I’ve only been in the USA for a short while, but something that has become very apparent to me is the destruction being overly politically correct can sow. As a community Jewry worries, rightly so, about assimilation, but in the USA it seems even a greater threat than ever before. G-d is under threat here.

Fox News presently portrays the boorish behavior of the PC protagonists as a “War on Christmas”, but I think it’s even more than that. It’s a war against G-d and everything he represents.

Political correctness exists to prevent discrimination and to foster respect for diversity and the rights of others. It was never devised to foster discrimination against those who seek no harm to others.

Under the guise of diversity and inclusion we’re seeing constant attacks on any kind of religious symbolism in public places, and to take it even further, outright criticism of religion under the guise of free speech. In Elmwood, Pa, an Athiest organization has proposed putting up a banner stating, “At this season of the Winter Solstice, LET REASON PREVAIL. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

They wish to do so in order to bring some sense of balance to a nativity scene that is being displayed at the same venue. The nativity scene represents Christmas and makes no statement about others' beliefs, but somehow it’s mere existence is so reprehensible to Atheists that they demand to put up a banner near it decrying the evils and myths of religion. Inclusion could just mean celebrating the Winter Solstice instead of saying nasty things about others, but of course we know that’s not what Atheists want! They want to mock G-d and religion and under the guise of “free speech” they demand the right to do so.

They wish to censor all talk of G-d by claiming they feel excluded when they see a nativity scene, when in reality they seek to exclude people who believe in G-d.

Really? Have these people lost their minds? While I’m a proponent of free speech, a nativity scene does not set out to denigrate others or insult their traditions and beliefs. This statement does exactly that. It’s a statement that is demeaning to all people who believe in G-d, not just Christians. In fact all that is missing from the statement is some kind of incitement to action that would turn it into hate speech. They behave no differently than the Jews for Jesus crowd who attempt to turn Jews away from Judaism. In fact they’re probably worse because the purport to believe in nothing!

If Atheists wish to celebrate their Winter Solstice then I’m all for that. If they have to invent that celebration just to find a way to say nasty things about others that’s just a different story entirely. It’s like some nasty adolescent bully breaking toys that he’s not allowed to play with so that no one can have any fun. They’re just bullies who hate anything that doesn’t comport with what they believe. They’re guilty of the very behavior they accuse religion of exhibiting.

It’s not a baby in a manger they’re celebrating, or even a Winter Solstice for that matter, it’s all about them lying down and being dogs in the manager!

I’m a Jew. I’m happy to be a Jew. I don’t believe in Christmas or any son of G-d. However, when I see houses in my street decorated, and trees and beautiful lighting all over the place I somehow feel happy and free. It’s a time of year where G-d seems more connected to the entire country. It's also a time when many of us get to celebrate our traditions and our beliefs freely. When a bunch of self-worshiping, naysayers peer over their rims of their spectacles at us all and dare to tell us that religion is a superstition and a myth we need to reject that. We need to reject it loud and clear.

My home has lights in it now, they spell out Happy Chanukah. I even have blue and white tinsel I got from the kosher store down the road. Yes it’s Goyish, but I felt like I needed to do something to not be the only dark house in my street. Some will say I’m being a Goy in the galus, to which I respond, no, I’m an unbending Jew in the galus! I’m not going to be dour, it’s a wonderful time of year and we’re about to celebrate the real miracle of Hanukkah too. So why not just enjoy the moment. Dark houses belong to those who judge us and want to stop us celebrating our Creator’s miracles. They don’t belong to Jews anymore.

While Christians celebrate the birth of a Jewish boy, and we celebrate the miracle of Hanukkah, the Atheists amongst us can celebrate our creation through some randomized fluke that created humanity from some interstellar primordial stew. As long as they’re not being nasty that’s fine.

So while I’m at it, I’d like to take a moment to rebuff their statements one by one, with my own religious, awe for our G-d of Israel.

They say, “At this season of the Winter Solstice, LET REASON PREVAIL.”

I say, no matter how much mud you stack up and apply heat to its pretty unlikely life will form from that, although some microscopic organisms may be greatly harmed in the process. There are no scientific experiments whatsoever that have caused the formation of anything other than some base amino acids (no that's not life, not even close!). Human bodies are infinitely more complex than any computer system we’ve ever developed, but even those required our finite capabilities to create. It is rational to assume the existence of a Creator when we consider how complex all the living creatures on Earth are. It is totally irrational to believe we’re ascendant from billions of lucky coincidences in a row. It takes a giant leap of faith to assume so many random coincidences happened in a short space of time (billions of years is a short period of time when you add up all the coincidences) to create life. In fact that leap of faith is a greater leap of faith than believing in a Creator is! Reason sides with Creation, not with random stuff happening from piles of muddy that somehow burst into some kind of life and from which evolution began. I don't dispute evolution, but I do dispute how they believe that got set in motion!

They say, “There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell.”

I say, sure, you can only say that if the premise that we arose from an incredible amount of coincidence is believable. While not all religions have the same concepts of gods, devils, angels and heaven or hell they all have generous helpings of something in that vein. If you’re of sound mind you probably have to accept the most complex and diverse things on our planet, life, are infinitely more complex than computers, yet computers didn’t just form out of dust without intervention from people. Seriously, it’s a long reach to expect people of faith to accept your story over anyone else’s. The least complex things people have made required our hard work and invention, but somehow we sprung into being from nowhere. It’s intellectually dishonest in the extreme. Now we’re seeing experiments pushing beyond the boundaries of that hard and fast rule about the speed of light being an absolute limit. Are rational people supposed to expect your theories are true without question, just to have you replace them as you’re proved wrong? The Torah seems timeless in comparison to scientific theories that continue to change in short periods of time.

They say, “There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

I say, religion has often become a vehicle for hardening hearts and minds, but that’s not the same as questioning the existence of G-d. Indeed if one is to make the assertion that radical religions formed to control and enslave then one must also recognize many other religions that which do no such thing but only focus on helping others and performing works of charity. Religion is a man-made institution and like all man-made things it is usually flawed. We see that in the human rights abuses going on daily in the Middle East where Sharia is present. Sharia is about power and control, it is not about freedom or moral choice. It is simply a convenient tool for men to control others including non-believers and women. Control is more easily asserted on masses when you deny them an education, dominate them, disallow any reasonable debate cause others incredible fear and beat, rape and enslave women in woven, sack coffins. Unfortunately the time will come that these rulers will be forced to see the error of their ways. No one can pretend there is a single successful nation on Earth that has implemented Sharia to its full extent. The Arab Spring was simply hors d’eorves. When their populations see through the misdirection, the blame and the lies they heap on the Jewish people and the West there truly will be hell on Earth for them. Everyone knows that what is happening there is not because of our Creator. Everyone knows this is not what the G-d of Avraham expected of us.

Religion and G-d are different things. How we organize to express our beliefs and who we belief in can quite obviously be different things. All their statement says to me is that they're ignorant and no nothing about religion.

I say Atheism is a religion too! It includes all the fundamental precepts of a religion, so why not just admit that Atheism has hardened some hearts and enslaved some minds too. It is exactly that sort of thing that drives people to put up nasty banners. At the very least it is an ideology!

Making a statement about religion is not the same as making a statement about G-d! When it comes to enslavement can these atheists truly believe that the 76% of Americans who identify as Christian are all so blind in their beliefs and so irrational that they never ever evaluate their beliefs? What a foolish, dark ages, view of religion. In the current day people are able to do as they please and believe what they please. That’s even truer in America than anywhere else. Why then do so many people identify as Christian? Do atheists think they’re stupid? Do atheists think that they’re so scared of others that they just pretend they believe in G-d even though they don’t? In the present setting it is more fashionable not to believe in G-d than it is to believe in him, yet the vast majority of people in the free World still claim belief! I live and work in the computer industry. I'm surrounded by men of science who have decided to work in that field. It would actually be easier for me to pretend I did not believe in G-d. Admiting you believe in G-d these days actually takes courage not cowardice! Look a Tim Tebow at the moment. He prays in his football games and people ridicule his beliefs. They laugh at him because he doesn't want to have sex before marriage.

People who are secure in their beliefs don’t need to run around mocking others beliefs. People who are secure in their beliefs will create the space necessary for others to celebrate theirs.

I read once that the Baal Shem Tov said we actually received three Torahs at Har Sinai. One was written, one was oral, and one was hidden in nature for us to discover. I think that third one is the one science is discovering. I love science. My children and I love learning about what the World consists of and we all look with childlike wonder at the new discoveries and inventions we see almost daily. While we do that we keep in mind that there really is nothing new under the Sun. Humanities discoveries and how we fashion those into the most incredible gadgets, medicines and tools is incredible, but each time we go deeper we find there is more and more depth. To us it represents the infinite complexity that is G-d. It shows us we can never know everything.

Atheists need to come clean and recognize they worship human intellect and science. They really do. They worship themselves above all else. While they tend to try and be profound and say they don’t worship anything, it simply doesn’t stand to reason that they can possibly claim that. Either they're top of the intellectual food chain, or anything they say is patent nonsense. If it is the former, that's a form of worship. If its the latter then we have to assume they accept there is a smarter being out there and whether it's alien or G-dly it's not different than being religious!

At the very least they represent life without purpose. They represent a cold, stark pointless existence in which we’re constantly running away from nature’s dangers to keep our gene pool in existence. They represent a sad and pointless life lived and the idea that life itself will one day be consumed by a big supernova or the like.

They bring a lack of humility to the World that endangers our existence far more greatly than any religious wars. In a World where anything goes, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else, I’m pretty convinced that ultimately everyone gets harmed. We simply do not know enough to assume that anything goes. We simply exist.

While they offer that morals can exist without G-d and religion I think that’s a wild reach. What’s the harm in sleeping with your father or mother if both of you thinks it is morally acceptable to do so? Where is the harm in late term abortion if you don’t believe life is sacrosanct? Why not just simply allow murder too? Maybe they’d like to start with those stupid idiots who think that G-d is real. Their banner statement really is only one step away from incitement. It is already classing all religious people as stupid. After all, if we're failing to use reason then they can hardly also claim they think we're smart! When do they take the next step and decide religious people fall into the category of Lebensunwertes leben. When will religious people be considered to be among those wasting their lives and worthy of termination? Maybe in the future atheists will decide soylent green is not a bad use of the humans they extinguish. Of course, I’m exaggerating. I don’t believe that atheists are evil, but given the sad reality of history is it really such a far reach to assume some despot will come along once more and do that sort of thing?

Let's coin a new term. Fundamentalist Atheists. Let's say they're the type of Atheists I'm talking about. I know without doubt that there are a great many Athiests in the World who would not seek to deny others their beliefs regardless of how they feel about them. They simply don't find any cause to be concerned about people of faith. Unfortunately some Atheists take things a little too far and start trying to be condescending and nasty. Those are the ones that bother me. They seek to deny rights and humiliate others under the guise of being the common sense, good people in the room.

While the example is extreme it is not out of the realms of possibility. Fundamentalist Atheists could easily become the new Nazi’s and they don’t even realize it yet. All they need is a charismatic leader. The banner represents the germination of an ideology! What would it take for an extremist ideology to develop from that? How many atrocities need to be committed before they realize it was precisely this sense of condescension and moral superiority that saw, amongst numerous other examples, the rise of Stalin, Hitler and the ongoing legacies of neo-Nazism and Communism that are responsible for the losses of millions of lives and human rights violations of many more. There was no G-d and country in in those fascist ideologies, there was only country! The first 10 commandments brought us balance between G-d and society and that in itself was a valuable message. We don’t want 12 spies and we don’t want suicide bombers. We don't want the absence of G-d and we don't want to be so focused on G-d that we forget to keep the physical and the spiritual in balance. G-d gets to be G-d 24x7, we have to be human 24x7 and so we need the physical aspects of our lives too.

I’ve never once met an atheist than can speak with any depth on his research into religion. They usually base their assertions on simple ridiculous generalizations, and sometimes on the depths of their family’s religion which they encountered as children. I’ve had some of them tell me that there is rape, murder, atrocities and destruction in the Bible as if that somehow means religious people aspire to that. I usually answer with, “yes, and how is that different than now?” Science and economics cannot solve those problems, and neither can a G-d who gives us moral choice. Our Tanach is not a fairytale. It doesn’t have a happy ending. The prince doesn’t ride away on horseback with his princess. Good things come to those who are righteous and try hard to be the best people they can be for their Creator.

Their generalizations usually go as follows. “All religions think they’re right”, to which I agree, but I go on further to argue that is not common cause to insist all of them are wrong! What if one is actually right! Most usually write off religion because they’ve never even bothered to look into any of them with any level of depth other than childhood learning and sweeping generalizations. They would assume any atheist who has studied religion, and in the course of doing so has become religious is just an idiot unable to look at things objectively. You cannot win with atheists!

We’d never assume a newly ordained Rabbi was a master of Judaism, but atheists purport to be. How else can a rational and scientific mind discount something without any real discovery of it? Has anyone ever met an atheist who poured even five minutes of study into Rambam or our sages works?

I came to Judaism at a time my life was going very well. I didn’t feel empty. I was doing well with my children, my career and all was pretty good. I still work in a job where my intellect and my ability to synthesize a great many ideas are paramount to my success. I’m no fool and I never fell on hard times and turned to G-d to escape any kind of hardship. Yet I too felt him calling me. As I usually do I pursued a much accelerated path of learning and immersed myself in depth into learning everything I possibly could. It’s a subject you can never learn enough about and a subject so deep and rational you can never extricate yourself from a desire to learn more about. Had I led a different life from the outset maybe it would be something I’d be spending my life doing rather than just learning part time! What I can say with certainty is that once you peel back the layers and starting delving in deeper and deeper the seemingly shallow answers atheists like to debunk become more in depth and much more difficult to simply dismiss out of hand.

Simple questions come to mind often, such as:

1. How did our sages 2000 thousand years ago know the World was many millennia older than the Jewish calendar?

2. How is it that the Torah stipulates clearly that there are exactly four types animals that contain one aspect of a kosher animal and not the other, and how is that still true today? If the Torah was created by caveman, or simply written just before the Christian Septuagint, we’re still talking about a time when Earth was largely undiscovered by man and somehow that fact, despite the discovery of many thousands of species, still remains true!

3. How do the six days of creation coincide so coincidentally with the fossil record and the Big Bang theory? See Gerald Schroeder's fascinating books on the subject to find out more.

Even our religion’s most important book of all, our Torah, seems to be right throughout all the discoveries of science in the last 200 years. How can it be so right when it is written in the bronze age long before science even mattered. We know it existed more than 2000 years ago because the Hellenists translated it to Greek! People can’t say it’s newer than that even if it was convenient to claim us much. The New Testament and the Koran are younger, but the Torah has this material in it.

Next they like to generalize by claiming all religions copy one another. Of course, how stupid of Jews to not realize that what we believe is just a concoction of Ancient Egyptian belief and Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is believed to have come into being about 150 years after the Exodus from Egypt and 950 or so years after the birth of Avraham, so no, that’s just flat out incorrect! Akhenaton, the Egyptian ruler who founded a monotheistic religion in Ancient Egypt came before the Exodus, but again long after the lifetime of Avraham. The sweeping generalization seems to get knocked a little of kilter when one considers these points. Again, atheists just don’t know these things but they like to make the claims regardless.

Such intellectual dishonesty deserves to be ignored. It is perpetuated by bigots who really have no idea how to love or experience happiness. They’d rather walk around telling others how to live their lives than just leave others in peace to find their own meaning in their day to day existence.

Purpose comes from knowing we’re connected to something greater. It comes from knowing we aspire to greater things. It comes from knowing we’re here to do more than just impact that which is physically present. As adults journey towards middle age and beyond and, hopefully, self-actualize the question, “why am I here,” often reverberates in their minds. Religion and G-d are not cop-outs. They ask the question not because they wish there was more or because they selfishly think they’re important and not just an animated blob of intergalactic mud, they ask it because many people realize we’re connected to some kind of source and that question and its answers often causes us to change the course of our lives beyond the self to the many.,

We’ll never know why Steve Jobs’ very last words in this physical world were, “Wow! Wow! Wow!” but I like to think that it was maybe more than just some white tunnel of light emanating as a result of his mid-brain region causing the release of noradrenaline and affecting his hypothalamus and amygdala.

So Atheists, leave Christmas, Hanukkah and all other religious celebrations alone. Tackle the real problems this World faces that you’ve been given the intellect to deal with. I don’t feel excluded when I see a Christmas tree, I just see people celebrating what they think is important. It reminds me that I’m free to be the Jewish person I am, because they’re free to be the Christians that they are. Don’t attempt to steal our freedoms. Simply enjoy yours! You have just as many rights as everyone else as long as you leave us to be who we are without your constant judgments and interference. Far be it for me to prevent your slow evolution into the nothingness of disappearing six feet under. If that’s what you want I’m glad for you that you’re getting it. If you seek immortality through science, I'm equally happy for you if you achieve that. Likewise, be happy for others to, we’re getting what we want! As most Atheists would say, "live and let live."

When I compare the constant judgments and nastiness of fundamentalist Atheists to the many Lubavitch families I’ve been blessed to meet and who I see try so hard to create the conditions necessary in our World for Hashem to return to us all I can’t help but know I’d rather be with them than anyone else.

Have a fabulous Hanukkah everyone. B”H we have an incredible and awesome G-d who makes his presence felt every day in every aspect of our lives.