Most of the book simply reveals that many people who don’t do God love to do Christmas. Claire Rayner writes extensively on the many pagan traditions wrapped up in a modern Christmas. Josie Long offers an array of games and crafts to keep the most petulant Scrooge entertained.
But above all, Atheist’s Guide shows a new side to the rationalist movement. For a start, it gives room even to those who are technically agnostic, like me. I long for an agnostic bus campaign, pondering the unknowability of buses, before deciding that the 38 might get us home whether it exists or not. Second, it shows that atheists are actually for something ”” fun, kindness, pleasure, charity and scientific wonder. The late Douglas Adams summarised the position perfectly when he asked: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” This is our gardening manual.
Greetings.
“Atheist Christmas” is, in itself, nothing new. When I was a child in the 1950s and ’60s, our working- to lower-middle class family celebrated a full-on Old Country Christmas with all the trimmings … with not a word about Christ, and we children unbaptized, unchurched, and unaware that anything was out of the ordinary about that.*
But neither did it ever occur to anyone to use the word “atheist” about any of it. I suspect my parents would have been shocked at the suggestion — intellectually inconsistent as that reaction may have been.
I suppose what’s new is the “Hey, look at me! I’m an [i]atheist[/i]! And I’m [i]doing [b]Christmas[/b][/i]! Wow!”
regards,
JPB
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* I say this with neither pride nor regret; it’s just the way things were at our house.
Atheists “celebrating” Christmas makes as much sense as vegans demanding veggie burgers from Burger King. Good grief, they are a tiresome, tiresome lot.
Well I don’t know about atheists, but it has been remarkable to see how immigrant families have taken on Christmas. We have had Hindus and others decorating their houses, putting up Christmas trees and giving presents and their children joining in the celebrations of their schoolfriends. They love it as we do.
And … in an unchurched and increasingly secular society, it is a way of getting the message across and a residual education process going on which may till the ground for the seeds of evangelism to be planted sometime and for the Holy Spirit to do his work.
That I celebrate.
If Christ is not in Christmas, then Christmas isn’t merry, and holly’s just a berry…
we need to change the pronunciation of it to Christ[mas] then people might get a better sense of what the day is about. Err, whom do I see about doing that?
There is always the possibility that atheist celebration of Christmas may result in conversion. I will never forget the day when, looking down from the choir loft in a Unitarian “church,” seeing the children processing in a “Christmas pageant,” I wondered suddenly, “What if it’s all true?” That moment led me on the journey to full fellowship with Jesus. You never know!
#6, I’ve asked many times the same question of several people, including close relatives – what if it is true? By believing, what have you lost? By not believing, what have you potentially lost? Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Perhaps I’m biased, but it always seemed most logical on the belief side to me.
Not to contribute to thread drift, but [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal’s_Wager]Pascal’s Wager[/url] is a little more complicated than that, I think.
[b]Billy[/b] asks:
[quote]By believing, what have you lost?[/quote]
First, it is really Pascal’s [i]Investment[/i], since I don’t know of any non-trivial belief system that says you can receive the benefits of belief without any [i]actions[/i] whatsoever.
Once we add that, the answer to “what have you got to lose?” can be “Anything and everything, depending on your individual situation.” Is that not the level of commitment called for by Christ in the NT? Of course, if [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Discipleship]cheap grace[/url] is good enough, there’s less of a problem.
[quote]By not believing, what have you potentially lost?[/quote]
“Heaven” is the answer looked for, of course, but you need to be careful about who God is and what He wants of you. This can be difficult; no matter [i]what[/i] you believe, someone somewhere thinks you are going to Hell. How to be sure you’re believing the right thing? Saying that “doing the best you can” is enough can go in some directions that I don’t think most blog readers here would favor.
To try to stay somewhat on topic, I think that’s the reason so many people adopt Christmas as a generic civil Winter Solstice Festival … once one has to actually choose one of the several competing Christian belief systems and take it seriously (especially in the absence of any family tradition to fall back on), there’s a lot more to it than the simple decision matrix of Pascal’s Wager.
Or maybe that’s just me. 🙂
regards,
JPB