An Atheist Christmas

Over the years, Christmas has become nothing more than a commercialized holiday worshiping the 'art' of shopping and spending money till you're in debt. Sure there are still commercials that say spread good cheer and be happy, but a lot of those are to mainly sell the products. I mean, I for sure would love that cute puppy along with a coca-cola bottle, but that's probably not going to happen.

What I'm really going to be addressing is the lack of true Christmas meaning of Jesus Christ's birth. I know that most Christians understand what the season is for but even they can get caught up with the wrong intentions. Jesus competes with His own celebration. Around the world people celebrate this holiday without a second glance or thought about what it means. You don't even have to be Christian to be celebrating the birth of Christ, at least not intentionally. 

                                 

A blog on The Huffington Post is written about the true meaning of Christmas, but by an atheist view on it. His ideas are interesting in the sense that he has a completely non-Christian stance on the true meaning and that he argues his points with some true facts and maybe even the blunt truth. 

He starts by pointing out that Christians believe that the whole month of December belongs to them. I can see that as true, but I personally haven't felt that it belongs only to us. Jesus was born to save us and everyone else from their sins and He died fulfilling the purpose of true love. But he also says that atheists, humanists, freethinkers, etc. are coming together and forming traditions of their own. "Across the nation we are starting to celebrate things that matter to us." He claims that if some people want to celebrate the Pastafarian holiday or the humanist holiday of  "Human Light" they can go ahead and do that. But he was bold to say that some of these started out as jokes but "Atheists tend to have a good sense of humor." And they're nothing more than jokes! How could you take a religion seriously if it started out merely as a joke? It's only to mock the religions of others and make theirs seem like a good choice to follow. He makes a statement to say that "Christians and Jews aren't the only ones with a right to celebrate during the winter season."

We also know that Jesus wasn't born in December, we just 'celebrate' at that time. He states that the holiday was taken from pagan tradition and symbols. Well duh. Nowhere in the biblical passage of Christ's birth does it say, "and then, Mary and Joseph put up an evergreen tree that smells good along with decorating the stable they were in." Those are just the modern Americanized Christmas symbols that are for fun, unless you do things for other intentions. Usually the star on top of the tree represents the star that the wise men followed and gifts under the tree are the gifts that they gave baby Jesus. Heck, even Charlie Brown got it right. And of course the image of Santa, that's mainly for the amusement of kids. 

I looked up why Christians celebrate the birth of Christ in December and I got a very reasonable answer. Christmas was first recorded on December 25th 336 and years later Pope Julius 1 declared that date as the celebration of His birth. There are many theories as to when Jesus was born like the celebration of the day when Mary was told she would have a very special baby, or perhaps that the day Jesus died correlated with the day of His birth. 

So what the atheist article was stating is that Jesus is not the reason for the season. Based on his thoughts I could see that what he was really looking into was the current celebration of Christmas and what people do now. And I have to agree with him, Christmas is not celebrated as it should be, but when does that make it reasonable to start making up some religion to celebrate in rebellion against this season. Christmas is not Jesus, nor do people who twist the meaning of Christ define Him. We celebrate Christ because it's how we honor Him, He is our gift. If not, then why did Christians even start to celebrate Christmas in the first place?