"The Reason for the Season"

**True, Dan. Yet, I try to respect people’s religious beliefs insofar as they keep them to themselves, especially at this time of year. And for the most part, most of them do. But silence on the subject shouldn’t be interpreted as acceptance of the premise. The other day I was cautioned to remember "the reason for the season" after I 'd joked about all the frenzied commercialism rampant since Thanksgiving. It's not a direct denigration of religious beliefs to simply point out some of the underlying counter-facts that cause those beliefs to crumble. Several good books have been written, some of them recently, showing that a person named “Jesus” (or one of the many forms of that name) cannot be reliably verified to have existed. More likely the “person” referred to is an agglomeration of characters, real and mythical, that served to symbolize a specific religious movement. This doesn’t diminish, for me, the value of certain “Christian” ideals, even when they’e been imported from other traditions. The “Beatitudes,” the “Golden Rule,” and the like, are plainly good rules for human living. But they don’t require the existence of a particular historical figure to make them credible. They are good ideas unto themselves that do not depend on any kind of deity for their validity. Many rituals and other habitual activities that give comfort have grown up around these myths, and one can attempt to graciously back away from puncturing the bubble of comfort they provide.

Even good religionists participate vigorously in the commercial enterprise known as “Christmas,” which started as an economic incentive many years ago. Gracing it with religious gravity only makes it ludicrous to those who know what is really going on. Yet, even severely religious people eagerly go out and buy so much stuff at this time of year as to make it an essential practice in order to sustain the economy (hence, “Black Friday” and the like).

In short, the “reason for the season” is money. Not the birth of a mythical character, even one identified with good human attitudes.

That doesn't mean that sincere, loving human beings can't hijack the commercial juggernaught of Christmas to extend good wishes, cheer and benevolence to their fellow human beings. And I hereby do.

What friends they have in Jesuses

** As I'm about to read Reza Aslan's latest book, "Zealot," I go in armed with Harry T. Cook's latest essay in which he says:

Aslan may be right about a Jesus having been a zealous revolutionary. Crossan is almost surely right about a Jesus being, as he put it, a "Mediterranean Jewish peasant" who may have been at the same time an "itinerant sage." The liberation theology people may be right in saying that a Jesus was a socialist at heart. And I may be right in saying that the Jesus may be a composite of all of them.

I normally would not have looked into Aslan's book but for a positive review by BW, my atheist friend,  and the rotten treatment he got on Fox "news" by a twit who couldn't get off the subject of a Muslim writing a book about Jesus. His detailed explanation on MSNBC that it was his job as a scholar to write about it didn't faze her but gave him more credibility in my eyes as someone who was not entering into a merely partisan argument.

I don't doubt that someone (probably Paul of Tarsus) cobbled together a mishmash of myths and claims about several guys to form an actual religion out of one guy. It served to construct an empire that continues to this day. Again, the story (true or not) has power.

The New Atheists are, for the most part, illustrating that one needn't believe in fantasies to live a good and useful life. this is a hopeful sign that humanity is evolving out of the need for infantile parental figures to give meaning to this accident of human life.