Yes, I'm a teenage atheist and yes, I celebrate Christmas. Why? Well, you see I could list off the number of Christmas traditions that aren't even Christian at all from the Yule log to the tree to the caroling to the candles.
The faster the church stops telling people they are hopeless sinners and starts building them up, the better chance this archaic institution has to survive.
A.J. Cronin is an important figure for our times because his writing addresses many of the most critical issues we face as a culture. Cronin's Religious Humanism redraws for us the categories in which we can process social activism and religious belief.
Converts to theism are disproportionately from upper and upper-middle-class social groups while converts to atheism are disproportionately from lower social groups.
The important debate is not about conversions, but between the unifiers and the dividers -- between those who think all Indians are "us," and those who think that Indians can be divided into "us" and "them."