Back of the Envelope

Mark Shea has an interesting article on the origin of Christmas. Like most people, I thought that it was borrowed from a pagain holiday, but it turns out that that may not be the case:

[O]ur records of a tradition associating Jesus' birth with December 25 are decades older than any records concerning a pagan feast on that day.
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In addition to this there's another small, but telling, point. We also find St. John Chrysostom (a patriarch of Constantinople who died in 407 A.D.) noted that Christians had celebrated December 25 from the Church's early days. Chrysostom reinforced his point with an argument that used Scripture, not pagan mythology, for corroboration:

Luke 1 says Zechariah was performing priestly duty in the Temple when an angel told his wife Elizabeth she would bear John the Baptist. During the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, Mary learned about her conception of Jesus and visited Elizabeth "with haste."

The 24 classes of Jewish priests served one week in the Temple, and Zechariah was in the eighth class. Rabbinical tradition fixed the class on duty when the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 and, calculating backward from that, Zechariah's class would have been serving Oct. 2-9 in 5 B.C. So Mary's conception visit six months later might have occurred the following March and Jesus' birth nine months afterward.

Mark also mentions another reason why the early Church was celebrating Christmas on December 25th, namely a Judaic belief that prophets died on the day they were conceived, so if you believe Jesus died on March 25th (which many of the early Christians did), you add nine months and get December 25th for his birth date. I find the second argument more compelling.

Anyway, whether or not these calculations of Jesus's birth date are accurate, it's a convincing argument that Christmas predates the pagan holiday. Granted, there have almost always been pagan holidays on or around the winter solstice, so it's not like Christmas was alone in that time of year, so it's not hard to believe that there'd be some interactions between the holidays, whatever the origin.

An oldie but a goodie by Jonah:

Despite all of the posturing, nobody is addressing the real problem with Hollywood: It's not the violence at all, but the message of moral relativism. Violence has been a constant in world culture. You can draw a line starting from cave paintings, and trace it through all visual media up to this weekend's latest blockbuster. Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's plays, Japanese picture books, and Native American oral histories can hold their own with just about any Schwarzenegger film in terms of murder and gore. Talking about violence — even graphic violence — as something "new" is like talking about a disturbing rise in the use of percussion instruments in music.

The antiviolence handwringers contend that it is the graphic, realistic nature of modern depictions that does real damage. But if simple film violence were the problem, one would look for some correlation between crime rates and violent-movie distribution. Such correlations remain elusive.

A more realistic contention is that while movie violence is not bad in itself, it can be bad when presented in a morally harmful context. During the 1992–93 round of Hollywood-bashing, Sen. Paul Simon threatened the television networks with government "action" if they didn't clean themselves up; in response, the networks sponsored a UCLA study that concluded that "context is the key to the determination of whether or not the use of violence is appropriate." The problem for liberals, though, is that they don't think there are many contexts where violence is permissible — save, perhaps, in cautionary tales about Nazis, southern slaveowners, and military homophobes. The Left always despised Dirty Harry movies, for example, because the moral context of those films suggested that criminals were, in fact, criminals, and that a liberal do-gooder court system was allowing the bad guys to rule the streets.
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Violence in popular entertainment, then, has a complicated history; it's neither new nor especially harmful. What really is new and harmful is the trendy moral relativism that characterizes so many movies and TV shows. These cultural products receive rave reviews from liberal activists for their "positive" (and relatively nonviolent) content. But in these films, protagonists do not defy the legal order so that they can uphold a higher moral order; instead, these "heroes" rebel against the notion that there is any moral order at all.
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The entertainment industry has hammered home the idea that conformity of any kind is a sign of spiritual surrender. While films with excessive violence often receive considerable critical and popular scrutiny, the idea that we are all our own priests is celebrated throughout the popular culture. This idea is found even in technically well-made films like Dead Poets Society and the pernicious Pleasantville, both of which redefined the concept of "to thine own self be true" to mean "thine own self is the only truth." It is also the moral of hundreds of individual TV shows and movies; it is the core social and political insight of rock 'n' roll and rap music. How else to explain the familiar litany of rap songs which exult in killing and rape?

This attitude makes violent films all the more poisonous. In a world where no set of moral principles is superior to any other, why not make heroes out of murderers? This is the lesson of nearly the entire Quentin Tarantino oeuvre and its many ripoffs. More and more often, we are seeing psychopaths and serial killers as protagonists. An early example can be found in the 1984 Terminator, in which the audience is invited to see things through the eyes of a killing machine — and enjoy it. Since then, the pace has only accelerated. In the 1991 Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter was a profoundly sympathetic cannibalistic serial killer; in the upcoming sequel — if it's adapted loyally from the novel — he will be the hero.

I quoted a lot, but it's a long article, so there's plenty left to read. He talks a bit about sex as well, seeing the Hollywood attitude towards sex (roughly, anything goes) as the starting point for this amoral worldview.

This ties in pretty well with my argument that America has a clear consensus on when and where violence is appropriate (despite plenty of Hollywood movies presenting contrary ideas), but it has no corresponding consensus on sex.