«Every year – with a week to go to Christmas – a low, familiar bleat is heard from the pulpits and vestries: Christmas has become crudely commercialised. Money, money, money has trumped Messiah, Messiah, Messiah.
(...)
The slow, steady commercialisation of Christmas over the past two centuries has been an unequivocally positive stride of progress. Far better to worship Mammon – and our friends, and family – than to waste our time worshipping a supernatural being for whom there is absolutely no evidence and a Holy Book littered with repellent ideas. At the end of 2006, a year in which the atheist fight-back against resurgent religion finally began, we should celebrate a nakedly materialist Christmas with glee, not guilt.
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The word ‘materialism’ has been hijacked by the religious as a stick to beat atheists with. While we are staring at the stars, they claim, you are obsessed with the squalid status symbols of life on earth. But if you return to the original understanding of materialism – articulated by the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who lived just before Christ – it is an essential moment in the development of reason. It is simply the claim that all that exists is physical matter. Everything, including your thoughts, is the result of this physical matter combining, separating or rearranging in various ways. These movements have nothing to do with spirits, ghosts or Gods, Lucretius said. They are governed by physical laws. You, me, this newspaper, everything you will ever see – it is all just matter.
(...)
Why should we allow the adherents of this book – even those who choose to ignore its many monstrously immoral passages – to seize our greatest annual festival, one that far predates the birth of Christ? There were winter festivals with trees and gifts on these islands long before a non-virgin gave birth in a Bethlehem stable, and there will be one long after the Judaeo-Christian God has joined Zeus, Baal and Odin in the cemetery for forgotten deities.
This year there has been an attempt by the right-wing press to import into Britain the hilarious Fox News hysteria that claims "the left is waging war on Christmas", as if we were wannabe Grinches tearing down tinsel. That’s not true – but we should be trying to de-Christianize the festival, turning it into a celebration of our existing friends and relatives, rather than a fiction. There’s no need to change the name to ‘Winterval’ – just encourage people to carry on as they are, shunning the churches and turning Brent Cross, the Arndale Centre and (most importantly) the arms of their loved ones into their substitutes.
Of course the Archbishops will resist this, but they speak for a tiny, irrelevant fringe - just 7 percent of Brits regularly attend religious services. This group has become increasingly hysterical this year, claiming that they are being persecuted. The Catholic commentator Cristina Odone, for example, has claimed secularists are "the new fascists" and "the new thought police." But in reality, the religious are given extraordinary and undemocratic privileges. Their representatives are given seats in the House of Lords. Their ideas are protected from insult by law and ring-fenced from ridicule in the media. They are given a vast network of state-funded centres to indoctrinate children, even though more than 70 percent of us oppose these schools. They are allowed to commit repulsive acts of animal cruelty in the creation of halal and kosher meat. They are legally allowed to discriminate against gay men and lesbians. And so on, and on.
(...)
The attempt to restore religion to the heart of a fun pagan festival is another attempt by this tiny religious fringe to battle against their slow eclipse across Western Europe. The commercialisation and secularisation of Christmas is a sign that are failing and flailing.
(...)
Embrace your littleness, embrace the people you love – and have a very merry, very materialist Christmas.»
(Johann Hari.)
(...)
The slow, steady commercialisation of Christmas over the past two centuries has been an unequivocally positive stride of progress. Far better to worship Mammon – and our friends, and family – than to waste our time worshipping a supernatural being for whom there is absolutely no evidence and a Holy Book littered with repellent ideas. At the end of 2006, a year in which the atheist fight-back against resurgent religion finally began, we should celebrate a nakedly materialist Christmas with glee, not guilt.
###
The word ‘materialism’ has been hijacked by the religious as a stick to beat atheists with. While we are staring at the stars, they claim, you are obsessed with the squalid status symbols of life on earth. But if you return to the original understanding of materialism – articulated by the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who lived just before Christ – it is an essential moment in the development of reason. It is simply the claim that all that exists is physical matter. Everything, including your thoughts, is the result of this physical matter combining, separating or rearranging in various ways. These movements have nothing to do with spirits, ghosts or Gods, Lucretius said. They are governed by physical laws. You, me, this newspaper, everything you will ever see – it is all just matter.
(...)
Why should we allow the adherents of this book – even those who choose to ignore its many monstrously immoral passages – to seize our greatest annual festival, one that far predates the birth of Christ? There were winter festivals with trees and gifts on these islands long before a non-virgin gave birth in a Bethlehem stable, and there will be one long after the Judaeo-Christian God has joined Zeus, Baal and Odin in the cemetery for forgotten deities.
This year there has been an attempt by the right-wing press to import into Britain the hilarious Fox News hysteria that claims "the left is waging war on Christmas", as if we were wannabe Grinches tearing down tinsel. That’s not true – but we should be trying to de-Christianize the festival, turning it into a celebration of our existing friends and relatives, rather than a fiction. There’s no need to change the name to ‘Winterval’ – just encourage people to carry on as they are, shunning the churches and turning Brent Cross, the Arndale Centre and (most importantly) the arms of their loved ones into their substitutes.
Of course the Archbishops will resist this, but they speak for a tiny, irrelevant fringe - just 7 percent of Brits regularly attend religious services. This group has become increasingly hysterical this year, claiming that they are being persecuted. The Catholic commentator Cristina Odone, for example, has claimed secularists are "the new fascists" and "the new thought police." But in reality, the religious are given extraordinary and undemocratic privileges. Their representatives are given seats in the House of Lords. Their ideas are protected from insult by law and ring-fenced from ridicule in the media. They are given a vast network of state-funded centres to indoctrinate children, even though more than 70 percent of us oppose these schools. They are allowed to commit repulsive acts of animal cruelty in the creation of halal and kosher meat. They are legally allowed to discriminate against gay men and lesbians. And so on, and on.
(...)
The attempt to restore religion to the heart of a fun pagan festival is another attempt by this tiny religious fringe to battle against their slow eclipse across Western Europe. The commercialisation and secularisation of Christmas is a sign that are failing and flailing.
(...)
Embrace your littleness, embrace the people you love – and have a very merry, very materialist Christmas.»
(Johann Hari.)
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