The meaning of Christmas

One of the things that bothers me sometimes during the holidays is this notion that Christmas is somehow inherently religious. Specifically, that some people think nonreligious people should not celebrate during Christmas or exchange gifts or anything like that. At a glance, their reasoning makes sense on the surface, but it falls apart when you look into it.

First of all, the holiday of Christmas existed, albeit not by that name, long before the time of Jesus. It was originally a celebration of the winter solstice, that is until the Christians hijacked it for their own purposes. So, Christmas is not necessarily a religious holiday. It would be fair to say that nonreligious people shouldn’t celebrate the birth of Jesus and so on (which they probably don’t anyway), but it would be wrong to say that nonreligious people have no business celebrating the holiday in general.

Second, we all know that the tradition of giving gifts is attributed to Saint Nicholas, and while he was clearly a religious figure, that fact has nothing to do with his generosity and habit of secretly giving people gifts. Christianity and religion in general didn’t make him a good person. In fact, religion doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on the goodness of a person one way or the other. There are plenty of good, nonreligious people, and plenty of bad, religious people. Saint Nicholas probably would have still been a good and generous person whether or not he was a saint or even involved in religion at all, so there is no reason why nonreligious people can’t exchange gifts during the holidays just like religious people do.

The only argument against any of this that I can think of that even makes any sense at all is that nobody would have ever heard about old St. Nick without him being a religious leader meaning that nobody would have ever started giving gifts. That’s possible, but it can’t actually be proven either way. I would simply ask if that even matters. There are now and have been in the past so many wonderful people who cared for the poor and gave things to people that any one of them could easily replace him as the formally-recognized founder of this tradition. It doesn’t really matter who started it. What matters is that it’s nice to celebrate with people you care about regardless of the reason, and that it’s nice to be a thoughtful, generous person and share yourself and things with other people, and that’s it.

3 things: worship, jihad, and compassion

1. I was thinking… Even if God was here on Earth and was proven without a doubt to exist, why does that mean he/she/it is worth worshipping? Perhaps some level of respect would be in order, but worship? How does worshipping something make your life better? Why would you worship anyone anyway? If you are worshipping someone, someone is taking advantage of you. Does God take advantage of people? If he’s at all good, he wouldn’t. If he does, he’s a prick, and thus not worth worshipping. It’s not like he needs people for anything anyway if he is all powerful and can do anything he wants.

Maybe you might worship God (or anyone else, for that matter) if he said he was going to hurt or kill you if you didn’t, or if he said he would give you some special reward if you did (both of which he does, according to the Bible), but anyone who has a decent set of morals should be conflicted about this. They know violence is wrong and temptation is trickery, thus it would be immoral to honor anyone who employed these tactics to lure people towards worshipping him. The only reason anyone would worship God is that they fear him, literally. But that brings us back to the beginning… If you do something for someone only because you fear what they would do to you if you didn’t, you are clearly being taken advantage of. If God was truly great and wise, he would not burden people with the requirement that they worship him. He would let them live more freely and happily, and only care about the quality of life they lived.

2. I was also thinking… What would be the reaction if someone blew up a building or killed a bunch of people in the name of God instead of Allah? (Disregarding the fact that they are both based on the same thing, of course, because people who are too into their own religions don’t or can’t see the similarities their’s shares with others’.) Would there be a flank of Christians who praised the action? Even if they condemned it, would there still be some who believe that killing in the name of God is somehow inherently less evil or less wrong than killing in the name of Allah?

And, if you, regardless of your own religious stance, would condemn a violent act that was motivated by a person’s religion which took a person’s right to life like this, then why would you support religion’s assault on any of the other rights and liberties that humankind has or should have?

3. A newly released poll conducted by Rutgers measures support of gay marriage by religious belief among citizens of New Jersey. The results:

Catholics: 48% support gay marriage, 40% oppose it, 12% are undecided
Protestants: 34% support, 55% oppose, 11% undecided
Jews: 56% support, 40% oppose, 4% undecided
Nonreligious: 85% support, 10% oppose, 5% undecided

This data tells me three things. One, overall support for gay marriage is still basically evenly split. Two, all of the Catholics and Jews who are the most vocal and active opponents of gay marriage in New Jersey are on the fringe and do not necessarily represent the majority of their respective religions. And three, nonreligious people are clearly the most supportive of gay marriage.

It’s really wonderful when people care about other people more than some abstract ideology.