simply referring to the LABEL that we (all) give to an official bank holiday in the UK, nothing more.

For me this is just another reason to abandon "official" religious holidays altogether. If we were a properly secular country (as suggested by the make-up of our population) then we'd just have public holidays for the sake of taking time off work and spending time with friends and family, any public declaration of the names of said holidays, in any context, wouldn't offend anyone. If people want to celebrate their particular flavour of mythology on particular days of the year, then that's perfectly fine by me; just don't burden the rest of us with your silly pedantry.

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