Merry Christmas
Happy New Year
I'm an atheist. I don't think god exists and I don't think that Jesus is the son of god.
But I was raised as a Christian and Christmas was a wonderful time of year.
Long after I stopped believing in God I participated in Christmas. I lived in my hometown amid an extended family. Christmas had a lot of momentum
I worked in camera stores and Christmas was wild and would account for half the years sales.
But once I was away from family Christmas just kind of dropped away.
For a while the celebrations around me seemed pretty hypocritical. But I didn't want to spoil people's good time.
I knew the Christmas story. The humble birth in a manger. The wise men guided by a star who came to pay homage. Still carried the Christian idea of universal love and compassion as a key element of my structure of understanding.
For a long time Christmas was a time when I'd go into a retreat of sorts. I'd stock up of favorite food and spend the time alone. It was easy. The world would sort of shut down between Christmas and New Year. Work would close. Stores closed. But everyone was in a good mood.
Part of the conventional wisdom was that everyone would sort of look at each other wryly and say something like; "Why aren't we this warm and generous all year long?". A good question.
We seem to live in a world full of trouble, from war to famine to disease to outright criminal nastiness. But I say 'seem' on purpose. Our perception of the world is distorted by the nature of our news media. The news is limited to presenting unusual events. There are an infinite number of events happening all the time and the news and our attention spans are quite finite.
Most of the time people are pretty warm and generous - it's kind of a norm that we're so used to that we don't notice. I guess that we couldn't actually maintain the Christmas spirit all year long. If we did then it would be just normal and we'd not notice it.
We live in a secular society and many people prefer to say Happy Holidays or Seasons Greetings so as to include people who are not Christian. I prefer Merry Christmas just because it carries that universal message of warmth and generosity.
Dan Dennett is in favour of teaching religion in public school. His idea is that we should all learn about all the major religions so that we are very familiar with their ideas. I admit that I'm not very familiar with any religion but Christianity. I'd bet that they all have special times like Christmas with their own ritual greetings. It might help reduce the barriers between religions if we all knew what those greetings mean and use them appropriately.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.