I had written a bit about this in a takedown piece (my second) about OnlySky a few weeks ago. I had been thinking about a more in-depth pullout about this issue anyway, but Jonathan M.S. Pierce, aka The Besotted Philosopher, getting tetchy about that led me to figure that to spite him as a sidebar, this was a good reason anyway.

And, with that, let's dig in.

Paul Golin, not previously critiqued by me, talked about why an Atheist Jew celebrates Hanukkah. As I noted last month?

First, as far as being historical? The events afterward didn't play out exactly as presented in 1 Maccabees. I've blogged about that before. I blogged about that more at my main blog. He also ignores, contra Shlomo Sand and many others, as I have also discussed, that Hanukkah is originally pagan. Since the menorah ran dry, as in had no miraculous refill night after night, since Hanukkah has pagan roots and since, per Yonathan Adler, the Torah in general wasn't widely observed until AFTER the Maccabean revolt, if Golin is intellectually honest in act as well as thought, he's just doing a Jewish-tinged solstice event. And, yes, that is exactly what Hanukkah was as a pagan festival.

So, he's like an ex-Christian still celebrating Christmas but not fully secularizing it. 

It would be like me, if I still celebrated Christmas in anyway, not only talking about Santa, but talking about a nativity or religious Christmas carols, but yet saying "I'm a secularist."

Of course, there's a deeper issue at root.

And, that is the tension, and this one is not limited to the English language, between "Judaism" as a religion and "Jewishness" as an ethnic identity. Given that Paul said "there is neither Jew nor Goy," outside of White nationalists trying to exploit Christianity, it's neither a linguistic nor a deeper identity issue that Christians face.

Ergo, it's not an issue that ex-Christian secularists face.

Now, given that, per Adler, Hanukkah eventually led to Judaism as we know it today, but not necessarily Jewishness, is it better to for an Atheist Jew to celebrate it than Passover? It also has religious, metaphysical elements (setting aside that it totally didn't happen), but it is arguably as much or more the origin of ethnic Jewish nationalism than is Hanukkah.

Of course, if you're an atheist celebrating ethnic nationalism, there's the deeper question of whether or not you're an atheist who's not a real secular humanist? I celebrate (not too loudly) the Fourth of July, but not German-American Day.