I, as an atheist, have never had and do not now have anything against Christmas. To each his or her own. But the nonsensicality inherent in the right’s cries of “the war against Christmas!” as well as said war’s nonexistence, put me in something other than a Yuletide mood and prompt me to hit the computer keyboard. And for reasons that go far beyond celebrating this particular holiday. Last time I checked, store windows were decorated with boughs of holly and blinking lights, their tinsel-strewn aisles thronging with folks eager to express affection for loved ones in the sole way many know: buying them stuff. Gigantic Christmas trees stand illuminated for all to see at the White House and Rockefeller Center and in state capitals across the country. Mangers on lawns pay chintzy homage to the laughable legend of a virgin birth. Partiers will soon be boozing up, with eggnog only one of many libations available. Christmas, thus, is proceeding apace in America, with all its customary tidings of hysterical commercialism and inebriated jolliness. The rare dissenters are dismissed as Grinches. So, a few billboards do not a war on Christmas make. In any case, polls show that eight out of 10 Americans consider themselves Christian. If marauding mobs of nonbelievers were torching nativity mangers and impaling shopping-mall Santas, or even besieging lines of holiday gift seekers and attempting to Christmas-shame them, we could definitely say there’s a war on Christmas. And we would all know about it, and fast, and not just from Fox News. The resulting publicity would not favor anyone, least of all atheists. So what, then, is O’Reilly actually saying? His allegations of a “war on Christmas” are really about seething anger over America’s ever more diverse confessional makeup. The Christian master should be able to do as he pleases on his manor. Being occasionally expected to wish others Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas is an intolerable affront to centuries of faith-based privilege. And that a tiny (but thankfully growing) minority – atheists – dare to so much as put up billboards manifesting something other than respect for this privilege … Well, that’s an insult not to be tolerated. There must be something wrong with them, something suspect. It was not for nothing that back in 1987, presidential candidate George H. W. Bush wondered aloud if atheists should be considered citizens or patriots. After all, he said, “This is one nation under God.” (Of course, it is most assuredly not, according to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The words “One nation under God” were added to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s, as a way to draw a distinction, for the schoolchildren reciting it, between the United States and the Soviet Union. The word “Christian” appears exactly zero times in the U.S. founding documents.) But back to Christmas. No matter what O’Reilly says, as December drags on, nonbelievers enervated by all the obligatory comfort and joy might indeed consider taking up figurative arms against the holiday. They may wish to patiently explain to the votaries of Christ that there is no evidence that their putative savior was born on the 25th; the Bible mentions no such date. Early Christians did not recognize it as special, nor did they observe Christmas. In his 2012 bestseller, “Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives,” none other than Pope Benedict XVI disputes the date, and raises the strong possibility that the monk charged with creating the first Christian calendar blundered, positing Jesus’ birth as occurring several years before what we accept as year zero, A.D. And he was probably not born in winter. Based on astronomical calculations, scholars have more reliably assigned the Nativity to the summer. An Australian astronomer posits June 17 as the fatidic date. So, Santa may well want to ditch his bulky robes for a Speedo, and lather up with bug repellent. There is no evidence that Dec. 25 should be anything more than just another day. But then, it’s not surprising that Jesus’ birthday should be so hard to pinpoint. Some 2,000 years after the alleged event, religious scholars, despite their best efforts, have still found no proof that Jesus even existed. Although it might seem reasonable to suppose such a one as he walked the earth in the Middle East, historical records kept by the Romans (then in charge of Judea and Samaria) and contemporary chroniclers make no mention of him. The Gospels are not historical records and don’t count; they were composed decades afterward. It has even been credibly proposed that Paul and his cohorts created the savior with strokes of their quills by mythologizing history. Footnote: If you’d still like to believe in a prophet whose existence has been established beyond the shadow of a doubt, try Muhammad.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 22:40:02 +0000
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