Merry Christmas

My best wishes to everyone for a Merry Christmas!

Things are winding down quickly, as today I've seen my email and voicemail and telephone messages trickle to a near dead stop. Everyone is in the holiday mode, some taking off early for their Christmas celebration and others spending time in office parties or just goofing off as the week winds down.

Naturally, the whole thing stems from the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ something over 2,000 years ago. Today we have a large and vocal group of atheists who may like having the time off, but rail against the remembrance of the birth of this founder of the Christian faith.

Unfortunately, today we also have a large and growing number of church leaders who seem to be joining the atheists in equivocating or denying the fundamental stories so important to that faith in the divine who became human to teach us humanity and thus save us from darkness.

Ours is a faith of simplicity and poetry on the surface, but to those who choose to study in greater detail, an amazing continuity can be found with the ancient monotheistic God worshipped by Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.

Back to the simple: Jesus was miraculously conceived by the virgin Mary or he was not. He performed hundreds of miracles during his roughly three and a half decades on earth, or he did not. He gave a number of inspirational sermons to thousands of people, mostly on the themes of loving and caring for each other, or he did not. Finally, and most importantly, he was viciously tortured and killed in a most barbaric practice known as crucifixion, was buried in a garden tomb near Jerusalem, and physically returned to life three days later. After which he was seen and preached to hundreds of people until he was whisked away on a cloud. Or none of that happened.

Nobody's ever observed a virgin birth. Nobody's ever seen a person that was dead and buried for 3 days return to life (unless you count the biblical story of Lazarus in addition to Jesus, of course). Most have never seen a miraculous healing without the use of science, whether sight or hearing or deformity or leprosy. Therefore, many simply refuse to believe any of that actually happened.

Sure, it is very hard to believe all that based simply on someone else's word. But Christians don't believe all this because of some sort of brainwashing or coercion. Most believe because of their own life experiences, in which they found that faith in the story of Jesus Christ with the study and commitment to following his example leads to inner peace and contentment and the belief it will all lead someday to a joyful reunification with Christ and the loved ones who passed on before. Many also believe because of the example of Christ's apostles and members of the early Church. If His story wasn't true, would it not seem logical that at least one of his disciples would have renounced it, rather than suffer abuse, imprisonment, exile, torture, and death? The disciple called John was the only surviving member of Christ's inner circle who was not killed for spreading the story to everyone who would listen.

If the story of Christ is not true, then all those disciples died for nothing. All the Christians that have been jailed and killed for nothing more than their faith over the years, even today in the Middle East, died for nothing. All the priests and religious who voluntarily chose to abandon normal lives for poverty and chastity to help the faith wasted them. Anyone who shows charity and kindness to others and tries to share their faith is wasting their time. Because, if the story of Christ is not true, then there is no reason for people to love each other, be compassionate for the needs of others, or help each other. Because if there is no God, and Jesus was just an ordinary man, then our lives are meaningless. Therefore, if our lives are meaningless, then we should get everything we can while we live so we can at least enjoy ourselves.

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly where most people are these days.

To those who want to outlaw Christmas and stop people from this annual celebration of the faith, I'd like to offer my humble request: Go ahead and regard us as a bunch of ignorant superstitious fools if you like, but do we not have just as much right to believe as we choose as you have to believe in your own gods? (because as far as I can tell, you're not really an atheist, but worship things like animals and the environment, and ideas like Darwinian evolution and Socialism and the Big Bang.)

Once again, Merry Christmas to All! May your Christmas be everything you hope it will be.