Atheist and Rebel

It’s probably not wise to read Christopher Hitchens on religion during the holiday season, as doing so can create intense cognitive dissonance. I mention this from harsh experience. While Andy Williams croons in the background about this most wonderful time of the year (always a debatable assertion no matter how many times it’s repeated), Hitchens -- in his polemic God is Not Great -- shreds cherished religious traditions and pokes huge holes in dogma doggedly held by millions of believers. An equal opportunity atheist, Hitchens skewers Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, and for good measure tap dances all over Joseph Smith and his Mormon tribe. While the lights on our tree twinkle, and Bing Crosby replaces Andy Williams, I find myself thinking about Almighty God, though I focus less on his (her?) supposed generosity and benevolence than I do on his darker utterances. For one supposedly all-powerful and all-knowing, he wasn’t very kind to women, children or skeptics. The eternal question enters my consciousness: if God created the universe and everything in it, who created God? Turn that question around any way you want, as many times as you want, and the logical answer is that we did, “we” being mankind.

If one is interested in an honest Christmas tune try The Rebel Jesus by Jackson Browne:

And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus

No surprise that Hitchens and Christmas are not a jolly mix. Mindless piety and crass commercialism collide head on, like two tanker trucks laden with jet fuel. Even though I take the silly season with a boulder-sized grain of salt, it’s next to impossible to ignore the general anxiety as Christmas Day approaches. People in the mall are grim and determined, focused on their shopping tasks, underpaid workers in the stores are sick and tired of dealing with demanding people, children are antsy, UPS drivers are harried, and nearly everyone who must attend one dreads the annual office party. There’s endless chatter on the radio and TV about happy families coming together in peace and harmony, and of course the obligatory stories about the holiday homecomings of brave American military men and women. There’s no harm in any of this, except when it reaches the saturation point, as it inevitably must, and then December 26th cannot arrive fast enough.

After the 18th the man who runs the Christmas tree lot in the County Bowl parking lot knows the jig is up, and that he will sell no more trees for $10 a foot. Optimistic to the bitter end, the man keeps the lot open morning till night the final week before Christmas, but his big red and white banner no longer entices passersby, and his giant inflatable Santa leans to one side in weary defeat.

For convenience sake we buy a tree from the man every year, no earlier than the 10th, no later than the 15th. As I write this, my wife and daughter are taking ornaments from the tree and packing them away in storage boxes. See you next year. Tomorrow I will saw the tree in two and place the pieces by the curb. We’ll pick pine needles from the rug for the next week or so.

And so it goes. I certainly have little to complain about, living here on the Platinum Coast, where the temperature on Christmas Day was in the mid-70’s, with blue sky overhead and a clear view to the Channel Islands.

Although I began with Christopher Hitchens I’ll give Jackson Browne the last word:

Now pardon me if I have seemed
To take the tone of judgment
For I’ve no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In a life of hardship and earthly toil
There’s a need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus