Reverie on Christmas

To me, Christmas is a day of mourning.

I mourn the suffering due to the hate promoted by the words of Jesus. Possibly he did not say those words and they were ascribed to him by those who wrote the New Testament.

Matthew 12:30 “He that is not with me is against me;” Those words make an enemy of those who do not follow. I do not wish to follow Jesus, but I do not wish to be the enemy of those who choose to follow him. Those words make those who do not follow him an enemy.

Matthew 10:37 “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

Why should Jesus make the unreasonable demand that family bonds should be less strong than bonds to him? Why set up such a competition?

I mourn the loss of history:

Much of human history is irreparably lost to us. In addition to the lost history by circumstances there is loss by design.

From Grayling’s The History of Philosophy:

“There is a wall standing between us and the world of antiquity: the period of decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the rise to dominance of Christianity. Edward Gibbon connected the two phenomena, blaming the former on the latter. He is in significant part right. Remember that in 313 CE the Emperor Constantine gave Christianity legal status and protection by the Edict of Milan and not long afterwards, in 380 CE, the Emperor Theodosius I decreed by the Edict of Thessalonica that Christianity was to be the official religion of the Empire outlawing others. The change brought rapid results. From the fourth century of the Common Era (CE, formerly cited as AD) onwards a vast amount of the literature and material culture of antiquity was lost, a great deal of it purposefully destroyed. Christian zealots smashed statues and temples, defaced paintings and burned books, in an orgy of effacement of previous culture that lasted for several centuries. It has been estimated that as much as 90 per cent of the literature of antiquity perished in the onslaught. The Christians took the fallen stones of temples to build their churches, and over-wrote the manuscripts of the philosophers and poets with their scripture texts. It is hard to comprehend, still less to forgive, the immense loss of literature, philosophy, history and general culture this represented. Moreover, at the time Christianity existed in a number of mutually hostile and competing versions, and the effort - eventually successful - to achieve a degree of consensus on a version required treating the others as heresies and aberrations requiring suppression, including violent suppression.”

There are other examples of the deliberate destruction of the records of the past. Christianity is not the only culprit.

I mourn the loss of thinkers and scientists. The murder of Hypatia, a woman who was the greatest mathematician, astronomer of her time by a Christian mob in 415AD, the burning at the stake of Servetus, a polymath who discovered pulmonary circulation and doubted the Trinity in 1553 AD, the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, a polymath who speculated that there are other solar systems and other worlds besides ours in 1600 and the murder of Vanini in 1619 are examples of the fate of such thinkers. Vanini had a great mind. He saw the universe as governed by natural laws and humans and apes as having a common ancestry. His end was especially brutal. In November 1618, he was arrested and, after a prolonged trial, was condemned to have his tongue cut out, to be strangled at the stake and to have his body burned to ashes. The sentence was executed on 9 February 1619.

I mourn the suffering and anguish of Jews. The Nazis didn’t invent Jew hatred. Centuries of Christian persecution preceded Nazism. Nazism exploited a feeling already endemic in the German psyche. The Holocaust was a culmination of Christian ideology.

I mourn the destruction of indigenous people and cultures by Christian imperialists and missionaries.

I mourn the loss of the ancient philosophies of Stoicism, Epicureanism and Cynicism to be replaced by the superstition of Christianity.

I mourn the suffering and death in the Wars of the Reformation where Christians killed Christians.

I mourn the suffering and horrible deaths caused by the Inquisition.

A number of years ago I was in Lubeck, Germany during the Christmas season. In Lubeck are twin towers with a passageway from one to the other near the top. At the bottom of one of the towers is a torture museum exhibiting thumbscrews, rack, iron maiden and other instruments. As I gazed in horror and fascination the strains of the carol, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” drifted in the window. Thinking of the Inquisition it seemed a very Christian moment to me.

I regard Christmas as a day of mourning. I am fascinated by Christianity and have read a bit of its history. One of the books I have read is a A History of Christianity by MacCulloch.

Diarmaid Ninian John MacCulloch (born 31 October 1951) is an English historian and academic, specialising in ecclesiastical history and the history of Christianity. Since 1995, he has been a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford; he was formerly the senior tutor. Since 1997, he has been Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford. Though ordained a deacon in the Church of England, he declined ordination to the priesthood because of the church’s attitude to homosexuality. In 2009 he encapsulated the evolution of his religious beliefs: “I was brought up in the presence of the Bible, and I remember with affection what it was like to hold a dogmatic position on the statements of Christian belief. I would now describe myself as a candid friend of Christianity”. MacCulloch sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

Two quotes from his book:

“I seek to give weight in these narratives to the tangled and often tragic story of the relations between Christianity and its mother-monotheism, Judaism, as well as with its mother-monotheistic younger cousin, Islam. For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes.”

“I still appreciate the seriousness which a religious mentality brings to the mystery and misery of human existence, and I appreciate the solemnity of religious liturgy as a way of confronting these problems. I live with the puzzle of wondering how something so apparently crazy can be so captivating to millions of other members of my species.”

Merry Christmas is an oxymoron.