Atheists claim to love Christmas too. That’s the gist of this apology for atheism, perhaps a reaction to everyone calling them mean jerks, because, you know, they’re mean jerks.
My response: No, you don’t love Christmas. Not if you’re an atheist. What you love, apparently, is the faux Christmas, some modernist “happy holidays” form of Christmas that removes Christ and the Mass from it. It’s a day that celebrates “human togetherness” absent the divine love that makes human togetherness possible. Human togetherness without divine love has other names: war, fighting, brutality.
In other words, what makes Christmas the wonderful, beautiful season we all love is precisely because it is the celebration of the divine love that sent a Savior among us as one of us, like us in all things except sin.
Without that it’s just a stressful time of year when you have to decorate your house, go to interminable parties, endure family gatherings, and brave jam-packed malls while going into debt buying stuff for other people. It’s Christ that makes that all special.
Or let Jody say it better I can…
There is nothing wrong with creating a lovely atmosphere conducive to the meaning of celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The counterpoint to his birth in a humble stable, with only the outcast shepherds as the first guests, is the visit of the Magi with their expensive gifts. But the Magi do more than just offer their costly gifts, “falling down, they worshipped him.” They humble themselves as sophistication worhips utter Humility.
Thus, the essence of our celebration is the Christmas mass shared by the whole (community) parish. Our family celebrations—to replicate the Holy Family—consist of first, the manger and then the sacred meal shared by all family members and guests (including in Polish custom those unexpected guests, the uninvited who approximnate Christ). When we give gifts to one another, we are only imitating the gift of the Father of His Son to us, and the gift of life that He bestows on each of us.
We share together in a joyous and perhaps somewhat elaborately beautiful way the utter perfection to be found in our redemption by our God who could stoop to humble Himself as a waif within a dark and often violent world.
Yet, with this in mind, it is indeed sad that the beauty of Christmas is marred by a covetous craze where the meaning gets lost in an empty glut of selling and buying as if the baubles, even though costly, could ever replace the totality of God giving Himself to us. There is hardly a lonelier place than the shopping malls that accompany Advent. And hardly more empty eyes than those of compulsively driven shoppers. It’s as if we are worshipping the the temple, rather than He who dwells within it.
Since Atheism is indeed a religion it should always be capitalized. To do otherwise would be to deny them their due. And I do want them to get their due.