Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.

Q: The single reason why I celebrate Christmas. The December issue of the Journal of Family Psychology contains no fewer than five research papers documenting religion's positive impact on family relationships . Reading them reminds me of why I take my Christian faith seriously and the single reason I celebrate Christmas . What's that reason? It's not the wonderful lights, decorations, and music  - all of which surely do help brighten our spirits and the short days of winter . It's not watching kids' faces when they lay eyes on Santa or receive the toys they wanted . It's not even the seeming overall increase in generosity and loving-kindness in the public square at this time of year . All those aspects of Christmas are precious to me . But the reason I celebrate the holiday is this: Jesus's ministry not only changed the world 2,000 years ago, it's transforming lives to this very day . The essential Christian message of a loving, forgiving God is, at this very moment, healing broken people and families all over the world in ways that deserve to be called miraculous . I could detail many true accounts of such glorious makeovers , but I'll settle for telling you just one . It's the story of how I myself wouldn't exist if it weren't for the positive impact of Christianity on my family . It begins with my maternal grandmother, Michaela Batallan (pronounced bah-tah- YAN) , who defined "liberated woman" long before the political movement of the Sixties . We grandkids called her "Titi." Titi was born in 1896 into a well-to-do Catholic family in Ciego de Avila, Camaguey, Cuba . When she was a young woman, she and her sisters emigrated to the United States all by themselves . They ended up living in Southern California . High-spirited, Titi liked to party and, one day at a dance, she met a tall, handsome ladies' man named Guadalupe Armendariz . Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, he himself liked to drink and have fun . He didn't go to church . He didn't believe in God . When Titi was 28, she married Guadalupe , who by then owned a shoe repair shop in Saticoy, California . When they had children- starting with Betty (my mom), Carlos, and Yolanda - Titi gave up partying and began attending a Pentecostal church . It infuriated my grandfather , who demanded that she stop indulging in such religious mumbo-jumbo . She didn't obey . When Carlos was seven, he was stricken with polio and eventually couldn't walk . One day, out of desperation, Titi invited the minister and people from her church to come to the house and pray for healing . My grandfather was not happy ; he wanted my grandmother to take Carlos to the Children's Hospital in Los Angeles for treatment . But that day, he witnessed something he couldn't believe nor explain . After the praying was done, Carlos immediately stood straight up and from that day onward was no longer paralyzed . My grandfather, seeing it happen with his own eyes, fell to his knees . He was never the same man again . My grandfather stopped drinking and partying and began attending church . In 1932, the entire family - my grandpa included- were baptized . Not long afterwards, the family moved to Azusa, California , where my grandfather felt called to become a minister . With the help of his young sons - Titi and he ended up having eight children: four boys, four girls - he built a church with his own hands , using materials he collected from around the neighborhood . It's still standing . Years later, Grandpa Lupe's ministry was so successful his sermons were broadcast on the radio . By and by, he accepted an invitation from my paternal grandfather - Dr  Miguel Guillen, after whom I'm named- to join the Latin American Council of Christian Churches (LACCC) , of which Grandpa Guillen was president . Later, Titi stepped up and founded a sister organization - the Pro-Seminario - to raise funds for the LACCC's fledgling seminary . Just two weeks ago, in Galveston, Texas, I had the honor of preaching at the biennial convention of the LACCC . At ninety-one, it's the oldest, independent, Spanish-speaking Pentecostal organization in the country, with hundreds of churches in the United States, Mexico, and Central America . I and the many others who attended the convention also had the joy of celebrating the 60th anniversary of LACCC's seminary , which Grandma Titi helped to build . Clearly, I don't need the Journal of Family Psychology to tell me that religion has a significantly positive impact on family relationships . But in a day and age when religion is being bashed on a regular basis by pop culture , finding validation of my family's life-changing experience in a well-respected scientific publication makes for a--- well, nice Christmas gift . Yes, Jesus - Christianity - is able to dramatically improve lives . And not always just our own . When Grandma Titi had the courage and conviction to stand up to Grandpa Lupe and embrace the faith , she ended up catalyzing a miraculous change not just in her own life, but in the life of her entire family ... of the LACCC's seminary ... of my own life . If Grandma Titi hadn't invited those Elders to lay hands on my uncle Carlos . If Grandpa Lupe hadn't become a minister . If the Armendariz family hadn't joined the LACCC and met the Guillen family . Then my mother Betty wouldn't have met my father Mariano ...and I wouldn't be here to write this column . Ultimately, yes, Jesus is the reason I'm here . It's the reason I celebrate his birthday - the only reason Christmas means anything to me . For me and the two billion others on the planet whose lives have been remade , it's a time when we celebrate the incarnation of love, light, and life - the hope of a better day, a better life, a better world . Merry Christmas!

A: The December issue of the Journal of Family Psychology contains no fewer than five research papers documenting religion's positive impact on family relationships But the reason I celebrate the holiday is this: Jesus's ministry not only changed the world 2,000 years ago, it's transforming lives to this very day
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Q: The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were smarter theologians than the jihadis. Rather disturbingly, one word seems to connect the activity of the Paris terrorists and that of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists: iconoclasm . I say disturbingly, because pointing out some common ground may be seen as blurring the crucial distinction between murderous bastards and innocent satirists . Nonetheless ,  it strikes me as fascinating that the cartoonists were profoundly iconoclastic in their constant ridiculing of religion (all religions, it must be noted) - yet it is precisely this same ancient tradition of iconoclasm that inspires Jews and Muslims to resist representational art and, in its most twisted pathological form, to attack the offices of a Paris magazine and slaughter those whose only weapon was the pen . So what's the connection? In one sense an iconoclast is someone who refuses the established view of things , who kicks out against cherished beliefs and institutions . Which sounds pretty much like Charlie Hebdo . But the word iconoclast also describes those religious people who refuse and smash representational images, especially of the divine . The second of the Ten Commandments prohibits graven images  - which is why there are no pictures of God in Judaism or Islam . And theologically speaking, the reason they are deeply suspicious of divine representation is because they fear that such representations of God might get confused for the real thing . The danger, they believe, is that we might end up overinvesting in a bad copy, something that looks a lot like what we might think of as god , but which, in reality, is just a human projection . So much better then to smash all representations of the divine . And yet this, of course, is exactly what Charlie Hebdo was doing . In the bluntest, rudest, most scatological and offensive of terms, Charlie Hebdo has been insisting that the images people worship are just human creations - bad and dangerous human creations . And in taking the piss out of such images, they actually exist in a tradition of religious iconoclasts going back as far as Abraham taking a hammer to his father's statues . Both are attacks on representations of the divine . Which is why the terrorists, as well as being murderers, are theologically mistaken in thinking Charlie Hebdo is the enemy . For if God is fundamentally unrepresentable, then any representation of God is necessarily less than God and thus deserves to be fully and fearlessly attacked . And what better way of doing this than through satire, like scribbling a little moustache on a grand statue of God . It's only some Christians that might demur from this logic . For the Christian story (ie Christmas) tells of God coming into the world as a human being . And in doing this the divine takes on a representational form . Jesus, says St Paul, is the image of the invisible God . Without this the whole western tradition of Catholic religious art and eastern tradition of icons is utterly inconceivable . So I can see how some Christians might find disrespectful images of God a la Charlie Hebdo insulting . After all ,  they believe it's possible for images genuinely to capture something of God . But if images can't capture God- and that's the Jewish/Islamic position- then bring on the cartoonists . They should be encouraged to do their worst and disrupt our confidence that what we think of as God bears any resemblance to anything legitimately God-like . They are like Moses bringing down the golden calf . It is the ancient job of the iconoclast . But ,  of course, these terrorists weren't really interested in theology . They thought that Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists were insulting their human tribe, a tribe they called fellow Muslims . And maybe they were . But whatever else was happening, it was the atheist cartoonists who were performing the religious function and the apparently believing Muslims who had forgotten their deepest religious insights . For any representation of the divine that leads people to murder each other deserves the maximum possible disrespect . @giles_fraser .

A: whatever else was happening, it was the atheist cartoonists who were performing the religious function and the apparently believing Muslims who had forgotten their deepest religious insights
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Q: Is it not time to dismantle the CIA? It's not as if we weren't warned about the CIA . Some 50 years before the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 500-page report on torture, former President Harry Truman published an opinion piece in the Washington Post asserting that the CIA was out of control and calling for it to be broken up . Truman's column appeared on December 22, 1963, a month to the day following US President John F Kennedy's assassination and 11 years after he himself moved out of the White House . Truman argued, as the president who authorised its establishment in 1947, that the CIA had strayed from the mission he had intended for it . He had favoured creation of the CIA so that a president would have one agency providing him with objective foreign intelligence, rather than having to rely upon the often conflicting information being served up by the Departments of State, Defense, and others who "slanted to conform to established positions of a given department" . Viewing intelligence gathering as its sole mission, Truman was disturbed "by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment . It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government." He said he had "never had any thought" that the CIA would involve itself in "cloak and dagger operations" . But it had which "has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas" . It is clearly of some significance that Truman published his piece just one month after Kennedy's assassination . Although there is no evidence that Truman was suggesting CIA involvement in the assassination , it is impossible to believe that the late president's difficulties with the CIA were far from Truman's mind . As a former president who the Kennedy White House regularly briefed on foreign policy issues and decisions, Truman knew how the CIA essentially steamrolled Kennedy into the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (and other anti- Castro actions), leading Kennedy to tell a friend that he wanted"to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" . Kennedy never had the chance to follow up on that idea but it was essentially what Truman suggested a month after Kennedy's death . Obviously, Truman's recommendation had no effect . In fact ,  the Washington establishment apparently took action to see that Truman's piece disappeared almost without a trace (easier in those pre-internet days) . According to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, the Washington Post only published the piece in its morning edition, pulling it from view after that (a peculiar way to treat an opinion piece by a former president, especially on such a weighty issue) . McGovern also reports that former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs debacle, actually flew down to Truman's home in Independence, Missouri to get the former president to retract . Although Dulles reported back to his friends that Truman had indeed recanted , he clearly never did . In fact ,  six months after publishing the column in the Post, Truman wrote to the managing editor of Look Magazine that he intended the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency only and not a place where"strange activities" would be launched . No doubt, the Bay of Pigs and Cuba, in general, were not the only examples of CIA interventions that disturbed Truman . In the years between the end of Truman's administration and his Washington Post column, the CIA had orchestrated the overthrow of governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964) . Within a year following Truman's death, the CIA successfully brought down the Allende government in Chile (1973) . As for its activities since, its intelligence activities have clearly continued to be a low priority (it has gotten Iraq wrong from the start, culminating most recently in its failure to predict the rise of ISIL) while , what Truman called its "cloak and dagger" operations, have proliferated . According to historian William Blum, writing in Foreign Policy Journal, in the last 69 years, the CIA has (often in conjunction with the military) "(1) attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected, (2) attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries, (3) grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries, (4) dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries, (5) attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders." And now there are the horrific reports of torture and, equally appalling, the defense of CIA torture by former CIA driectors, other top CIA officials and, most enthusiastically, former Vice President Dick Cheney who famously told NBC five days after 9/11 that it was now time for US intelligence agencies to operate on the "dark side" . That is the context of the torture debate . As Truman understood, the CIA was dangerous and should be broken up or, in Kennedy's words, "splinter[ed] into a thousand pieces and scatter[ed] to the winds" . That was 50 years and nine presidents ago and since John F Kennedy, no president has challenged the CIA . Perhaps each of them have understood there are battles that not even a president could win .

A:
Some 50 years before the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 500-page report on torture, former President Harry Truman published an opinion piece in the Washington Post asserting that the CIA was out of control and calling for it to be broken up
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