Keeping The Faith

ALTHOUGH I AM NOT RELIGIOUS in any traditional sense, the Christmas season gives me a great deal of happiness, perhaps largely because the happiness of Christmas has been instilled in me since I was in diapers. Christmas is in fact among my favorite holidays, and I pretty much like them all. It is also my favorite manifestation of the Christian religion, notwithstanding the well known facts concerning the holiday's convoluted history. Moving Christ's birthday from early April to late December can be viewed in retrospect as good strategy for a faith desperate and eager to expand into the wilderness. It always surprises people to learn hos insignificant Christmas was during American colonial times, and how much later, well into the nineteenth century, it began becoming popular. In 1843 Charles Dickens published his immortal book "A Christmas Carol", which caused a sudden spike in Christmas interest, which remains to this day. In short, Christmas has undergone a long, circuitous, and complicated history of change, with much pagan influence, over the centuries. Somehow, amid the profusion of commercialized hedonistic debauchery Christmas in modern America has become, it seems to bring the best in us. Being religious, it turns out, does not necessarily bring out the best in us. Being religious does not make a person more virtuous. Yes, there are tangible, provable ways of measuring this, they have been employed extensively and exhaustively by objective, meticulous scientific research, and such studies have yielded some surprising results. Non religious people, it turns out, are no more lacking in basic human decency and goodness and morality than the devout. Even more surprising, studies have found that indeed atheists as a whole tend to be more generous, more compassionate, and less judgmental that people extremely devoted to their religion, especially Christians. There exists a fair amount of literature so support and explain the research and conclusions. It appears that the benefits of religion include community cohesion, a sense of purpose, comfort, inspiration, and a sense of belonging, but not an improved, morally superior creature. Sociologists have also noted that all the benefits derived from religious devotion can be gotten from other sources, sources without dogma, proscriptions, or social hierarchies. But so what? With or without its vast assortment of religions, humanity, we can all surely agree, still has a long way to go before claiming to have hoisted itself out of and above the barbaric mess we have given ourselves thus far. The only question is how to do it. Meanwhile, we may as well rejoice in the delightful Christmas season, no matter how or why it seems to work.