NOT CALLING IT “EASTER”

I’m not a particularly religious person, to be honest. I used to be, of course, but the whole God thing and I kind of grew apart over the years and, whilst I’m perfectly able to accept that other people do still choose to continue to believe in that sort of thing, these days I’m more likely to side with the rationalists and atheists in any of those kinds of debates.

Ah now, I may have crossed a line already here. What is the old saying…? “Never discuss religion and politics…” Oh well, I’ve talked about the latter in these pages often enough, so I suppose that eventually the former would have to raise its ugly head, even if it was merely in order to set out my stall for what I really wanted to talk about.

You see, as we were driving to the supermarket last weekend, we had a bit of a discussion in the car. One of us had seen a sign inviting one and all to a “Spring Egg Hunt” and we wondered whether it was now unacceptable in terms of the awkward liberal sensibilities that we seem to have developed as a nation to just use the word “Easter” in such a context in case it upsets anyone.

Somehow, a large part of the nation seems to have taken it upon themselves to decide that certain phrases and sayings ought to be avoided just in case somebody, somewhere finds them offensive in some small way. This same group of people, or it might be a different bunch for all I know, have also complicated and confused things by simultaneously arguing that to be inclusive, you have to celebrate, remark upon and recognise absolutely every festival for every faith, so long as you don’t ram the one that is still ostensibly on the national letterhead, as it were, down anyone else’s belief hole.

You see, I’m all in favour of inclusiveness, and, to be honest, I broadly agree that you ought to include all beliefs, which means that you really ought to be letting the Christian shout as loudly as they like as well, and if they want to call “Easter” Easter, or “Christmas” Christmas, let ’em…

After all, I’ve not got that much belief in me, but I still call it that, and it doesn’t bother me, and just as long as you’re not going to punish or persecute anyone for believing something else, and your’re going to let the atheists, agnostics, and humanists feel that they too can celebrate what they like in their own particular way, then I don’t care what you call it, so long as you can try to avoid the kind of bland, inoffensive nonsense that calling it something like “Winterval” manages, because I find that kind of patronising idea that “Ooh! We’d best not offend anyone. Let’s find a nice, safe name for it and everyone will be happy” more infuriating and offensive than any of the so-called “official” labels.

And, when you think about it, you’d never get someone in one of those meeting rooms suggesting that a celebration of Eed  or Diwali be called anything other than what they are, so why are we running shy of calling Easter what it is, i.e. Easter…?

Are our Easter Eggs not Easter Eggs any more…?

Has the Easter Bunny had his job retitled…?

It’s interesting to be because in this sort of culture, the “Christmas and New Year Radio Times” remains just that despite it not being the winter festival of choice for many of our fellow countrymen and women and the BBC being rather good at finding new ways to homogenise the culture and “inclusivise” everybody and nobody at precisely the same time.

You see, whilst I do get rather tired of people trying to “convert” me or trying to ram their beliefs down my throat (as it were), I’ve got no real objection to people believing what they like so long as they don’t do any harm to anyone else by doing so…

There’s the rub, however…

A lot of religion gives a lot of people a lot of comfort, but a lot of religion also causes a lot of conflict and hardship across the world. Finding a tolerant, neutral ground is what we’re trying to do in this “free” country of ours, but that doesn’t mean that you have to throw away everything you believe in yourself to make everyone else feel more comfortable. You don’t earn respect by doing that, you just get contempt for not having the courage of your convictions.

That’s where the British Airways decision about the woman wearing her cross got it so wrong. She was quite right to suggest that they wouldn’t ask any other faith to remove the symbols of their faith, and I really can’t imagine any passenger taking one look at a bit of jewellery dangling around her neck and finding it offensive.

“That was her belief, I have mine…” is, I’d have thought, a much more likely response, if anyone even noticed it at all, and they are much more likely to be thinking “Get this bloody queue moving, I’ve got a plane to catch…” than that anyway. So as long as she was not taking a few moments to try and convert each passenger, and handing them a little pamphlet along with their boarding passes, I think most of us would have coped.

I might very well be in the Dawkins camp when it comes to a lot of things, in that I do think that you ought to let people get to an age where they can make choices for themselves rather than being told what they should believe almost from the moment that they come into the world, but I am more able to tolerate the iconography as an inevitable side-effect of living in a free society.

After all, I might not choose to eat McDonald’s hamburgers myself, but I acknowledge that their temples are on pretty much every street now. I drive past them, choose not to enter them, but realise that they give a lot of people a lot of comfort in their time of need, so I’m quite happy to let them be as long as I don’t wake up tied to a chair and being force-fed Big Macs until I learn to love them.