Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.
Celebrating Love and Light: 10 Holiday Tips for the Post-Religious
By Valerie Tarico
Is the holiday season more glitter than glow for you lately? For a humanist who seeks to live a life centered in reason and compassion, the holiday time can be surprisingly challenging. Old traditions may not fit anymore, but what does? We see ourselves as an integral part of nature, and the beauties of the winter season surround us, but how can you bring the season into your home in a way that feels rich and satisfying? We humanists find meaning in relationships, but reunions can be fraught with peril. If an old Christian friend or family member uses Christmas cards or gatherings as an opportunity to evangelize, you may even find yourself feeling downright crabby. How can you shake it off?
Here are ten tips to help you get the scrooge out of your humanist holiday season:
1. Remind yourself that our celebrations from December 21 through January 1 are not Christian in origin. All over the northern hemisphere, people have celebrated this time as one of birth and new life. Solstice is the reason for the season, and December 25th was the day of solstice under the old Roman calendar. The return of light, the budding of new life, the promise of fresh starts—these were particularly precious to agrarian people who entrusted themselves one year at a time to the cycle of the seasons, but they are precious to us all.
2. Discover the magical, mystical origins of the Christmas story. If you love mythology in any form, from the epic of Gilgamesh to the epic of Frodo Baggins, the Christmas narratives are rich with threads of hero quest that have been woven and rewoven and can be traced across time and culture. Why was the virgin birth added late to the Jesus story? Why were stories of dying and rising gods so common in the ancient Near East? What can these ancient stories tell us about who we are as human beings? Antiquities scholars, both Christian and secular, can set you on your own journey of discovery.
3. Claim what fits. In weddings, the saying “old, new, borrowed, blue” reminds us that mixing and matching are what ritual and celebration are made of. Every culture and religion borrows from those that came before. (Syncretism, they call it.) So does every person. Pick what you cherish from your tradition or others and do your own mixing. One wonderful thing about moving beyond dogma is the quest for meaning is yours. You and only you know which old traditions are still meaningful.
4. Don’t be afraid to embrace explicitly Christian elements. If you’ve been wounded by Christianity or feel like our world is being wounded, it is easy to be bitter or reactive and to pass that reactance on to any children who look up to you. A better approach is to treat Christianity just like you would any other mythic or cultural tradition. All of them reflect the struggle of our ancestors to determine what is good and what is real and how to live in community with each other. All contain a mixture of wisdom and foolishness and downright immorality. Take what seems timeless and wise and move on.
5. Get creative. Draw on your inner artist. The best art takes old elements and assembles them in a way that is unique to the artist. Create your own rituals. What is your life about? What do you want to celebrate and with whom? What might the decorations look like? Which smells and tastes do you savor? What music does resonate? Do what feels genuine, and then persist. Developing a solid sense of ritual and tradition takes time and repetition.
6. Find common ground with visiting relatives. All relationships (teacher-student, work colleague, friend, partner, daughter, nephew) require that we come together around things we have in common: shared interests, respect for each other’s good qualities, overlapping values, the appreciation of a good meal or a football game. Your family may not share your skepticism, curiosity, or desire for personal growth. If not, don’t go there, and don’t let them draw the conversations into your areas of disagreement. Take deep breaths, exercise self control, and change topics. Save deep, painful conversations for another time. Trust yourself. Schedule coffee with sympathetic friends. It may be sad, but it is ok for you to grow emotionally and spiritually even if people you love don’t come along.
7. Be a little wicked if you like. Religious people use the holidays for drawing in new believers or old believers who have fallen by the wayside. Sometime their evangelism comes from the thoughtless assumption that you share their point of view, and sometimes it is intentional. It’s part of our cultural dynamic, so feel free to do the same. Send solstice cards. Invite religious friends to your celebrations. Give a receptive friend the gift of growth: if someone is wobbling their way out of Christianity, give them a copy of my book, Trusting Doubt. For a friend who may be ready to move from born again “beliefism” to a more thoughtful form of Christian faith, give Bruce Bawer’s Stealing Jesus. For someone who would like to see the Bible through the eyes of an unflinchingly honest Christian antiquities scholar, get Thom Stark’s The Human Faces of God.
8. Balance your gift giving. Stand on principle—some of the time. Face it, certain kinds of gifts don’t mean much, but not giving them does. Your integrity doesn’t stand or fall based on whether you give the token “Christmas” gifts to your boss, co-workers or neighbors. Go to Starbucks and buy a dozen gift cards, or if time costs you less than money right now, bake those cookies. Tell people you wish them well—because you do—and be done with it.
9. Pay attention to your deeper values. Your resources are finite, so how do you want to use them? What are you trying to say to other people with your gifts—about them, about you, about your relationship, about the things that make life rich and full and that you want to share with them? If you are tired of the consumer rat race, opt out. Give some Kiva credit or a goat through the Heifer Project, or adopt a sea turtle or whatever. Then wrap the gift certificate around a really good bar of chocolate.
10. Immerse yourself in the real gifts of the season—love, light, joy, generosity, kindness, gratitude, wonder and shared hope. In the end, what else is there?
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and former director of the Children’s Behavior and Learning Clinic in Bellevue, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt, a book about her personal encounter with religious fundamentalism. Her website is www.valerietarico.com.
Virginia Holiday Battle Includes Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
A number of tongue-in-cheek nativity displays on a Virginia county courthouse lawn has divided the tight-knit community Leesburg right before the holidays and created an unusual scene.
Beside a Christmas tree and creche sits a large banner with a nativity scene in which baby Jesus has been replaced by a plate of spaghetti with googly eyes. A crowd that includes pirates and gnomes surrounds Jesus. At the bottom its message reads "Touched by an Angelhair." The scene is the work of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monsters.
Near the courthouse fence is another display whose sign reads "Greetings From Your Friendly Local Atheists." It's message is about celebrating the Constitution and honoring the separation of church and state.
Elsewhere on the lawn, a skeleton in a Santa suit hangs on a cross.
This has all become part of a battle that has many outraged.
"People are just horrified by this. It's just created a lot of division, a lot of angst and a lot of people are upset," Kenneth Reid, Loudoun County supervisor-elect for the Leesburg district, told ABCNews.com.
Reid has been vehemently fighting the atheist groups that are behind the decorations and says the displays are destroying people's holiday spirit. Reid is Jewish and says he is very open to other faiths. But he believes the Leesburg atheists are forcing their beliefs on others.
"Nobody is out there preaching like these guys. They're out there in a blatant attempt to try to stamp out religion and ruin people's Christmas," Reid said. "The atheist groups over the past two years have used it as an opportunity to try to ban everything. It's no longer sufficient to be an atheist, they have to go out there and proactively try to deny and make sure other people don't believe in God."
When Christians were allowed to display a Christmas tree and creche on the courthouse lawn, atheist groups objected, saying the display violated the separation of church and state.
A skeleton wearing a Santa costume on a cross is on display at the Loudoun County Courthouse. (Photo courtesy: Ken Reid)
Reid's predecessors realized that the only way to allow the Christian decorations was to open up the lawn to all faiths, including the atheists. And so began the battle on the lawn.
The atheist groups deny Reid's accusations.
"The whole thing is a separation of church and state issue. We've been accused of trying to destroy Christmas, and that could not be further from the truth," Rick Wingrove, the Virginia state director for American Atheists, told ABCNews.com. "There's no war on Christmas. If there were a war on Christmas, I would have gotten a memo."
The Loudoun County board of supervisors proposed a ban on all decorations, aside from the Christmas tree, but could not get enough votes. So, the decorations will stay up.
"I think it's fair, and even if it's unfair, it's protected," Wingrove said. "Provocative is still protected."
Rick Wingrove took this photo in front of a display on the Loudoun County Virginia Court House lawn in Leesburg, Va. (Courtesy: Rick Wingrove)
THE
TROUBLE
WITH
CHRISTMAS
BY
TOM
FLYNN
A BOOK REVIEW by Ron Herman
Mr. Flynn provides an extensive scholarly history of the Christmas holiday in this book with footnotes, which may be more information than most people these days care to consider. It took me a while to finish The Trouble with Christmas, because it gave me too much to think about, and I needed time to process it all. Strong childhood ties to that holiday, you know, and other emotions involved even as an adult. Christmas in my old family was as much about snow, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como as Midnight Mass.
However, by the time I finished the book, I realized that this is exactly the book we should all read and talk about with our friends and families. Christmas is one of the hinge-pins of Christianity, along with the creation in Genesis and the resurrection on Easter, and clarifying its true history may be one of the most important messages we can deliver to our wider community. The following is a quote from a helpful summary in Flynn’s book:
I have good news and bad news. The bad news first: Christmas has to change. Irreclaimably rooted in the religious and cultural homogeneity of Anglo Victorian culture, it is far too limited to be the principal, universal holiday of a multicultural society much longer. Now the good news: Christmas can change. Our vague feeling that it has been with us forever is part of the holiday’s artifice; the Victorians built in false nostalgia from the start. Contemporary Christmas is less than 150 years old. It was concocted through processes we understand well. It has not passed through all that many hands. The principal inventors were five Dead White Anglophone Males and a Queen, the DWAMQs: Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Clement C. Moore, Thomas Nast, Francis Church, and the indefatigable Queen Victoria. A few others have put their mark upon the holiday: Haddon Sundblom refined the image of Santa for those unforgettable Coca-Cola ads. Robert May gave us Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, whether we wanted him or not. “Dr. Seuss” perfected Scrooge’s potential for villainy in the figure of the Grinch. As Philip Roth reminds us in Operation Shylock, Irving Berlin revenged world Jewry upon Christendom by composing “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas,” converting the two most sacred days on the Christian calendar into, respectively, a fashion show and a holiday about snow. Finally, we should not forget whoever it was that forgot to renew the copyright on It’s a Wonderful Life [which means that local TV stations can run this supernatural cult flick continuously at no charge to them].
Flynn lists five reasons to “Just Say No” to Christmas:
(1) Christmas is not the birthday of Jesus, the alleged Christ or savior. (Birth records were seldom kept until recent times.) (2) Pre-Christian Christmas traditions are just as bogus as the Christian contributions. The Solstice, for example, is a celebration of how powerless humans are under the elements of nature (just as we are supposed to be powerless against the irrational God of the Bible). (3) Contemporary Christmas traditions (carols, shopping, the legal holiday) are bogus, too. (4) Infidels who keep Christmas (or an analogue of it) promote a myth of consensus in American culture that serves the fundamentalist agenda. (5) Growing up different is hard, but growing up with hypocrisy is harder (so doing it for the sake of the children is no excuse).
Flynn emphasizes that he is not advocating that we infidels rise up and take away Christians’ favorite holiday, just that they should keep it to themselves.
I would also like to suggest that celebrating the birthdays of our friends and family members - “human birthdays,” rather than the birthdays of gods - has much more personal significance and helps distribute the commercial success of gift-giving more evenly throughout the year.
Tom Flynn has long been a leader of the Council for Secular Humanism (along with Prometheus publisher Paul Kurtz), and he is an excellent writer. He is now the Executive Director and editor of Free Inquiry magazine. Prometheus no longer carries The Trouble with Christmas (although Amazon may have copies), but the author recently released a private edition, which can be obtained from
Tom Flynn 175 North Street, Suite B-1 Buffalo NY 14201-1503
Finally, for my fellow scientists - happy Newton’s birthday (December 25th)!
THE REASON RALLY
March 24, 2012
10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
The Reason Rally is an event sponsored by many of the country’s largest and most influential secular organizations. It will be free to attend and will take place in Washington, D.C. on March 24th at the National Mall. There will be music, comedy, speakers, and so much more. We hope you can join us! Please poke around this site for more information, stay tuned for frequent updates, and let us know if you have any questions! Speakers include: Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Taslima Nasrin, James Randi, Bad Religion...and others! Plus, you will be surrounded by non-theist love!
