Sunday Discussion Group

December 24, 2006

Rumor has it that there’s some kind of major holiday tomorrow, so perhaps it’s best to have a little Christmas-related discussion.

The other day, a reader gave me a heads-up on a column from the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Katherine Kersten, a conservative, who suggested that it’s about time for a “cease fire” in the “war on Christmas,” in large part because [tag]Christmas[/tag] isn’t really a religious holiday anymore, so there’s no real reason to worry about the annual controversies.

The New York Times’ Randy Kennedy recently wrote an essay suggesting that this year we’ve got, not just a war on Yuletide symbolism, but a war on the holiday’s underpinnings: on belief in God itself. How ironic, he noted, that books such as Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Sam Harris’ “Letter to a Christian Nation” (a defense of atheism) have climbed the best-seller lists so close to Christmas.

But Kennedy also revealed a fascinating detail: Dawkins and Harris celebrate Christmas. Harris even has a decorated tree in his living room. Dawkins explains why. Christmas, he says, has long since ceased to be a religious festival in America. […]

When an outspoken atheist such as Dawkins says “Merry Christmas,” we may be reaching a consensus. American popular culture has appropriated Christmas, as it has Thanksgiving, and drained it of religious meaning.

Is this true? And if so, have we reached a point in which Christmas has been secularized to the extent that even non-Christians can enjoy it?

As a personal matter, I don’t celebrate Christmas because I’ve always taken the religious meaning behind the holiday seriously. Christmas is for Christians, just as Hanukkah is for Jews, Ramadan is for Muslims, and Super Bowl Sunday is for Americans. Right?

Well, for a surprising number of people, that’s an overly-literal, antiquated look at the holiday. The NYT article that Kersten noted included some surprising comments from proud non-believers.

[Sam Harris] is a having a (relatively) holly, jolly atheistic Christmas, one that will include presents and a big family party. And Mr. Harris, who was raised by a Jewish mother and a Quaker father, sees no glaring contradiction in doing so, at least not one he feels the need to spend much time thinking about.

“It seems to me to be obvious that everything we value in Christmas — giving gifts, celebrating the holiday with our families, enjoying all of the kitsch that comes along with it — all of that has been entirely appropriated by the secular world,” he said, “in the same way that Thanksgiving and Halloween have been.”

Mr. Dawkins, reached by e-mail somewhere on a book tour, was asked about his own Christmas philosophy. The response sounded almost as if he and Mr. Harris — and maybe other members of a soon-to-be-chartered Atheists Who Kind of Don’t Object to Christmas Club — had hashed out a statement of principles. Strangely, these principles find much common ground with Christians who complain about the holiday’s over-commercialization and secularization, though the atheists bemoan the former and appreciate the latter.

“Presumably your reason for asking me is that ‘The God Delusion’ is an atheistic book, and you still think of Christmas as a religious festival,” Mr. Dawkins wrote, in a reply printed here in its entirety. “But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.”

He added: “So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”

So, is this folly, or are we approaching a post-Christian Christmas? Who can celebrate this holiday? If the answer is “everyone,” what should non-Christians who want to celebrate the holiday do?

The tree.
Mistletoe.
Presents and lots of spending.
Santa Claus.
The very timing of the date.

Christmas is about Jesus literally in name only.

There’s a good reason we call this the “holiday” season – a lot of holidays currently fall around this time, and a lot have historically as well (such as Saturnalia). I would think this particular time in the year is noteworthy because of its connotations with death/winter/the end and rebirth/spring/a new year.

And quite frankly, everyone enjoys a day off.

  • I ithink Christmas comes down to what you want it to be. Family time, crass consumer-driven time, sacred time, time to give to those in need, or just a time to reflect on the better parts of ourselves. Me, I still hold onto the dream of a more peaceful world, and extend that wish to everyone here.

  • Given the rather turgid reply of Mr. Dawkins, as quoted above, I would expect that in the next breath he would begin to quantify the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

    Christians appropriated what was a secular festival of the winter solstice for their own purposes. Since when do Christians have a lock on the “true meaning” of this celebration, as if theirs was the only “authentic” one?

    The authenticity of my celebration is no one’s business other than mine. I’ll not be badgered into thinking of this “holiday” in any way other than the one I choose.

  • God bless us, everyone!… except the Jews, and the Muslims, and the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Pagans, the miscellany of superstitious sense-making, the atheists, the agnostics, the stillborn, the malnourished masses of parasite food, the coffin-dwelling cancer victims, the ignorant, undiscovered natives, and those — all of us at one point or another — who sneeze alone.

  • I think Christmas ceased to be a religious holiday when it morphed into a festival of insanity, mall food and fights over parking spots and the shopping mall became the new house of worship.

    As mentioned in earlier TCR posts, the whackadoos use the war on Xmas to line their pockets, er, fundraising purposes. I suspect that rational folks like Kersten will be given the pariah treatment.

    Personally, I wish everyone here (even Fallenwoman) a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

  • The proximity of Christmas to the northern winter solstice is no coincidence. December 25th was considered the date of the winter solstice 2000 years ago. We’ve updated our astronomy, but not our religious calender. Nearly every human civilization celebrates the winter solstice for the return of the Sun. This time of year is hardly uniquely a Christian holiday season, despite what idiot blowhards on the fundie right try to argue. Unfortunately, the “pagan” underpinnings of most aspects of Christianity are lost on nearly all Christians.

  • Christians appropriated what was a secular festival of the winter solstice for their own purposes.

    Namely, being able to hold a celebration without drawing unsafe notice by the authorities, back when there really was a war on Christmas.

    “Merry Christmas!” = “I predict that Dec 25 will be an atypical day for you, in that you will spend it with many more family members than usual. I hope it is enjoyable!”

  • Christmas is, and forever will be, a Christian (ie: religious) holiday. As a religious Jew, I always found it offensive when people tried to convince me that Christmas was an “American” holiday. Well, I’m an American, and it’s certainly not my holiday or a holiday for any of my Jewish friends.

    Some of my non-Jewish friends and colleagues are surprised to hear that I don’t put up a Christmas tree in my house. Many others are shocked to hear that I believe that Jesus was just a Jewish man, and nothing more. Christians, like any other majority, tend to push their beliefs and principles on the minority.

    It is troubling to me that we are having this discussion on a liberal blog. I am a proud Democrat. Perhaps naively, I believed that all the “Christmas is an American holiday” folks were from the other side of the political spectrum. I suppose that’s not the case?

    Lastly, if you ever needed more proof of the religious nature of the holiday, just look at the word itself–CHRISTmas. Jesus as “Christ” is certainly not a concept that non-Christians believe in. And therefore, Christmas, the celebration of Jesus, quite simply is not an American holiday.

  • Oh, didja hear? Santa Clause outsourced toy production to China this year. A spokesman for Santa indicated that though Santa tried it was simply no longer feasible to keep production in-house. Inside-observers claim it was all the recent talk of unionization that motivated the shift. Aside from a few service jobs (shoveling, furnace-maintenance, reindeer care) the North Pole job market is dried up. The elves have made some effort at redress but it has proven futile. Those that have tried protesting outside Santa’s house are quickly dispersed by the private security contractors that man the guardhouse to Santa’s gated estate. Most spend their days at the Shivering Moose, the local tavern and the only small business in town that is thriving. They pass the time drinking eggnog and rum, eating white-chocolate covered pretzels and brittle christmas cookies, willowing away the hours talking about how things used to be, how an elf could make a living hammering pegs into a rocking horse and be proud of it. But now, Santa’s Workshop is an empty and silent hulk, a single light bulb illuminating its deadbolted front door. The towering dual candy cane arch that used to welcome the elves to Santa’s Workshop no longer stands. Scavengers tore it down, presumably to use the material for smaller candy canes. It’s a rare night when the North Pole jail doesn’t fill with drunk and rowdy elves, angry at the world but having only each other on whom to take it out. With any luck, they’ll be able to find work salvaging water-logged polar bear carcases, a growth industry in the coming decade.

    In other news, rocking horse imports are up 58%.

  • My brother and two sisters and I were raised Roman Catholic by an Irish Catholic mother and what I would describe as Rationalist-Deist German father (who attended Mass regularly though I often heard him describe a lot that went on as “hypocritical hooey”). My parents were from Philadelphia and, during the 1930s worked for a New Deal Democratic congressman. By contrast, we grew up in Paso Robles CA, a town which was tiny, rural and overwhelmingly Republican (Dad used to say Democrats there only came out at night).

    A Franciscan priest used to come down from San Miguel Mission to help out our regular parish priest on Sundays, and I served Mass for him (memorized all that Latin, too). One day in my eighth grade I was complaining to him about our little public school: many of my teachers in the junior grades were excellent “school marms”, but by the upper grades they were GI Bill guys more interested in becoming administrators than in teaching. He suggested I consider the Franciscan seminary adjoining Santa Barbara Mission. I leaped at the chance to get out of Paso Robles and into a place which took education seriously.

    I attended St. Anthony’s Seminary for three years. This was the seminary which hit the NY Times in the early 1990s with the first of the Church’s major sex scandals; 11 of 44 priests were accused and the school shut down in 1987. There I studied Latin, Greek, Spanish, three years of Art history and Music, math, science … a fantastic education for $350 a year if you could afford it (that covered tuition, room and board!). For what I considered a practical joke, I was suddenly and secretly thrown out about month before the end of my Junior year and wound up in a private, Catholic prep school populated mostly by pretty rich people from the LA area.

    I got a scholarship to the University of San Francisco. USF was Jesuit and, no matter what your major (mine was chemistry) you had to take their classes in religion and “philosophy” … really doctrinaire Catholic apologetics. That was the first time I ever confronted religion critically, rather than simply as a matter of faith or family tradition. The more I studied it, the more holes I found in the belief system. I found myself reading people like Bertrand Russell or Friedrich Nietzsche — books which I had to get from the downtown public library because USF considered them “condemned” — looking for ideas with which to attack my teachers. I tried less doctrinaire Christian religions and even attended both of San Francisco’s major Buddhist churches before at long last realizing that there was nothing to any of it for me (other than intellectual curiosity or amusement).

    If I were on my own I probably wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, not because I’m “bah, humbug” but because I just don’t believe any of it (I actually believe it does more harm than good). But there’s more to life than being brutally honest. There’s community, others’ beliefs and traditions, and so on. And anyway it’s mostly harmless fun, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I think one of things which most drives me up the wall about the “war on Christmas” crowd (O’Reilly, et alii) is that they seem to want to take all the fun out of kids’ lives. They mouth “Glad Tidings” but are only interested in Great Tithings (for themselves needless to say). All I can think of when some smart-assed, theologically ignorant, teenage clerk says “Merry Christmas”, in an obviously preachy way, is how hypocritical the entire exercise has become. I think Pharisees and whitened sepulchers. I still think the Franciscans have it right: give food to the poor, not just at Christmas but all year long. Try to make a better, happier world. And keep your beliefs to yourself.

    Merry Christmas, everyone.

  • Gee, now Dawkins and Harris tell us Christmas is okay, after I spent all those sullen hours at Christmas gatherings when I was a teenager to show I was an atheist. Well, I always loosened up after I proved my point (that is, made sure everyone noticed I was protesting.)

    I’ve found trying to avoid Christmassy stuff gives it more significance than it deserves. Now I just enjoy the kids enjoying the holiday.

    I think the equivalent to the Muslims packing into Mecca for their Pilgrimage is the Christians packing into airports for their pilgirmages home.

    And in a nutshell:
    And quite frankly, everyone enjoys a day off.
    Comment by Nautilator

    And to Hankster, Gesundheit!
    and those — all of us at one point or another — who sneeze alone.
    Comment by Hankster

    Speaking of births, virgin or not, that poor Palestinian, sweet baby Jesus, had it rough, but 36 Palestinian women have died in childbirth at Israeli checkpoints on their way to the hospital. Then there are the children killed by suicide bombers. And the circle keeps cycling, like Bush on a Christmas air assault.

  • As a onetime-Catholic, onetime-Protestant, and now non-religious Christian married to a Jewish wife, I don’t believe we’ve reached the point yet where Christmas is simply an American holiday. It is still an issue for my Christian family that I don’t celebrate Christmas in my now-Jewish household with the reason being that there is a perception that I’m giving up my “Christian” heritage.

    For the devoutly Christian/religious, it has certainly not crossed some line into just being another holiday. For Jewish people, it is generally the same from my experience, i.e., that Christmas is not their holiday. If there are some (of whatever faith or non-faith) that have reached some sort of comfort level with themselves and their loved ones that they can eliminate the religious aspect to Christmas, that’s great for them.

  • “I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza”

    Talk about your emblematic fig-leaf of repulsion! I bet that guy does enjoy Christmas.

    Religion is a real folk-thing, it’s practice by the people is a lot more flexible than upper-class writers and middle class activists who drive these controversies would like to think. Don’t they seem like they’re interested in drawing out the lines of these dogmas so strakly just so that they can identify some dilemma and spill paragraphs of ink and emit some moans over it? It’s as if upper class people and ultra religious people want you to think that religion is not something to be doing unless you’re going to be putting yourslf through impossible grinders for it- the one so he can justify his not practicing his religion (except for his religion of bitching to and hobknobbing with his friends) and the other so he can justify his belief in his own religious superiority over others and in the necessity for his leadership. Most Americans have some kind of belief in angels or reincarnation or supernatural phenomena that would probably place them outside of the official (approved) boundaries of their religion. So who’s right, the people or the preachers? I would tend to think the people. It’s ironic that for practical purposes, these atheists are practicing a religion by participating in Christmas, at least to the extent they get something out of it beyond patronizing their friends. That’s really the definition of religion.

    Religion faces a dilemma in Western civilization because we no longer have shamans- people who go off alone to speak to speak to God like Moses or an oracle did, or connect to the gods in some other way- to update us on what God or gods expect from us. But the mores and the norms of the religion were handed down in much more primitive times than our modern times, to people who compared to us were technologically and culturally barbaric. Textual justifications for current mores against homosexuality and abortion supposedly come from the old testament. But we have these mores preserved in a text, not just in the oral tradition of a clerical class. We’ve become a society that respects the printed word, a legalistic society where- for the most part- laws can be embodied in a text and it takes legislation to change the text and thereby change the law- not just the words of a Solomon-like judge acting singly and extemporaneously. Because we can respect the printed word, we’re left with the dilemma of why should we fail to honor traditions written thousands of years ago, so long as we have the writing, if we haven’t heard anything from God since? Since we’re stuck with this point of view, we’re left celebrating, or being made to feel we should celebrate, mores and traditions adopted by people thousands of years ago who were nothing like us and had needs and interests nothing like ours. Until we develop a way of looking at religion that lets us acknowledge on our own, and hopefully lets our spiritual leaders acknowledge as well, that God probably doesn’t care so much about every little punctillio that people ever really adopted in his name, and God really probably cares about the kinds of things a person’s moral sense guides them to respect and honor- morality, and the fact of morality, not so much its form; and respect for God, but the fact of honoring God, not so much its form- then people are going to waste countless hours for years and years that the Biblical God and Jesus would probably look with on disdain on disputes over what a common sense person should be able to see are really petty matters.

  • It’s my belief that people should be permitted to study Bentham and Kant in conjunction with their study of the religious texts and that the words of the religious texts should not be considered word-for-word or sentence for sentence literally binding, but to be contstrued in light of modern thought, experience, and conditions. I believe people who follow this practice should be allowed by their religions to be called a Catholic or a Protestant or Muslim.

  • Whatever we call it, celebration at the time of the winter solstice seems to have been adapted by multiple cultures through time.

    Our current American corporate culture teaches financial consumption (all those presents), energy consumption (all those lights) and physical exhaustion…(swimming upstream thru the crowds of feeding shoppers).

    My non-christian family’s heritage is to have a tree, think about people we love and exchanging of gifts. I continue to practice that heritage…and now my children do too.

    The tree and gifts is called Christmas now…the tree and gifts was called something else in other Germanic times. Whatever.

  • I meant to say, that the intelligentsia and dispensers of wisdom (I say with sarcasm) should continue to allow the people to choose to celebrate or choose to not to celebrate the Christmas holiday regardless of what religious or cultural tradition they do or don’t identify with, and no matter what the intelligentsia may have read.

  • If you set off a day as “special”, and do special rituals on it, it has to be for a reason. As a not especially religious Jew, I still find joy and meaning in (most of ) the Jewish holidays, because each of them has roots in my people’s history and culture. As an American, I find joy and meaning in Thanksgiving and July 4, because they have roots in my country’s history.

    So I don’t really understand why someone would celebrate Christmas just because everyone else does it. Take a day off, fine. But why make it a special day if there’s nothing particularly special (to you) about it? Sure, it was originally a pagan festival – are you a pagan?

    Harris’s and Dawkins’ explanations sound kind of pathetic. They’re basically doing it out of inertia.

    I would say the awkwardness of the Harris/Dawkins position on Christmas points up the weakness of their broader attack on “religion”. As I understand it (and I confess this is from reviews and blurbs rather than the books – willing to be corrected), they start from two indisputable facts: that the idea of a supernatural, omniscient god is so implausible as to be impossible, and that some religious people over the centuries have been brutally violent and intolerant. From this narrow base they discredit the social, cultural, intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic virtues of any and all forms of religious tradition.

    Oh, but they happily join in a cultural outgrowth of religion, by celebrating a religiously-derived holiday, because, um everyone else does. OK, guys. Whatever.

  • The fact that Christmas is the only quasi-religious holiday that is considered a national holiday pretty much guarantees its transition to a secular (or American) one. In my mind, Christmas is religious in the same way that marriage is religious — it can have a religious component, if you want, but its meaning and importance goes way beyond its religious origin.

    (Just to be clear about my own leanings here: I am Jewish, raised as an atheist, and I love Christmas. I wish people would be kind to one another like this all year around, but until that happens I’ll settle for December.)

  • as a jew married to a christian (from new orleans), i still remember the first time we went down to the big easy over xmas: i kept saying “where’s jesus?”

    if christians don’t take their holidays seriously, that’s their choice, but don’t tell me that that makes christmas the equivalent of thanksgiving and the fourth of july.

  • People seem to expect more purity of intention from atheists than they do from doctrinaire religionists. People love to party and until they delare a day off for Atheist Emancipation Day, we’ll have to take the parties that are available, like Christmas. We also have a host of Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim hol(l)y days we can partycipate in. The thing is we don’t have to go to church, temple, mosque to do it. Even the Flying Spaghetti Monster lets us do it our way.

  • Lot’s of interesting personal comments here about everyone’s Christmas experiences.

    Me, we had Christmas in our family for a number of years until almost everyone became Baha’i’s. Then I spent the majority of my adulthood in the traditional sense of not celebrating Christmas, i.e., no tree or decorations. Outside of that, I still acknowledged the holiday, and bought a gift or two for a few friends. We did not have any family celebrations of the holiday, religious or otherwise. In fact, after I split with the father of my daughter, she basically spent every Christmas with him and his family, (until she was 8) because I did not celebrate it, and of course, there was no tree in my house.

    But, somehwere along the way, the holiday became divorced from the religious aspect. Coupled with a second round of custody battles with the ex, I was forced to stand my ground for parsed visitation, and I kept my daughter for Christmas. The dilemna, of course, was that I did not have even a single Christmas holiday ornament or lights, or anything. I tell ya, that year (1988) I had to spend over $1,000 just to put together a tree with all the ornaments and a few presents. What was ironic was that after all the years of non-participation, (I was 36 by then) I found that I actually enjoyed the putting up of the tree, the playing of all those old Christmas songs that I actually liked, and buying special gifts for special people. I have since continued celebrating Christmas yearly, but not with my family (most of whom have either passed away, or live like in China – forever the missionaries) and I actually look forward to the holiday every year. Of course, I’m one of those that plan my Christmas gift list and shop early. I generally am done with the shopping part by Thanksgiving, so I hardly ever have to deal with “mall syndrome.”

    Anyway, that’s my tale, and I’m sticking to it. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

  • I don’t know how that happy face got there, but insert the word “eight.”
    Comment by Carrie

    I thought it meant until she was a movie star. 8)

    The number 8 makes an icon have sunglasses.

  • The post-Christianization of Christmas is the result of fundamentalist Christians deciding that they were powerful enough to weaponize Christmas. They were, of course, not powerful enough—and a post-Christianized Christmas is, instead, going to blow up in their faces.

    To that, I will most certainly wish everyone a Merry Christmas—and I’ll even raise a tall pitcher of high-octane eggnog to the event. Not too much, though. The reindeer insist that I not drive the sleigh while intoxicated….

  • So I don’t really understand why someone would celebrate Christmas just because everyone else does it.

    Why do people from Asia name their kids English names when they move to America? Why do people from the West celebrate the holidays and respect the mores of the east when they move to the east?

  • I can understand Jews and people not wanting to celebrate Christmas, but I don’t think anybody should be prohibited from celebrating Christmas. I think all religions have holidays where the connection to religion is more close and I think others are celebrations where the connection to religion has become more obscure. I don’t think there’s anything that’s a reason to single out Christmas to hold it over other holidays to this ridiculous standard. Even though it’s the memorial of Jesus’ birthday, the celebration itself has become really important and important in itself; if the feelings and morals of Christmas of brotherhood of man and love your neighbor and festivity aren’t what’s really important then what’s the point of celebrating Jesus’ b-day over anyone else’s? If people can relate to and feel those values as part of Christmas at this time then I think that’s more important then how often they think of Jesus during this time.

  • I’m willing to buy Christmas as a secular holiday — but only to a point. As a confirmed Bokononist, I don’t celebrate Christmas — Foma! — but I’m not generally offended if someone wishes me a Merry Christmas. And where I can do so without risk of offense, I will heartily and sincerely wish a Merry Christmas to those who do celebrate it. Religion aside, I know they will spend quality time with families they care about — who can possibly object to that?

    Otherwise, I restrict myself to something like “Have a great holiday!” Because even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, it’s still a day off. And everything is closed, so there’s nowhere to go — a good time to just depressurize. And that’s not a bad thing at all.

    So Merry Christmas to all who observe it as such. And to all others, have a great holiday. Sleep in, sip your coffee more slowly, curl up with a good book and a purring cat on your lap. Enjoy the quiet. Peruse the after-Christmas sale flyers.

    Something for everyone.

  • From this narrow base they discredit the social, cultural, intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic virtues of any and all forms of religious tradition. — BC

    Yes, you really do have some misconceptions about The God Delusion (don’t know about Harris because I haven’t read his book).

    He does not start from the “indisputable” fact that a god is so implausible that it is unlikely. One of the chapters in The God Delusion is called “Why There is Almost Certainly no God,” and in at least one interview he noted this as well — that there is always room for doubt.

    Towards the end of the book, Dawkins very specifically acknowledges the cultural contributions that religion. He included a long list of phrases and such that are biblically derived. He does not “discredit” them, however that’s supposed to work. I don’t think he tried to “discredit” the cultural aspects of it either, except (if I remember correctly) for rightfully bringing up the “don’t impose your beliefs on me” attitude.

    As far as aesthetics go, I imagine you’re referring to things like art and such. He acknowledged those too, but brought up at least one important point: imagine what (particularly in the Renissance) such famous artists would have come up with if they had not effectively restricted to religion.

    On ethics, Dawkins points out a lot of the evil done in the name of religion (almost entirely christianity, which he acknowledged was because that’s what he’s most familiar with). But he then acknowledged that not all christians are like that, and proceeded to take passages from the bible and point out just how “ethical” they are. Thus your attempt to marginalize these as hasty generalizations on the part of Dawkins falls flat.

    And claiming that religion is… intellectual? Dawkins did note this, but you really don’t need a book to realize that the glorification of blind faith and the “this is sacred; you’re not supposed to question it” mentality that pervades religion is as unintellectual as it gets.

    And again, Christmas is religious literally in name only. I’d like to see some decent proof that Dec 25 was actually the day Jesus was born; it certainly wasn’t mentioned in the bible. It’s especially noticeable given the “coincidence” that Christmas is celebrated at a time riddled with holidays since long before Jesus was born.

  • It is demonstrably false that Jesus was born on December 24. Let’s look at the facts: even in Israel, winter is a Big Deal and people in those days didn’t go traveling on donkeys in December unless there was an emergency. Joseph and Mary were responding to a Roman census requirement. Can anyone with any brains support the idea that a bunch of Roman bureaucrats would decide that all the people of the empire had to travel to their home towns in the worst travel season of the year? Hah! Most likely it was in Summer, after Planting, before Harvest, when people could do it easily. That’s when shepherds would be herding their flocks (full of lambs).

    The truth is, the Christians appropriated a Roman secular/semi-religious festival – Saturnalia – which celebrated the Winter Solstice and had become the major holiday in the Empire, as a public relations stunt to promote their dippy religion.

    So it’s entirely appropriate for Christmas to return to its pagan, pre-Christian, secular roots. Hurrah!!

    And now, if you want to celebrate something on December 24 that is actually worth celebrating, allow me to say….

    Merry Newtonmas!!

    The celebration of the birth of a man that can be factually proven from multiple independent sources to have actually happened on December 24.

    Not only that, but it can be factually proven that this man said all the things he said in his life, again from multiple independently-verifiable sources.

    Not only that, but any person, regardless of personal belief, and look at the accomplishments of this man in his life and agree that he completely changed the way the rest of us ever since have viewed the universe and our place in it.

    Not only that, but it can be proven that he made life better for everyone. Who can fault the invention of the “cat door”????

    So Happy Birthday and Merry Newtonmas, Sir Isaac Newton, born this day in 1643.

  • All moses and other seminal religious figures were trying to do was the same thing Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant were trying to do, but with religious tools alone, because they didn’t have as sophisticated philosophical tools (because they didnt have as extensive libraries collecting learning from as long a time). Religious tools are like philosophical tools, but less sophisticated. Take what’s valuable from the religious and discard the rest, take what’s valuable from the philosophical and discard the rest.

  • Not to mention that all those Christmas trees in the fundie households are ancient Germanic pagan symbols, that probably are also symbols of the ancient Goddess religion of Old Europe, since it celebrates the ability of life to exist in the midst of the death of the world (winter) by being ever green.

  • Christians borrowed EVERYTHING–from their hero figure, to their holy days to their myths. Nothing is original to Christianity. And these days there is very little left of the unoriginal original Christianity.

  • A friend points out that not only did Sir Isaac Newton invent the cat door, but he was one of the first to popularize the keeping of cats as pets, i.e., letting the little critters overrun the household with no higher purpose (mousing) than the happiness, ,joy and contentment they bring to all by their existence (said as I notice six of them are asleep here in the office – nothing like the quiet energy of sleeping kitties to pacify everything).

    He was also one of the first “ethical” vegetarians, having decided he didn’t need to exist by murder.

    I ask you, is that a person to emulate, or what????

  • I agree with Beep52

    Christmas is as Christmas does. Celebrate or don’t in the manner that works for you and yours. For those of you celebrating, Merry Christmas!
    For all, here’s hoping 2007 is a better year than the one ending. And, oh yeah, I love the fact that the days are now getting longer…

  • I ask you, is that a person to emulate, or what????
    Comment by Tom Cleaver

    Yeah but Old Clockwords Universe Newton just couldn’t quite come up with Quantum Theory could he? 🙂

    It even took me a while to come around.

  • I lover Christmas but I’ve never thought of it as a religious holiday. I was brought up Unitarian and my family always made a big deal of a traditional Christmas, carols and all, without me feeling the least bit that I was participating inn someone else’s religion.
    Now I’m a Shambala Buddhist, but I still celebrate Christmas. I love the lights, the tree, the decorated presents, the big family dinner—what’s Jesus got to do with it?
    Christmas is only a Christian holiday if a person chooses to think of it that way.

  • An interesting “bit” I heard on the radio re: People waiting until Christmas Eve to by a Pagan human sacrifice substitute. The reporter asked “So who would wait until today to buy a tree? How about a Jewish Muslim couple…”

    And now you are thinking what I am thinking, which is Huh?

    But I think that helps answer your question, sure anyone CAN celebrate any damn holiday they want in any way they please (provided they don’t break the law of frighten the horses). But as David H. says, to assume that everyone celebrates Christmas or SHOULD celebrate Christmas because it is “just another” secular day off from work, is both false and offensive.

    It’s a pity that Dawkins didn’t have the honesty to say, “Look, I like Christmas trees, presents and stuffing myself full of food at least once a year. Leave me alone, I gotta go shopping.”

    tAiO

    p.s. I’ve been flipping through the Bible, trying to find the bit where Jesus says anything about celebrating his birthday (several months early no less) by beating the crap out of other human beings for a parking space all so you can buy a bunch of crap.
    No dice.
    If there were a war on Christmas I’d say the people who celebrate it are the ones doing the most damage.

  • Is it fair game to resuscitate the old chestnuts about the Jewish merchants who do a roaring trade through the runup to the holiday and then go home on Christmas Eve to sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”–?

  • My family’s Buddhist and we celebrate Christmas. If anyone questions me on this, I reply that it can just as easily be called Buddmas since neither Buddha nor Jesus was born on December 25th. So I suppose non-Christians who celebrate are not celebrating Christmas so much as using the day as an excuse to see relatives and give each other gifts.

    For a lot of kids, the day is about Santa Claus, Ruldoph, Frosty the Snowman, etc. Hell, Christmas is celebrated in Japan where most people don’t really understand the whole Jesus thing.

    I can understand why some Christians might find it annoying to have their day taken over by those who don’t believe, but how are they harmed by it? Cultural intertia’s a strong force, so I don’t expect fighting against this would be successful.

    So celebrate the birth of Jesus, Isaac Newton, the winter solstice, or having two weeks off from school. Or don’t celebrate at all. Whatever works for you and why should anyone else care?

  • Christmas wouldn’t be what it is today without Charles Dickens and his story “A Christmas Carol”. Dickens is THE reason why we have a widely celebrated Christmas now in the U.S., instead of another Easter. Jesus may be the reason for the season, but it took Charles Dickens to make it new again for us.

  • “…are we approaching a post-Christian Christmas?” – CB

    Well, since Chirstmas is a post-Pagan Soltisce, why not? As The Astrogeek points out, this is the season all religions celebrate the annual return of the Sun (or at least, the very northern ones do. I don’t know how big a deal it is in Egypt compared to the rise and fall of the Nile). When the Christians were converting Northern Europe, they found a need to steal the holiday away from the Pagans and they chose to do this by moving the feast of the birth of Jesus from April to December.

    America has lost the “meaning of Christmas” a long time ago (I think when Coca Cola company standardized Santa Claus in his red outfit) and I doubt we could ever get it back. If the Roman Catholic Church ever did go to the extreme of dumping the less religious members of the church and we had to form an American Catholic Church here, the first thing I’d suggest is we move the celebration of the birth of Jesus back to April and do our damnest not to let it be secularized (particularly by suggesting that our members not take the day off work).

  • We don’t celebrate “christmas” – we celebrate the solstice. The return of the sun to our dark northern Scandinavian homeland is not a “religious” occasion – it is a scientific, astronomical fact. Believe me, when you’re down to three hours of daylight, you’ll celebrate the turn-around point, too. The tree with its decorations represents our hope in the return of spring (life). The dark depressing days of midwinter call for drinking, feasting, and family gatherings to lighten the mood. It’s a shame that all these completely practical, non-mystical, non-religious practices somehow got hijacked by a desert religion that originated in a place where there is no winter as we know it, and that people get so wound up over what we call it or how we celebrate it.

  • Allen K – no. Christian’s didn’t even celelbrate Christmas until the third century, and then only after a failed effort to eradicate a ‘pagan’ holiday.

    Most Christian theologians will also tell you that Canonized scripture regarding Jesus birth is largely late editions and borrowed mythology (non only the three wise men, but even their gifts).

    There has never really been a ‘war on Christmas’, only a war on solstice celebration with a lot of neo-druid trappings. Only psuedo Christians get worked up because they don’t realize that Easter is the holiday that is central to our faith. Presumably, someone could take on the Easter Bunny and declare a war on Easter, but again, only psuedo Christians need apply. Stoning people in bunny suits and torturing children until they forsake colored eggs are both pretty much no-no’s in the new testament.

    -jjf

  • It’s probably obvious from my previous post that I’m not a Christian. I don’t have anything against it other than a sense of bemusement that my fellow northern Europeans have so thoroughly integrated a foreign middle-eastern credo into their culture. For my part, I choose to honor my true cultural roots and celebrate the return of the sun at the winter solstice. In spring, I will celebrate Easter not as the time of Jesus’ resurrection but as my ancestors did – the return of life to the land. I don’t see why this cultural legacy should be any less valid than Christian “christmas” or Jewish Hannukah, etc. Let’s just live and let live!

  • I’ m an atheist by upbringing; my parents were atheists by choice (mother from Jewish Orthodox roots, father from Roman Catholic ones). When I was a child, we celebrated New Year’s Eve at home — it was “father frost” who dropped the gifts for me under the tree, on Dec 31. But my father’s family celebrated Christmas and it was *magical*, the year I spent Christmas with them, when I was 5… Beginning with the hay under the tablectloth (to honor the animals in the barn, who’d warmed up The Baby), through candles in every window (to lead the weary travellers) and the empty seat at the table (for the travelling stranger. I guess only Joseph was figured in; Mary must have been too busy giving birth to think of feasting ).

    The best part of that evening was when the adults went off to the midnight mass and I disappeared” much to everyone’s consternation when they came back. I’d slipped into the barn to catch the animals speak in human voices at midnight and fell asleep snugged among the cows and the sheep.

    As a result of that Christmas, I was never annoyed by people who do celebrate it, though I do think that the whole thing has lost its charm here in US — the lights at the mall can’t compete with candlelight. As long as people let me keep my superstitions (there’s no god), I’m willing to let them keep theirs, even if it may be inconvenient to have the PO closed.

    A birth of a baby (or sun, or new year) is always a “good thing” — a hopeful thing. Giving shelter to a tired traveller/stranger is a good thing too, as is feeding the hungry. If we can’t do it all year round, it’s better to do it once a year than not at all.

    Besides… Christmas is the time I can “carrot and stick” my son into travelling home, across the continent. And that’s a very good thing indeed 🙂

    very merry to you all

  • I was raised Catholic, but never really cared for that stuff. But I always celebrated Christmas and still do. And I’m totally atheist and that’s how I raise my kids. I never really thought Christmas had much to do with Christianity at all. It’s just a festive time to decorate the place, give gifts, and be happy. Or at least that’s what I do.

    Santa ain’t God. I believe in Santa.

  • The outpouring of comments concerning this issue suggests, among many things, that this day has lasting psychological affects on nearly everyone, if that’s even possible. The Skirmish Over Christmas seems to come down to an existential debate among the True Believers, the True Non-believers, and the Believe What You Will camp. When a devout Catholic utters “Merry Christmas!” to me, what he/she is saying is “Merry Birth-of-the-Savior-of-the-entire-human-race-ad-infinitum!”. As a non-religious person should I then launch into a tirade about the winter solstice/pagan religious festivals/German yule logs/Saturnalia/etcetcetc? Is every Christian holiday an excuse for the atheist to go ballistic and offer stentorian paens to pure reason and logic? The answer to both questions is an obvious “no”. If I respond to the devout Catholic with “Thank you, Merry Christmas.”, it’s not because I’ve suddenly forsaken my strongly-held atheist mindset. I don’t become a fraud every December just because millions of people across the world see this time of year as a significant moment in their personal tautology. No, I respond in kind owing to one of my own secular values: common courtesy. Call it “spirit of the season”, if you prefer. I’m secure in my value system, I don’t need to shove my philosophy down the throats of every religious person I meet during the last two weeks of December. At the very least, it’s classless to do so.

    In my view, the “real meaning of Christmas” is irrelevant. What matters is the current meaning.

  • I agree that Christmas is a syncretism, ie, Christianity appropriated aspects of a pagan holiday (tree, lights, yule log etc.) of an ancient holiday celebrating the winter solstice; we atheists and pagans are just reclaiming what is ours.

    At this time of year we need something to cheer us up, and I won’t let any sanctimonious Kristian take away the pleasure this atheist takes in wishing everybody a

    VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!

  • I think if we did a poll of people who would like to make war on Christmas, we’d find a much higher percentage of fundamentalist Christians than of atheists. I know of one family who disapproves of Christmas trees, as does her entire church, I believe. And another family where each member only gets a single present.

    Far more warlike than atheists like myself, who get entirely into the Commercial….er, Christmas….Spirit.

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