We were in Assisi for a few days and we went to the living manger scene (I’m writing a poem about this, so stay tuned), which is a kind of reenactment of the night Jesus was (supposedly) born in a stall near Bethlehem. At least that’s what happened in the play. I’d have to go and check my NT for the details, assuming they are the same in all four gospels. At the end of the imaginative scenery – complete with faux-synagoge and dress-up rabbi, a rare sight in Umbria – there is the family portrait, sitting patiently bathed in firelight from the burning oildrums (all of this took place out in the cold, a realistic touch). Yosef, Miriam, and little plastic baby Jesus. In this manger scene, most curiously, Jesus had a sister. She looked to be about six or seven, and she was real flesh and blood and DNA. And a hell of a lot more convincing than baby Yehoshua! What she was doing there, assuming the (dubious) virginity of Miriam, is anyone’s guess. But it occurred to me that this is the reason they sell those little baby dolls in religious shops, along with shepherd’s gear and staffs aplenty. It’s a costume party every Christmas.
Afterthought: it occurs to me that perhaps they use a plastic doll for Jesus to accentuate that he was not born of dirty sexual intercourse between two humans. Apparently they prefer a supernatural kind of rape, which is considered holy. But still, plastic is so cheesy don’t you think?
Santa stopped visiting my house the minute I confronted him, demanding he reveal himself to me. It turned out he was a middle aged Jewish woman with a florid imagination.
Every winter I promise myself I’m going to learn to enjoy Christmas. And every winter I fail. By the time the lights are up and the oversized public fir tree hung with tinsel and trumpeting angels, my enthusiasm has unraveled like a proverbial ball of yarn. Yet I am unable to understand just why I find Christmas-time so appalling. I must have been dropped on my head as a child.
Or maybe its the “smile or die” philosophy lurking behind each trochaic “Merry Christ-mas!” Those of us who aren’t natural enthusiasts of the holiday have a hard time grasping what is so merry about the birth of someone else’s baby so long ago in a land so far away. It’s like celebrating Luke Skywalker’s bar mitzvah. And since the world has decidedly not become a haven of love and justice since the birth of this thaumaturgic child, I’ll briefly note that things actually worsened in the centuries following extreme evangelization.
But, in the spirit of yuletide, I’ll leave my historical grudges aside and try and concentrate on modern ones. Why is it so terrible to dislike Christmas? If you so much as mumble bah humbug under your breath people look at you as if you’d just hacked a puppy to kebab and washed it down with a tall glass of blood.
In centuries past, having nothing nice to say about Christ (or his birthday) had been an alarum bell for the Inquisition. Power-wielding Christians used to employ converted Jews to write treatises on the fabled talmudic hatred of Jesus as a pretense for further persecution. Modern Jews, having made peace (sic) with Christmas by bartering for public Chanukah lightings, have shifted the burden to atheists. Now it’s our turn to be reviled for downgrading Christmas to “the holiday season” and neutralizing the messianic promise of late December to accomodate less ostentatious holidays.
I was recently uplifted by the title of a new book, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, until I realized it was all about how to enjoy the holiday. Damn, I say, isn’t there anyone out there – even a Richard Dawkins – that has anything negative to say about Christmas? It’s a fine thing to be a public atheist. Just don’t dare be a public Scrooge.
But what’s wrong with spreading a little light through the gloom of the darkest month of the year? And even if Jesus wasn’t born on Christmas Day, what’s the harm in pretending? No harm, I say. But why should those of us who don’t wish to go along with the charade have it shoved in our faces like a Jell-o pudding pie for a full month every year?
I love giving gifts, and I love receiving them. But I hate shopping for them, and I hate returning them. Beyond that, I rue the uselessness of most gift-giving. Another freshly published book bears a promising subtitle, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays. Has some slick economist finally made the case that we are wasting our money, and not just our time, on this most frivolous of all holidays? Well, hallelujah.
“Where are you going to spend the holidays this year?” I am asked this same question annually – sometimes by the same people – and I always answer that I don’t really celebrate Christmas. “Really” is my concession to the Christmas Inquisition, leaving my sentiments just vague enough not to risk offending the ears of little children lest I be publicly chastised. What I mean is: I grudgingly accept that there is no escape from this holiday, unless I apply for citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Unwilling to compromise my wife’s dignity that far, I remain in the secularized West and pray for further secularization.
Let me state it plainly: nobody likes this holiday. Everybody feels obliged to say they love Christmas, but deep down I’m convinced great numbers of folks (what a Christmasy noun) despise it. And they’re right. They are being manipulated for a full 1/12 of their lives.
Consider: There are no parking spaces in December. Those who work in the commercial sector are forced into virtual slave labor so that those who have three weeks vacation can spend them in malls spoiling their children. Dysfunctional families are thrown into each other’s company, further enforcing their mutual disgust. Almost everyone goes away feeling drained, cheapened, broke, overstuffed and woozy. And then there’s the music. What can be more pathetic than street musicians pounding out “Let it Snow” on the hurdy-gurdy?
Half the world has almost no food or water. The other half spends roughly $1253.61 per family on Christmas gifts (this is a rough estimate based on esoteric logarithms, but not dissimilar from the calculations of actual experts). So where is the divine love, I say? Why does the miracle worker let half his creatures die out in the most miserable circumstances imaginable, while the other half lives high and gin-soaked in a senseless spending frenzy come December? Unless, of course, there is no miracle worker – and no miracle.
And without the miracle of Christmas, what’s left? A dull holiday poisoned by infighting. Perhaps suicides – contrary to urban myth – don’t increase during the holiday season, but neither do they decrease. Some people grow happy in that automatic way, some grow grinchy in the same way. Some admire artful manger scenes, some suppress a chuckle at the site of them.
Me, I make for the nearest exit, pursued by a pious mob.
Mexico City has (very) recently legalized gay marriage. Some Mexicans are (not quite understandably) pissed off about this, and feel their Christmas will be ruined by the equal rights of others. Mighty Christian of them. Long live “family values.”
If this is what the “great religions” teach – and it most definitely is an integral part of any othodox instruction – should we be so willing to let it slide? Are great religions so great if they continue to uphold bigoted positions modern civil society has begun to reject?
Many people in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America remain opposed to gay marriage, and the dominant Roman Catholic Church has announced its opposition.
“They have given Mexicans the most bitter Christmas,” said Armando Martinez, the president of the College of Catholic Attorneys. “They are permitting adoption (by gay couples) and in one stroke of the pen have erased the term ‘mother’ and ‘father.'”
I’m surprised this isn’t one of the most watched videos on YouTube. There really is no explanation other than the fact that there is no toilet humor. There is some blood, but only on the operating table. There are no wild animals battling it out on the savannah. It’s just a succession of edited “moments”: licking an ice cream cone, kicking a soccer ball, waking up, batting an eyelash. There is a little music. The whole thing is very tastfully done. Try not to be moved watching it. It’s utterly amazing.
I have precious little time to do any writing these days, much less blogging. Anyway, you should read the Restored New Testament because you probably haven’t even read the unrestored one, and because (yes) it’s a major work of literature. Should you think the NT stale and boring, this is a new version just for you.
Here, from the same publisher and officially published a week apart [The Book of Genesis Illustrated By R. Crumb Norton], are two of the most important books of 2009. Willis Barnstone’s “Restored New Testament” is the Samson attempt of one great scholar and translator to knock down ancient pillars of error, injustice and persecution. In that endeavor alone, it may be the most important book of the year.
If you’re against gay marriage becoming legal, perhaps you’d better take a deep breath before watching the following speech before the New York Senate.
This year Adam Kirsch, 33, has cemented his position as this century’s first pre-eminent Jewish man of letters. A widely admired poet and essayist, his mind is exercised both by Jewish particularity and the broader world of culture. Both are evident in, for example, his biography of Benjamin Disraeli or when reminding readers of the New York Times that Ayn Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum. He wrote the weekly column “The Reader” on Jewish topics for Nextbook and is regular writer for its reincarnation: Tablet Magazine. When the New York Sun, for which he was the book critic, ceased publishing in September 2008, his writing appeared more frequently in what earlier had been occasional venues: the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Slate and The New Republic — where he had been the assistant literary editor while still in his 20s and is now a senior editor.
Tradition is good, because it is tradition. Logical, no?
Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Wednesday rejected a recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights opposing the display of the crucifix in school classrooms in officially secular Italy saying it is important to maintain traditions.
Thanks to the Skepticblog for pointing this out: claim for claim, Information Is Beautiful debunks the 2012ers. Not that it really matters; the nutjobs won’t stop dreaming of apocalypse just because some nerds actually took the time to hold their claims up to the light.
I’m not trying to convert anyone. What, I wonder, would that be? There is no skeptic’s religion. Being skeptical is a stance, a way of thinking critically about the world, a method of engaging with information. After all, you can’t believe everything. It is not a religion. Skeptics may be Jews, Christians, atheists or agnostics. Skeptics have no commandments, no sacred texts, no sectarian law. They don’t discriminate on the basis of sex, ethnicity or sexual preference. Most importantly, they have no idols – so even monotheists can feel comfortable as skeptics. After all, skeptics aren’t pagans (rural folk, as it were) venerating little carved figurines by an open fire.
Anyone can be a skeptic, and all of us are already skeptics in a certain sense. For example, it has been pointed out that as far as Greek mythology goes most of us are skeptics. Not many people alive today believe in the gods of Olympus or the Delphic oracle. Ditto a whole slew of ancient gods and divinities which we group together as myths, or rather stuff other peple believed in long ago. It goes without saying that, for an atheist, יהוה is a mythical god. So is Jesus, for that matter. This is not to disparage them, however. Many skeptics are devoted readers of the bible. They just don’t believe in it.
Though even skeptics recognize that many people do indeed beleive in Jesus, יהוה, and many other gods (“all of us worship the same god” is a politically expedient myth ; we don’t) and goddesses, angels, devils and heavenly intermediaries of all types: the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, Gabriel, Metatron etc… the list is long and tedious. Jews are necessarily skeptical of Christian claims, as are Christians of Muslim claims. I mean, either Jesus will return or he won’t. Either moshiah will come or he won’t. So far, so bad. They can’t all be right.
A skeptic makes no such claims about the nature of the universe, but limits himself (or herself) to interpreting facts and making educated guesses. A skeptic has no trouble saying, “I don’t know (right now).” The religious mind, on the other hand, often seeks utter certainty on one hand and fathomless mystery on the other. Needless to say, this is incompatible with a skeptical worldview.
Marc Di Martino 