What is Christmas to Christians, Jews, Muslims, and infidels?

Whatever one’s religion, clearly the birth of Jesus two thousand years ago has effected Western morality in a way that no other birth save Moses and Muhammad has. He taught the highest Judaism based ethics and the world has yet to catch up.

Frankly it doesn’t matter if December 25 was once celebrated as the birth of god-the invincible sun, or of some late Roman astral mysticism which adopted the day, or of some Celtic cult whose actual beliefs have been lost in the mists of history because they were irrelevant after the coming of Jesus.

Nor does it matter if one accepts the convoluted tenants of the council of Nicaea about Jesus. He himself would answer a theological question if asked but rarely seems to have initiated such discussion. His focus was on loving others, even non Jews, not on ritual or specific interpretations of the Torah.

Unfortunately haters have used him to justify their hatred. There have always been ultra conservative Christian haters, the same as there are haters in Islam who likewise have always been ultra conservative. Nor is Israel free of such. Jewish haters just mask their hatred for anyone who is not of their persuasion with passages of the holy books. None of these are practicing Christian or Muslim or Jewish love.

Jesus taught a gospel of love. Christians have not always followed it. But Christ should not be blamed for the horrors of the Spanish inquisition which like the Sadducees of Jesus’ time was focused on ritual and theological conformity. Nor can he be blamed for the excesses of Elizabethan anti Catholicism which tortured and murdered papists. Nor for the first crusaders who wanted to free the holy land from the Arabs who had seized this once Christian land and were killing Christian pilgrims who dared to visit the site of their God and savior’s presence upon earth. What Jews and Muslims can rightly complain about is the atrocities committed by the crusaders in Christ’s name for he would never have blessed these. If they love God and people of the book they should relegate these atrocities to the realm of semi barbaric feudalism and not support the haters among them who to no advantage prefer to carry their hate till the end of time.

The ethics of Jesus have been at least a goal for the western world no matter how much they have been violated. Even those who profess no faith have adopted them. Witness the US Declaration of independence with Christian enlightenment values enshrined by a group of Deists.

Therefore I suggest that the winter carnival of Santa and Frosty and the holiday making at ski lodges belongs to us all, but Christmas day to Christians and to those who honor Jesus and his legacy. It is not a Christian season. It is a holiday season, a chance to enjoy life before the miserable months of January and February. Christmas day should be respected though, even by those who do not accept the Christ in a religious sense, as a day commemorating perhaps the most, important event in history, one which elevated the status of women in Europe, put an end to Roman cruelty, and in time to slavery in the Western world.

Not all of us who call ourselves Christian in some sense accept what the grouchy old men of Nicaea decided. They lived three hundred years after Jesus. Save for the evangelicals, for one day of the year we suspend disbelief about angelic choirs in the sky. But we do regard the life and death of Jesus as all important to our spiritual life. Paul and all but one of the apostles, along with many others, died because they had seen something which had to have been very important and it was the Jew Paul who spread ethical monotheism throughout the pagan world, surely something more important than the wars of other heroes in our history books.