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Question140

Why are religious holdays recognized by governments (US or otherwise)? Should they be?

• Political expediency. and No. (Charles Fiterman #376)

• They are recognized partly because separation of State and Church is not complete, and partly because many religious holidays got loaded with secular (or ex-pagan) traditions.

  Instead of abolishing state-recognized religious holidays, I'm for a more flexible system where people of different religions can have such holidays at different dates, and atheists would get a fixed number of free days. (BTW, Germany has a Lutheran-only free day.) (Daneel #323)

• Why? Because most of the legislators are theist.

  Should they be? No. However, they have shifted away from their superstitious roots and become more of a time for relaxation and family. So, that is progress. (Stoney #9)

• I think that holidays such as Thanksgiving, Xmas, and Easter should be made into generic holidays that do not respect particular religions or religion at all, but continue to be celebrated because of tradition. (Capella #5)

• Step Numero One-o: Abolish all religious holidays. Step Numero Two-o: Add all those abolished holidays to the annual vacation days that workers get.

  Tada! Everyone who got all those days off instead now get them as vacation days- days that can now be taken whenever they want 'em! If a company wants to be closed on a particular religious day, it can be, though. It just shouldn't be something that the government observes- why the heck can't our government be 24/7/365? (Todd Yarbrough)

• The "Why" goes back to medieval times at least. Saint's days were once official vacation days for peasants, a tradition that often had them working onl two-thirds of the year in all. We've actually decreased workers' vacation time quite a lot since then. The most prominent of these days, of course, were the ones that remained.

  Many of these more prominent holidays were, in turn, based on pagan religious festivals. Those, in turn, tended to be based around certain astronomically significant times of year. Christmas is what remains of winter solstice festivals; Easter, the vernal equinox and beginning of spring. Other holidays are at the quarter-points, halfway between equinox/solstice times.

  Should we retain them? Well, there are some practical issues. We need holidays, of course; and though personal leave-time would be ideal, some types of business simply can't operate on that basis. Furthermore, it's nice to have days when you know your family and friends will be off work. Again, speaking practically, a lot of people are going to be leaving work on religious holidays, so we may be making a virtue of necessity.

  One alternative might be to go back to the astronomical roots of the holidays; give everyone the solstices, equinoxes, and quarter-points off. It'll never happen, but it's a nice thought from the point of view of astronomical symmetry. :) (April #1723)

• The reason religious holidays are recognized by governments is because governments are run by religious people. Even though there are laws that prohibit favoritism, these people find ways around them. Not to difficult of a task in the U.S. Religious holidays should not be recognized by the government because it shows favoritism towards one religion or another.

  In the U.S. all money says "In god we trust", why is that? Who is this god character and why have I never heard of him while studying the history of the U.S.? (Logician #1804)

• Civil Service jobs (at least in the US) have some of the strongest unions anywhere. If the gov required its workers to work on christmas, thanksgiving, etc, the workers would work even less than they do now. I know, some civil service people are excellent, and I've met a few of them. But they are few and far between. You few know that the majority of your fellow workers are just putting in time, whining and complaining their life away. Make them work on one of their cherished holidays, and it would cost the gov even more just to do business.

  Should they be?

  No. Each person could register one or more days they require off for their particular belief system. I see no reason to make a Hindu take off Dec 25th, or make a Jew work thru (whatever you call it). I would take off two days a year to laugh at the christians at a public ceremony. (zach #33)

• Because the seperation of church and state is for the most part a myth. They probably should not be, but as long as I get the day off too.... then what the heck.

  Seriously though I don't think they should be recognized by governments, although employees should be allowed to have the days off (without pay) if their religion requires it. Even though it's how it should be it's not what I would vote for because I was pretty serious about any excuse for a day off being good (I still work 'em, but it does build up extra vacation days for me).

  Such holidays as Christmas and Easter are so secular these days that they should still be recognized for the same reason that new year's eve should be recognized (And pragmatically Jan 1 should be off from work too for people to recover from the new year's eve parties). (Rian B. Jensen #317)

• "My responses on why religious holidays are recognized is fairly typical and so probably not of interest - but, from the responses so far, I'm of the minority position on whether they should be."

  "I think they should be - for efficiency's sake. I've seen what anguish a student of mine goes through when an exam follows on a religious holiday, and try to accomodate them wherever possible. It seems to me that, rather than try to deal with *all* such holidays on a case-by-case basis (and have huge absentee rates on such dates for common religions) it is just more efficient to have the more common religious holidays as days off when possible, and make generous exceptions for uncommon religions."

  "I realize that the people with the opposite religion are taking stands on principle, and I sympathize with their position - I just think that accomodations have to be made for the real world, or the government will be so out of synch with the will of the people as to be unworkable. This seems a reasonable thing to concede to the religious folks. IMO it should be extended to more religions than just Christianity, though, which seems to be the current version, and which is patently unfair."

  "So I'd say we should shorten the Christian-related breaks to be about the size of the holidays themselves (i.e. 2 days for Christmas) and use the days freed up to create time off for the other major religion's major holidays." (Abner Mintz #154)