I thought I should take a minute to
explain why I’m doing this project. Why a holiday calendar is so
important to me. I apologize if this post seems broken up. I'm still not sure if I'm completely happy with it, but I wanted to get it out as early as I could. There is so much to include but I did not want the introduction to be excessively long. Some of the major ideas of this came from a speech
given by Alain de Botton about how he thinks the secular world should
adopt the ritualistic, moralistic, and communal teaching methods of
religion.
To paraphrase what he said, religions have had
thousands of years of trial and error to learn the best ways giving
us morality, guidance and consolation. There was a time when
universities tried to offer these same things to students. They used
culture instead of the doctrines of religion, teaching about people
like Shakespeare, Plato, and Jane Austen. The idea hasn’t been
forgotten, and it’s always mentioned in speeches like commencement
addresses, those lyrical claims that the process of higher education
will make us into nobler and better human beings. But, Alain de
Botton and I believe that these claims simply aren't true
anymore.
Universities are not in the business of personal
assistance. They think of us as rational adults who just need
information and data. And the way they teach is to sit us in a
classroom, tell us about Plato, and then send us into our career for
40 years, thinking those lessons will stick with us somehow. Religions treat us as children in need of assistance, and over thousands of years of trial and error,
they have come up with some fantastic ways of helping us grow and
mature into stable, productive adults. Not just in what they teach, but in
how they teach. Two important ways are repetition and calendars.
Alain de Botton feels that we need to restructure our secular world. I completely agree and what I would like to do
is start the ball rolling with a holiday calendar. Calendars are a way of arranging time and making sure
that, as we go through our year we come across certain very important
ideas. On certain days we are given time to digest and think about specific ideas, deciding why they are important to us. We repeat the same calendar every year because repetition is the only way that we retain ideas and learning. And, synchronizing
encounters means that we are given time to practice that very
powerful tool, group learning! These are terrific ideas, and there is
no reason why even a stark atheist shouldn’t find a reason to
celebrate holidays like Christmas or even Easter. This blog is
where I will introduce each holiday and explain how I believe we should celebrate them.
