Tag: Holiday

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Happy Easter, for Now…

Easter isn’t a holiday I celebrate much anymore. Not being devout, I don’t participate in lent, go to mass, or celebrate in a religious way. I do however, find the time to bite the ears off some dark chocolate bunnies and eat a hefty brunch of eggs and bloody mary’s.

It seems the trend in America is similar to my own experience. Gallup just released this poll data going back to 1948 showing an inexorable decline in the number of Americans who practice Christianity.

The percentage of Americans who identify with some form of a Christian religion has been dropping in recent decades, and now stands at 77%, according to an aggregate of Gallup Polls conducted in 2008. In 1948, when Gallup began tracking religious identification, the percentage who were Christian was 91%.

This poll shows a long and steady slide toward atheism, agnosticism, and general secularism; so does this mean that the religious right is correct in shouting “Christianity is under attack!” in this country, or does it show my and Gallup’s hypothesis, the further diversification of religion in this country is a result of other groups by definition have expanded (which coincidentally also contradicts the “We are a Christian Nation!” stance).

The Gallup poll shows the heaviest increase in no religious affiliation for the pollsters:

“Other” has been the lump group of all other religions including Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or other non-Christian religions. This group has grown from close to 0% since inception of this poll, to 7% today.

What this data shows is two things, there’s a growing of the base population in Americas that are of non-christian religious which most notably would be from immigration and reproduction of immigrants holding to these “Other” religions. I don’t believe there is significant conversion but, that theory really can’t be explored with the data presented.

The 2nd interpretation is there is a growing sector of non-religious practicing Americans, and this increase seems to be directly effecting the Christian population in this country, either through loss of believers or over time, families are dissolving their participation in religious practice.

Two social scientists at the National Opinion Research Corporation, Tom W. Smith and Seokho Kim, contemplating similar data from the General Social Survey in 2004, concluded: “In sum, an array of social forces from cohort turnover, to immigration, to reduced retention rates, indicate that the Protestant share of the population will continue to shrink and they will soon lose their majority position in American society.”

More details of how the survey was conducted and concerns in conclusions from the data are available on the link above.

For me, I don’t completely reject organized theism per say but I’m not practicing of any religion. I don’t go to church, mass, participate in lent or confession. Holidays such as Christmas, New Years and Easter are openly celebrated with family and friends more for the opportunity of communal gathering with said people than for their religious implications.

It’s widely known that the origins of Easter are deeply rooted in pagan customs. It was Emperor Constantine that made Easter the “official” holiday, replacing Passover. This Christian Biblical Church of God site has a full break down of the origins of Easter with sources, if interested.

Maybe more people are getting more educated on religion and making their own decisions about their faith and how much they are dedicated to one theology. I don’t need a religion to tell me how to live a good, positive and full life as I live by the golden rule and just try to do the right thing. Enjoy the time with your family and friends, and as long as you still have that solid base, you’ll be alright. Bring on the chocolate!

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Last Day – First Day

Some people say that how you spend the last and first days of the year signify the summary and prequel to the year respectively. I don’t give much stock in foretelling my life and future by Aloysius Lilius’s calendar but my New Year’s eve and day was spent with friends and family.

The I went with some of E’s family to Jane & Roberts crib of a California BBQ; something I miss having both the property and weather to do year round. J&R know how to grill it up as I found out last year at Thousand Trails park (I think?). This eve Robert was spearing slabs of Korean marinated bbq short ribs, tri tip, rotisserie chicken, kielbasa sausages, lumpia, and chicken wings on the grill. Couple that with some sweat potatoes, salads, friend banana, egg rolls, rice, noodles and someone ordered a stack of pizzas, this turned out to be a fantastic last meal of 08.

We caught up and moved on to Adam12’s spot to hang with some other local south bay hoodrats. Joy is starting to fill out with 5 months to go and so is another friend, Linda also due about the same time. With E not drinking to avoid any DUI-legal-death issues, I was looking more like the lush of the party poping Cava, and taking back Stellas till the West coast broad cast of the NY Time Square ball drop.

While E was catching up with all the pregnant women, I was entertained by fascinating stories of conspiracy and ruling elite bloodlines from PopDz, Trip getting closer to graduation/quitting, and some rawkus games of The Pit – a card game fashioned from the energy and dealings of the stock market trading floor.

The alarm rang and we switched from the warm up tunes to the animatronic Dick Clark hosting the new year. He looks almost life like! 3…2…1… Rockband!

We started some sets of karaoke, rocking out to Blondie and Rod Stewart. I tried my hand at both bass and drums, of which the former being closer to my skill set being so inebriated. The game comes with a drum set, guitar, mike and 50+ songs to sing and rock out to. I quickly learned (from the booing) my failures to keep rhythm were causing the whole band to come down. I definitely can get into this but would need a 2nd show as I should have canceled my NYE on on being too “sick”.

This New Year wasn’t a huge party but a more mellow send off of the death of 08 and ring in of 09 with friends food and good times. Here’s to a great New Year!

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Flying Virgin

Traveling for business, usually takes me to all the major east coast ports at least 4 times a month, unfortunately I’m confined to journey on the corporate sponsored airlines of they typical variety: AA, Delta and Continental. When I actually have the option to travel for personal leisure, I’m using up my JetBlue miles, my defacto airline, as I truly enjoy things like comfortable seats, tasty snacks, wireless access I don’t have to pay for in terminals and working entertainment to distract me or to drown out the annoying long island accents spewing from the neighbors around me.

This holiday season, I scowered the discount airlines on my favorite search aggregator, Kayak.com for tickets back to the bay and came up with decent tickets direct from JFK to SFO via Virgin America airlines. Virgin has been that elusive hot girl at the party, that’s always there when you’ve shown up the girl you had planned to go home with and yet your secretly wanting to be that guy talking to her while yours takes off for a smoke or womans needs.

Since Virgin’s inception in America I had wanted to take a ride on her and now I’m getting my shot. Just like that first time, nothing is going right headed to JFK. Our car service was not coordinated in navigating the holiday traffic and it took longer to get to the terminal than many previous trips. Our driver navigated the side streets of the ghetto east New York yet despite the education and route diversion, his route still didn’t buy us any extra time.

We arrived at the international air terminal, Virgin is the only domestic airline flying out of terminal 4 and at first the idea of this was “sweet”: I’m flying with real travelers, vacationers and not the typical corporate drones I shoulder with in security, pretzel stands and overly sanitized bathrooms. Then depression starts to set in as I realize I’m one of a few not leaving the country or venturing to something more exotic like Belize, Chile, or Monaco. We’ll I guess Hunter’s Point can be exotic at certain times in the evening.

The “Terminal” desk is tucked away from the rest of international passengers as almost an after thought, but they do have iMac check-in desks, complete with a vase of flowers and Post-it note pads for you know duplicating your ticket should you forget to check your gate. After weighting our bags, they don’t have a conveyor to the baggage pick up; here Virgin makes it passengers walk their bags to another check in. This is the most budget aspect of the flight, it’s like having to bus your own tables at any fast food joint.

Security is is thick and unruly this trip, it is the holiday’s of course, we make it through late and with a rush through the cafe line for our snacks just to get on the plane next to last. We’ve been stressed enough through the entire process so the mood purple and blue glow of the interior ambiance is actually a welcome calm. Some breaky down tempo tracks circulate through the cabin, it’s like we just walked onto an iPod commercial set.

Ahhh.. sitting down to nearly new black leather seats and being surrounded by toys, I’m ready to start this trip. Virgin has gone over the top here, with a detachable remote for creating your own music playlist (mostly Virgin record label music of course), standard and premium TV options, and flip the remote over for a game controller for new and old school video games and the ability to chat with anyone else during the flight (hello hottie in the 10th row!). When the food service starts up, you have the option to order food and drinks from the console. Additionally there’s two options to be added at a later date, electronic books/magazines and wifi to be added.

This being a British airline, of course they have a snarky delivery of the safety information. Here’s the animated version here:

The flight was considerably smooth all be it very long (7 hours coast to coast!) but with naps, games, and a few chat sessions with randoms on the plane. The worst part of this experience is Virgin’s RED in-flight entertainment system which needed to be rebooted several times during my flight and failed to resolve at least half of the available TV stations. My cherry has been officially popped.