Merry Christmas! On this day, the celebration of the day of birth, approximately 2,005 years ago, of a child. It surely would seem strange to those present the night that child was born that all these years later, it would become terribly important to expend great quantities of energy and vigor, having recorded memory of the birth at all at such a future date, to pointedly not celebrate the birth, and to encourage others to not celebrate it either, or to spread warm greetings associated with such celebrations. Yet, today it has become critical for all right-thinking and good people to go out of their way to not in public take up the traditions of their ancestors, but instead to shake off the antique and antiquated custom of Yuletide greetings, and greet in public at this time of year without any specific or overriding reference to the birth of that child, but to reference any and all sundry tradition of other lineage.
It is the soi dissant “Pagans” who claim today that many years, long before the birth of that child, in the midst of the cold cruel winters, many cultures would gather around fires on a particular day in the wilderness, or perhaps in their caves, and generally engage in unusually civilized, cordial relations, and a sharing of gifts, and a sharing of warm non-sectarian hellos and warm wishes amid soft lighting. There was no inspiration for this holiday. It just kind of occurred to those ancient people, who were one with the tree. They got together one day and said, hey, let’s have a day when we set aside all of our difficulties in being uncivilized persons living perhaps in primitive huts under despots. In the contemporary Pagan fevered imagination, Christmas was only a diabolical attempt to subvert their tradition. They then intensely denounce the crass materialism and the phony kindnesses and all of the other horrible things associated with this day of infamy we call Christmas. The tree god would just give us firewood, and that’s all we should want. As we have regrettably seen, though, we are forced to admit that, yes, Christianity did in fact come up with the concept of the “Midwinter Holiday.” (*) “Saturnalia” was indeed but a pagan reaction to the Christian holiday.
Of course, gift-giving is a travesty. While it may be arguably true that the Christians can claim that their “God” gave the world as his gift to human beings, and then, after the human beings acted as they tend to and corrupted and befouled this “Creation” by acting like a pack of surly chimpanzees at riot in the Louvre, this “God” gave another gift, his “beloved son,” to be sacrificed to pay for the mayhem and ruination wreaked by those ungrateful humans, so that humans would not “die,” but could cheat Death (a process which, technically, is unthinkable) all thanks to that second gift, it nevertheless is still the case that humans are utterly presumptuous to give each other gifts in mockery of those idiotic three “Wise Men” and their pathetic frankincense, gold, and myrrh, given as gifts to the Creator’s infant son on that cold night in backwards Bethlehem.
Fortunately, there have been many that claimed that this “Jesus” was just a man, and not technically speaking “the Son of God.” Arianus lost that debate in the fourth century and the “Trinity” was established as the hateful dogma of the Christian church. Soon the horrifying spectacle began wherein nearly every corner of the world has heard the mean-spirited and intolerant and, yea verily, fascist message of Christianity, and untold billions have converted to this sick, wicked cult, consigning them to repressed desires and unrealized fantasies in exchange for an illusion of brotherhood and a wasteland of belief in the Lord.
Then Mohammed was born, exposed to a little Christian and Jewish teaching, and at an opportune moment later in life managed to rewrite the Bible as a mostly false document as seen by his perfect and unjaded eyes. Of course, only Mohammed was the true prophet. It was the others that were the fakes, or the “less than perfects.” While it may be that those fakers did successfully predict the future, as Jeremiah foretold the fall of Judah, and that Mohammed never actually was so bold as to bother predicting any future event, nevertheless, Mohammed was undoubtedly the only prophet worth talking about. And Mohammed said Jesus was just a man, and so we know that must be true. With good reason, Mohammed married a nine-year old girl, preached polygamy, waged holy war or jihad (Jew Hate) upon his neighbors, encouraged lying for self advantage such as may be necessary when one might verbally misstate one’s core beliefs to avoid persecution, and successfully started a new religion that in many ways was a brutally reverse reflection of the Christian “God loves you” church. Where Christians had drawings of a cross, Muslims were not allowed to have any drawing or picture of a real thing, the better to not think too heavily on reality.
Perhaps it is strange that it is so currently controversial among Christians to celebrate the birth of a child who grew up to be a man who never hurt anyone, stood against a blood-soaked and evil Empire, called for humans to treat one another well, and was executed for refusing to back down on his statements.
What is not strange is that in the subsequent millennia after a man lived and walked the Earth, his message may have been appropriated and misused many times, and that historical events and trends may have resulted in certain difficulties in applying and interpreting his two universal messages of: love no god but God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Pacificism was no longer necessary for Christians after the Roman Empire converted to the religion, but still was considered by Christians to be a good idea. Yet, in this world an absolute refusal to carry and use arms does not work as a political philosophy, for others will take arms against you regardless of your beliefs. And so a real question existed as to whether Christians could successfully defend themselves from aggressors. Charles Martel turned back the Moors at the Battle of Tours in 754, and the question was for the time satisfied.
The Renaissance and the Reformation paved the path in Europe to capitalism, and the old rule against usury was abandoned by Christians in favor of the greater good that capital formation could and did deliver. With trade and intercourse with the many peoples around the world growing in the “Age of Discovery,” it was natural that a more balanced, more relativist, and less unitary morality came to the fore in Christian culture. The moneychangers were not invited back into the temple, but the laborers were too often denied their daily bread, while the minimal sacrifices of a few were in the style of the Gilded Age rewarded disproportionately to work and risk. Many other issues have confronted and continue to confront Christians. The world is beset by problems, but is also ripe with possibilities for good.
We do not choose the world in which we live, but we are given it by our ancestors. It is they who choose, unwittingly, our circumstances, but it is we who choose how to address them. And so we find ourselves in a world on the cusp of great things, including the colonization of space, and also at the cusp of great horrors, including nuclear war and a total absconding of stewardship of the Earth’s environment.
And so let us take a day or two and put aside our differences, give some gifts, and celebrate what is best in this Creation, and be thankful for what has been done in the past on our behalf, and prepare ourselves to live worthy and ennobling lives that bring credit to the high expectations of us held by Jesus the Christ, upon which basis his sacrifice was so freely given.