Date of birth

I used to get confused about the date of Christmas. I was born on the 24th, and I thought Christmas was on the 24th, too. Sure, yeah, it sounds like I had a Messiah complex. But no, really, I was just confused. I had it figured out by the time I was seven or eight.

There’s a great deal of convincing scholarship that shows that the date of Christmas was chosen to compete with Mithraic and other non-Christian feasts. Of course, there’s a great deal of convincing scholarship that shows that the Bible is a hodge-podge of stories by various authors, cobbled together over the centuries, with very little material to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was more than a good guy who preached non-violence and was eventually executed by crucifixion.

I envy the believers, sometimes. You know, the guys and gals who believe the entire Christian dogma. Their faith is endearing. That said, I wish they’d live more of Jesus’s philosophies, especially the parts about universal compassion, fairness, and non-violence. I don’t see much compassion or fairness in the hatred of gays, or much support for non-violence when it comes to gun-totin’, death-penalty-lovin’ Bible-thumpers. In fact, one of the few right-headed encyclical policies of the Catholic Church, my church of origin, is its consistent opposition to the death penalty.

Well, as my old friend Bill Henderson used to say, “Sometimes even a blind squirrel finds a nut.”