The Serpent's Wisdom

For a couple of weeks now, i've been thinking about the Parable of the Vineyard Workers. This is one of the more bizarre parables, and that's saying quite a lot as many of them are quite odd.

( the parable )

Those who say the primary or sole focus of Jesus' message was "saving souls" say this teaches us about getting into heaven. If you are born again while young and do good your whole life, you'll get the same reward as someone who converts on their deathbed after a life of wickedness and iniquity. This is because God is "merciful." Don't forget that the twisted assumption behind this is that God doesn't care about how good we might or might not be, just whether or not we have "accepted Jesus" (whatever that actually means).

Let us say that the above interpretation is correct. Even if so, this parable is hardly a ringing endorsement of the doctrine, because in that case at least a third of the parable is given to considering that maybe it's not fair for someone to "toil" all their lives (as if living an ethical life is necessarily drudgery) and get the same heavenly reward as someone who comes along at the last minute and converts right before they die.

Essentially, we are supposed to accept that god tells do-gooders, "Suckers! Gotcha!"

But all of this strikes me as an excuse to overlook the parable for what it is on its face: an examination of the way wage labor works. What we see here is that the person who pays the wage has the opportunity to set the terms, to give favor or not as they see fit; and that those who are forced to work for wages have very little input into the way they are paid -- creating opportunities for exploitation. The landowner is hiding behind "the tyranny of the contract" to exploit the day laborers who worked for him all day, under the guise of generosity towards the later laborers.

Labor for wage is a good thing to question, because in an empire, jobs which relate directly to the business of empire tend to earn the highest wages. Look at our present-day American empire and see how many positions of prestige and wealth are ethically bankrupt and involve directly increasing American power or profiting from disparity with developing nations. Note, too, that many of the most important jobs in human society -- bearing and caring for children, teaching, maintaining house, day-to-day caretaking of sick relatives -- pay almost no wages at all. Wage labor is a system designed to push people into working for the perpetuation of empire.

If the hypothesis i've offered in the past is correct, and Jesus wanted his followers to turn on, tune in, and drop out of the monstrous imperial machine, then the second view of the parable makes a lot of sense. Jesus would have wanted his followers to examine the true nature of wage labor.

John Dominic Crossan demonstrated in his complex anthropological investigation of Galilee at the time of Jesus (detailed in The Birth of Christianity) that a considerable upheaval was going on in which many peasants were driven from their land so that rich Roman developers could build large villas and other pet projects. Displaced peasants have a much lowered standard of living and are forced to take up crafting or day labor -- which Crossan pointed out added a dimension of significance to the fact of Jesus' career as a carpenter: he was a displaced peasant.

Property ownership is the key to power in a human society. Any class of unpropertied renters are kept in a state of perpetual debt to them. This is particularly hard to swallow when many of the unpropertied renters once owned their own land.

This is why throughout human history, mass displacement of peasants -- usually from families which had owned their land for generations -- is one of the primary causes of armed rebellion.

Christianity, which may have had its roots as a pacifist and egalitarian response to lower-class unrest, was over the generations misappropriated by the Roman upper-class and became a primarily "spiritual" movement, with all vestiges of its former radicalism painted over and spliced out. It became dominated by the heirarchical edifice of the church and became eventually a gear in the imperial machine. The "spiritual" interpretation of this parable, as an instruction on god's endorsement of the moral unfairness of deathbed conversions leading to eternal reward in heaven, is revealed as not simply being nonsense, but a deliberate burial of radicalism beneath a memetic morass.

In the last week there has been a storm in the mass media about controversy over some comments Pope Benedict made about Islam.

You can read a translated text of the lecture at the heart of the controversy here.

Reading this text, it is quite immediately obvious that the mass media -- surprise, surprise! -- is mis-portraying the essence of the controversy. Muslims are not just 'overly sensitive' and protesting the Pope's obscure quotation of a medieval emperor -- though certainly that quotation doesn't help.

This entire lecture is a diatribe about the superiority of Catholic "reason" over the explicit irrationality of Islam and the godlessness of secularism. And this came from the Pope.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry.

The violent actions of some Muslim protesters -- possibly including the assassination of a nun in Somalia (the perps gave no explicit motive) -- doesn't make it any easier for Muslim scholars to rebut Benedict's comments. (Nor, for that matter, does reality.)

But it would be nice to see the Pope demonstrate in what universe the Catholic Church has adhered to this lofty idea of Catholicism as a non-violent marriage of faith and reason. Not this universe, to be sure.

Catholics have been saying this about themselves since Thomas Aquinas. I've yet to see how it really works. Instead, what i see is an abundance of irrationality which is defended very eloquently.

Eloquence is not reason.

One more time: eloquence is not reason.

Reason demands full openness of discourse, inside and outside the organization. The Catholic Church does not have this. There is no recourse for dissenters or even, in some cases, for innovators; they are censured, cajoled by superiors to 'humbly reconsider' or to 'respect tradition,' forcibly silenced, denied participation in sacraments, defrocked, excommunicated. In previous eras, they were also tortured or executed.

Coersion of dissidents is defended with eloquent expositions, which are then described as "reason" because they are moderate and intellectual in tone.

If 'Truth' will truly prevail, then there is no reason to fear any line of inquiry. So why does the Church suppress any critique of doctrine? This is not a marriage of reason and faith. What kind of faith turns away from the truly difficult questions?

The Catholic Church is guilty of the same charge Benedict makes of Islam.

This Pope is fond of warning about dangers he perceives in secularism -- and i think he perceives the same danger i do, of meaning being driven out of our cultural discourse. I am an atheist and i can see the same dangers, but i do not think the solution is for humanity to seek refuge in the deafening echo chambers of religion or tradition.

The Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal is beautiful. I mean, breathtakingly, heartbreakingly beautiful.

It is dark as night inside. The neo-gothic ceiling is decorated in dark blue with gold stars and large rose windows. The balconies and columns are made of dark, rich wood intricately carved and decorated with gold leaf. If one turns around and peeks up, one can see a 7000-pipe organ over the back balcony. Despite all of this complex ornamentation the eye is drawn forward to the chancel and altar, which stands out of the darkness, shining and bright.

cowgrrl and i first arrived at the Basilica at 11:30 on Sunday -- so a morning Mass was underway. We were able to peek in for a few moments, and could hear the organ and accompanying choir. In those few moments i felt an immense sense of peace, of centeredness; i remembered a few things about religion and worship that, in my cynicism, i had forgotten.

cowgrrl described her reaction as "religion envy," since she was brought up without exposure to devout religious practices. And i began to feel like a refugee again, because this is a place to which i can never return.

I just can't set aside awareness of the many people i've known, including myself, who have been deeply damaged by people acting in the name of god and church. I cannot overlook the role of religious institutions in the stealth genocide.

For me the damage runs deeply enough that i doubt i will be able to sit peacefully in any sort of church ever again, feeling welcome and valued and loved. The closest i came was during my years of involvement with the UU church. And while during those years i encountered a number of people i feel very fondly towards even now, i am just too disillusioned by organized religion these days.

Once upon a time, i was a conservative Christian. I turned away from this during my early teens, when i began to realize that certain of my beliefs simply could not be reconciled with logic, science, reality, and my personal experience.

During my years as a non-Christian, as i explored many different approaches to spirituality i never stopped feeling like a spiritual refugee, and so when i learned about Gnostic and liberal Christianity i began to think maybe i had found a way to come home, spiritually speaking.

Liberal theology is rooted in an approach to scripture at odds with the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is literally true, infallible, and designed as a timeless guide to life, belief, and morality. It has nothing to do with liberal politics, though many liberal Christians are also liberal politically.

Finally, a kind of Christianity i could sink my teeth into!

But after years of exploration in the realm of liberal theology, i find i still cannot reconcile Christianity, this time with economics, ethics, philosophy, justice, and again my personal experience.

Christianity is based on the idea that humans are separated from God in some profound way. The conservative Christians talk about "original sin" and "sin nature" which passes from father to offspring. In the Calvinist formulation, people are inherently "totally depraved," utterly incapable of embracing good and worthy by default of eternal damnation.

The problem with this belief is that it is damagingly divisive. Someone who is "lost in sin" is too easy to see as less than fully human, less than fully capable, worthy of pity or rejection. It is too easy to justify to oneself participating in the mistreatment of people who are called by one's leaders less than fully human; and history bears out the problems this has allowed.

Liberal Christians understand how divisive this belief has been and rejects its overt forms. But most of the liberal theology i've encountered does not, in the end, truly reject it -- because they still rely on Christ for some sort of salvation.

Spong, for example, proposed we understand humanity as "incomplete," still a work in progress. Other liberal theologians describe us as in need of healing from without, in need of divine guidance or leadership.

In the past, i looked to the idea of soteria as "healing" or self-improvement in the hopes of understanding Christian doctrine in a non-divisive way. This approach can only work if and only if healing is seen as voluntary, as something we seek if we recognize a need for change in ourselves. It should never be seen as something which all of us must undertake -- because then it becomes, in turn, an "us vs. them," a question of "who is seeking healing and who isn't?"

But the idea of Christ as an envoy from God, or a reflection within humankind of the divine presence, makes it impossible to think of healing as something voluntary -- because Christ, as the perfect human, the ideal to which we are to aspire, is a yardstick by which we will always come up short.

The fundamentalists see Christ as God in human form. Liberal theologians are likely to see Christ as a metaphor for human potential, or the divine presence in an understandable form; or they see Jesus as an extraordinary person, someone of immense charisma who moved socio-political mountains and taught people a lot about tolerance and love and co-operation.

I was striken then very hard by the observation of Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza that perhaps the proper way to view the early Christian movement is not one that starts and ends with Jesus, a single extraordinary individual, a man who saves us all by leading the way to a bright new world, but as a broad and diverse social movement to which many people contributed with their bravery and their witness. In this view, Jesus is simply a person who became, for a time, the movement's chief galvanizer and spokesperson.

To take a galvanizing figure and make him a figure of worship or emulation and to make him the central focus of theological inquiry takes the emphasis from where it must be (justice and compassion). The idea of Christ is therefore misappropriation; it diverts inquiry from the hard questions of justice and ethics and spins us in a whirlpool of philosophical auto-eroticism. (ETA: Alright, i know that's harsh. But immersion in a quasi-Marxian-inspired point of view has made it difficult for me to see anything that does not immediately contribute to justice as a potential contributor to the status quo, by taking our energy away from the important areas of focus. I've always been accused of being too serious for my own good.)

Is there any way to preserve the idea of Christ and maintain a focus on justice and compassion? I eagerly sought one. The best i could come up with is the idea that Christ is something which those who follow the Christian path are called upon to become or to embody when we they confronted with a person in need or an ethical dilemma.

But if that's the way it works, then phrasing it in terms of "Christ" or "savior" is distraction -- or worse, because the loaded cultural values of these terms means that phrasing discourse about acting justly or compassionately in this way makes us forever in danger of being diverted away from ethics and onto the distraction of Christology. It's safer just to say, "We have to be just and compassionate with one another," than to bring a religious term into it that risks diversion.

This leads to another concern i had, which is that once you apply a word to something for ease of description, people take the word and run with it as a label, and use it in a normative way to distinguish between one thing and another. Similarly, any kind of organization formed by people of one generation to solve the problems they face becomes a rigidified edifice which tends to cause problems in future generations.

In other words, anything resembling "systematic" theology or philosophy -- the attempt to coalesce one's worldview into a concise set of concepts -- puts us in danger of creating fodder for the perpetuation or justification of injustice.

That's a damn drastic thing to say, i know: but i've expounded several times in recent months on why i have concluded that there is no way any ideology can be "the answer" to human ills. This is a thunderous insight that continues to reverberate throughout my brain and shake down wall after wall. It's a threatening idea to anyone who has a pet ideology, and i even sometimes find myself resisting it. But if there is anything that has been shown to be true by the witness of human experience, it is this.

In his treatment of homophobia in Christianity, i am glad to see that John Shelby Spong did not shrink back from admitting that certain texts in the Bible are homophobic. I haven't read his previous book on the topic, but i feared that he would try to rework or revise our understanding of these passages instead of just admitting that they are bad and wrong, the way i have seen some liberal Christians do.

At one time i believed in, and even formulated myself, arguments that passages like Romans 1 or I Corinthians 6 have been misunderstood and misapplied, and should actually be read in ways that are much more narrow than the conservative interpretation of applying them to all forms of homosexual love and sex. I am wary of such arguments because i fear they are selectively revisionist, and i fear that they defend a kind of text-centric approach that will ultimately fuel literalism.

He suggests that in Paul's writing, and i have noticed this myself, there is a distinct contradiction between his understanding of Christ as the bringer of universal redemption, and his passages of moralizing condemnation.

Spong then mentions a mentor of his who went through a time of being idologically rigid and fanatically pious, before breaking down and admitting that he was gay. He argues that many of the most ardently anti-gay preachers are projecting outwards their own inner struggle with homosexuality -- an argument that has some precedent in psychological research.

Paul, he says, was doing this: projecting outwards his own inner struggle against homosexuality. I've seen this argument before, and i think it is a good one. There is another possibility that occurred to me a while back: that Paul's disapproval of men who have sex with men stems from having been sexually preyed upon at gumnasium.

The problem with either of these theories is that they cannot really account for Paul's disapproval of lesbian sex. Paul would have known that Jewish law specifically bans gay male sex, but does not mention lesbian sex. Paul's disapproval of homosexuality did not stem from his understanding of the law -- Paul NEVER moralized against something from the basis of its being against the Mosaic Law. That would contradict his understanding of the Law as something that Christians have transcended. (Never mind how dangerous this notion is to the fundamentalist program -- ::gasp!:: you mean God's law can change?) But even so, his thinking would have been influenced by it.

It's possible that his own inner conflicts or his own rage at being molested might extend to lesbians as well as gay men -- but it does not strike me as intuitive. Especially given that the Mosaic Law says nothing about lesbian sex.

No, his disapproval stemmed from something new: he believed that gay sex is not expedient.

Now, i've argued in the past that the reason gay male sex seems inexpedient from an economic point of view is that it reduces the reproductive potential of the family. (In the ancient way of thinking about pregnancy, at least.) An act of male masturbation has the same effect -- and both are prohibited in the Old Testament, while lesbian sex and female masturbation (neither of which directly reduce reproductive potential) is entirely overlooked.

So, what kind of expediency does he think is reduced by lesbian sex?

Paul believed that sex itself, on the whole, is not expedient. Like any good authoritarian, he believed that sex must have consequences to prove that it's better to avoid it. And like any good dualist, he thought of flesh and its needs as something that impedes the proper functioning of the mind.

He stopped short of telling Christians that having any sex at all would lose them a spot in the Kingdom of God. For one thing, children have to come from somewhere. He treated marriage, and marital sex, as a concession, but stated his strong preference for universal celibacy.

But gay and lesbian sex are slippery, in that they do not have consequences the same way that heterosexual sex does. It can't result in pregnancy. It can result in venereal disease, but that's not special to gay or lesbian sex. So in his authoritarian mind there's nothing to stop people from having gay/lesbian sex.

Furthermore, he saw homosexuality as a consequence of having the wrong thoughts about God. This must have explained, in his mind, why the Jews rejected it while the Pagans accepted it.

SO, Paul may have been emotionally conflicted or angry, but i don't think this is the ultimate cause of the conflict in his writing. I think it stems, ultimately, from his instincts as an authoritarian, clashing with the inherent radicalism of the early Christian message.

Yesterday's observations about the Catholic Charities of Boston ending all of its adoptions in Massachusetts to avoid doing a few (probably less than 5%) to gay households is an example of why i am opposed in principle to moral absolutism.

Here's another: conservative groups like the Family Research Council are fighting the development and distribution of a vaccine for two strains of Human Papilloma Virus (which is known to cause cervical cancer) beacuse the virus is often (but not always) transmitted sexually. Their allegation is that an HPV vaccine will encourage premarital sex. The message this sends is that it is more important to preserve the moral absolute of "sex in marriage only," even at the cost of 3,700 women's lives per year in the US alone.

And here's another: the Bush Administration has aligned itself with moral absolutists who are spreading untruths about condoms being ineffective at preventing the spread of HIV. In fact, clinical evidence (which means, surveys of results from people actually using condoms) shows that condoms are more effective at preventing HIV transmission than any other STD. The Vatican's claim that condoms have "microscopic holes bigger than the HIV virus" (which in the US was latched onto by promoters of abstinence education) overlooks the fact that the virus is transmitted only within cells, which are bigger than microscopic holes.

The above are examples of "cutting off your nose to spite your face" to which religious organizations have been driven by their adherence to moral absolutism. In this view, it is acceptable to perpetrate a huge wrong to avoid committing an arguably much smaller wrong. At the crux of this is the view that it is okay to "punish" people for having sex in ways not allowed by (a particular interpretation of) certain ancient moral codes. It's one debate whether or not God will punish people for having premarital or homosexual sex; it's another debate whether any person or agency can legitimately become an agent of God's judgment. I'm willing to take my chances on whether or not there will be any sort of Judgment Day, but i am not willing to sit back while people proclaim themselves the agents of "God's judgment" on the basis of scriptural claims which i believe are false.

I suppose it is okay to post this now, it should have been graded by now (though i haven't received it back yet): the essay i wrote on Gnosticism for the final in Prof. Koester's class.

---

What separated the gnostic Christians from the non-gnostic (hereafter ‘orthodox’) Christians was not simply a difference in beliefs or opinions, but deeply divergent ways of viewing the world, human nature, and divine nature. These divergences made reconciliation between the gnostics and the orthodox impossible.

Christianity is concerned with the state of humankind, asserting that people exist in a state of incompletion or depravity, and are therefore in need of salvation in order to achieve their potential intended by the creator. Salvation, Christians believe, comes to humankind from God by way of Christ.

The orthodox doctrine teaches that salvation comes from the presence of Christ with us, from Christ’s sacrifice, from Christ’s resurrection, from being baptized in Christ’s name, and from taking in the body and blood of Christ during the celebration of the Eucharist.

The label of ‘gnostic’ was given to Christian sects who taught instead that salvation came from knowing particular doctrine or having certain awareness. The death and resurrection of Christ or the presence of Christ in the sacraments were matters of less importance to the gnostics.

At the heart of gnostic belief is the notion that some people have a spark of divinity within them. This fragment of the divine spirit has been enchanted and so has forgotten who and what it is. The gnostics believed that the key to salvation was to re-awaken the divine spark to awareness of its nature and origin.

In contrast to this, the idea of a measure of divinity within each person became increasingly unpalatable to orthodox thinkers. The author of John’s Gospel took pains to dispel this notion, calling Jesus the “Only Begotten Son” of God, making it clear that Jesus’ divinity was unique. Later, Augustine promoted the notion of original sin, which precludes the gnostic idea altogether.

( long )

In Hebrew, ha-satan means "the adversary."

Elaine Pagels argued in The Origin of Satan that the term evolved as the Tanakh was written so that by the time of Jesus it referred to the spirit of social discord. That is, Satan was not necessarily God's adversary, so much as Satan was the embodiment of adversity between people.

Jesus placed above all of the laws and commandments two which he called the greatest: to love God with all of one's heart, mind, and soul, and to love one's neighbor as oneself. If these principles indeed took center stage for Jesus, then that casts his workings against Satan in a new light. Satan is then his opponent not for opposing God but more for causing people to oppress and abuse one another.

Combine this with an argument i made in the past, that Jesus was far less concerned with the transgressions of ordinary people than he was with oppression and exploitation. In fact, to recast God's judgment so that it seems to be about everyday transgressions is to subvert and misappropriate the message of the prophets, who were concerned with social justice. It then becomes a tool of the oppressors, as many ex-Christians can tell you it was used against them to hound them into submission.

During the course of events in the early church 'heretics' were accused agents of discord and therefore were called antichrists or agents of Satan. This is further misappropriation: dissidence is not discord.

By this interpretation, then, to promote peace, understanding and togetherness, to promote justice and equality, no matter what your beliefs or background, is to be in accord with the wishes of God and Jesus, and to promote intolerance, discrimination, and abuse, to promote war and exploitation, is to be an agent of Satan.

It is more truly Satanic to misuse religious teachings to promote discrimination against or abuse of others than to commit individual transgressions.

In fact, Jesus gave special attention to those who take on the appearance of being righteous while acting as agents of Satan. This is why he gave so much of his scorn to hypocrites: he knew that this particular guise of Satan would be the hardest for people to see and understand.

So, we are planning to see the Narnia movie this weekend.

I've been thinking about a point chipuni made a couple of days ago:

For most of the book, Peter, Susan, and Lucy are passive. ... [U]ntil Aslan shows up, they can do nothing really good. Although they finally get to act in the final third of the book, fighting the forces of the White Queen, they aren't successful until Aslan comes with his army. ... [T]his Christian allegory says that whatever we do without Christ isn't good or successful. But doesn't the book also imply passivism? Whatever we do matters little: Aslan will fix it.

This point has stuck with me. My research has suggested that throughout history there have been (at least) two competing strands of interpretation within Christianity -- one which tells people that they are hopelessly depraved and that they are utterly dependent on Christ for salvation, versus one that tells us that a better life is in our own hands and when we take on that work we are on God's side, and God is on ours. I'd say the Eastern Orthodox notion of theosis falls into the latter category, though this is more of a spiritual emphasis than a social one.

This debate has raged for centuries without resolution because it boils down to the way in which one reads the text and reflects on tradition. It's amazing that many people can read the same text and see different meanings in it, but there you have it: the same words mean different things and hold different degrees of significance for different people.

But of these two views, which is more hopeful? It is worthwhile to ask which of the two views above is more likely to inspire one to see the value in working earnestly for a better world and a better society? Which is more likely to inspire confidence in oneself as a valuable agent of hope and positive change? Not IMO the one which tells us to be passive and wait for Jesus to do all the work.

A day or so before, someone (can't remember who, you're invited to come forward) posted a link to Polly Toynbee's disapproving atheist commentary on Narnia:

[H]ere in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis's view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis's earth.

from 'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion'

Again, here we have another debate within Christianity, intractable for the same reason as given above: Jesus the Prince of Peace vs. Jesus who brings not peace but a sword. Peace outweighs the sword by 95%-to-5% or so, to judge by attention dedicated to either by Jesus, but the one or two passages of Jesus with a sword, emphasized highly enough, can apparently be claimed to outweigh all the talk of loving one's enemies.

But even the sword can mean something entirely different if it is used to champion the downtrodden against a cruel oppressor, vs. when it is used by a majority to bend people to their will by fear. Which slant it will have in the movie remains to be seen. Overall, with regards to the movie i am not in a position yet to say whether or not i agree with Toynbee's assessment.

Catholic group feels Wal-Mart doesn't think the world goes around Christ, so it calls for a boycott. (thanks to arisbe for the link)

Why on earth should any Christian care what respect Wal-Mart (or any other worldly institution) does or does not have for Christian observance? I am consistently disappointed in expecting people to understand that there can be no compulsion in faith. With compulsion it ceases to be faith. But that matters little to those who want to see Christianity as a political force. It was, firstly, not a political movement but a radical movement, that is, a movement that sought to change society by focusing on bettering each individual from within. The Christian Testament is full of language expressing mistrust for becoming entangled in the political process. Using the message of Christ to promote a political agenda misappropriates and de-radicalizes Jesus' concern for the compassionate and dignified treatment of all people.

Which brings me to my second point: why should anyone, much less someone calling themselves Christian, have no objection to the role Wal-Mart plays in world poverty, but care instead whether Wal-Mart bows down before their god? Wal-Mart's business model directly impoverishes people and therefore contributes to their misery. This is directly counter to everything Jesus and the other prophets said. Why is that not a more compelling reason for Christians to avoid Wal-Mart? (The only answer i can think of is selfishness.)

The commercialization and commodification of Christmas is another way in which the Christian message has been misappropriated and de-radicalized. If you pay too much attention to the worldly thing which Christmas has become, you lessen the impact in your life of observing the birthday of your god.