I am all in favour of Christmas, although personally I loathe it, and I strongly support Judeo-Christian civilisation, although personally I am an atheist.
I believe Western civilisation is the best there has ever been – for liberty, decency, justice, democracy, equality, enterprise, science and welfare – and that Judeo-Christianity lies at its heart, and therefore I see Christmas as a celebration of the West and applaud it loudly – even if I’d like to crawl into a cave and wait until it is all over.
The West has two founding cities: Athens and Jerusalem. (The West had many beginnings in the East.) With different approaches, they prepared the ground for the astounding rise of Europe two thousand years later.
Athens, from about the 6th Century BC, gave us democracy, the sovereignty of the individual, critical thought, the scientific method (relying on observation and experiment rather than revelation), mathematics, science and engineering, great literature and philosophy, enduring myths and fables and, as important as any of these, formal comedy – using legitimised satire to make fun of rulers and ruled alike.
Jerusalem, at about the same time, had a different but equally influential history. This time it was the conquered people, the Jews, who changed the world. Returning to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon in about 538 BC, Jewish scholars and holy men began to write the most important book of all time, the Bible. Collecting real histories, legends and folklore, and drawing from other religions, it was both a history of the Jews and an instruction in their religion. It took centuries to finalise, but even in its first forms it had an immediate and profound effect. Its fundamental principle was of a single god. The Jews had fallen because they had not been faithful to God. In the Bible were stories of immense psychological power, which have captivated men and women around the world for the last two and a half thousand years, and still do. In the 19th Century, when ‘negro’ slaves in the United States sang songs about freedom, they sang not about their African homelands but about release from bondage in Egypt: “Swing low sweet chariot”, “Go down Moses”.
The Bible, which could have stultified Jewish intellect (because it spoke of revealed truth rather than empirical truth) did the opposite. It expanded it mightily. I think this was because it encouraged literacy and scholarship, and because it gave high status to the scribes. Because of this, and the fact that throughout Europe Jews were only allowed to enter professions – like banking – which required high intelligence, Jews today have the world’s highest IQs and do disproportionately well in universities and in every field they enter.
In about 30 AD, a Jewish rabbi, Jesus Christ, inspired a new religion, an offshoot of Judaism. Being an atheist, I don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus or indeed any divinity. It seems from the patchy record that Jesus was a historical person. It also seems that the Christian religion was founded to a large extent by Paul, who first wrote about Jesus about twenty years after his death. None of this particularly interests me. What does interest me is the moral beauty of the Sermon on the Mount and so much of Jesus’s teaching, as told in the gospels.
I believe there is nothing but the natural world and it came about by accident. But I am sure – because the scientific evidence is overwhelming – that religious belief is innate in all people. We are born with it. It is a product of our evolutionary behaviour (which I’d be happy to explain). I believe the great religions have done rather well in controlling this belief. When it is controlled instead by ideologies such as Communism and Nazism, the results have been catastrophic. For all its wars and persecutions, Christianity has done far more good than harm. In the West, Christianity led to the scientific rise of Europe. This was because the Church inherited the organisational networks of the Roman Empire throughout Europe, and in them established monasteries and places of learning, where theology moved on to science. Christianity funded science.
All the world had slavery until the 19th Century. Then Christians in Europe banned it. African slave dealers were horrified: “How dare you British Imperialists, with your guns and warships, end our traditional African slave business, part of our culture!” But the Christians did so.
On the 25th we celebrate the birth of Jesus. Nobody knows when He was born. The early Christians simply usurped the pagan feast for the day when it was sure Mid-Winter was over. So what? Perhaps we should worry more that Christmas has been sullied by the other great triumph of the West, capitalism. Christmas is too commercial! But, again, so what?
I’m all in favour of Church Services on the 25th and Santa Claus, jingle bells, Christmas cakes, cribs, and Jewish-owned supermarkets giving us Christmas Day special offers.
Not “Happy Holidays”. Not even “Happy Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas!”
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the IRR.
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