lack of religious synchronization

The acute readers might be thinking I am talking about the late execution of Sadam Hussein. Well that too, but first and foremost we should concern ourselves with a more imminent issue: the lack of common religious holidays in eastern and western tradition. The only exception I could think of is new year’s eve. But even that was originally a western tradition and nowadays neither the west nor the east celebrates it as ferociously as other more treasured occasions such as Xmas or Chinese new year. In other words it bears little religious signficance in either society.

A friend of mine, Shen, talked sincerely and eloquently about how being a foreigner entails hardship in getting into the native culture, which is reflected most conspicuously in the lack of enthusiasm in the indiginant holidays. As a living example, he cited himself, an American citizen who has stayed in america for the most part of his life, constantly embracing the feeling of rejection by the surrounding culture, which is particularly accentuated during holiday seasons. Of course his main emotional resource came from his parents. The shifting of Chinese new year within the framework of Gregarian calendar seems to pose a more devastating problem in synchronizing the temporal milestones of lifelong pilgrimmage on both sides of the spectrum. In the western eyes, the Chinese new year is perhaps too unstable and random as a holiday to be considered serious, given their own firmly established Gregarian tradition. It is indeed hard to justify something of which the predicability requires major arithmetical acuity and literature searching as essential to the consummation of secular life. I do not want to deny that in many ways the lunar calender makes bureaucracy hard to carry out, which explains why even the Mao regime, somewhat antipathetic to the western evil force of imperialism and capitalism, adopted the gregarian system without a second thought. But as an impirical mechanism, it is in fact more accurate than the solar calender for capturing the behavior of the moon, which is far more influential to the terrestial living and nonobvious to the untrained eyes than what the sun could cause us.  

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