Christmas and what religion means to people

In this, my second last column of the year, I turn my attention to the subject that interests me much more than the politics I usually comment about: The study of the human mind and society.

The traditional Christmas season is back. As is usually the case, the commercial and family visits side to Christianity dominates and pushes the spiritual aspect of it to the back of most people’s minds.

I have some views on the pagan origin of Christmas, but for the purpose of this article, I will take it at face value and seek to reflect on the role of religion in society and what it seeks to address.

Mankind has always sought to understand what lies beyond the grave and death. Death remains the most fundamental fact and dread in human society as it always has been since the dawn of time.
As we get older, we become ever more conscious of the futility of much of what we do. Time takes on a new urgency and with it, brings the question of our life’s purpose to the centre of our thinking.

The question of being good and holy, in fact, is secondary to life. Death is the crux of history. If we are going to die eventually and that it that, then in a sense it does not really matter whether we lived good or evil lives.

Human history for its first several thousands of years had emphasised the grandeur of empires and the heroism of kings and warriors.

Babylon, Egypt, Rome, Sparta, Greece, China, India, the Aztec and Maya empires, Kush and the Vikings all emphasised great, soaring, military glory and eternal greatness, often brutalizing conquered people and their citizens little more than slaves.

Athens, the seat of Greece, brought to the world a different set of values, stressing reason, culture and the pursuit of learning.

Human mortality
However, even Greece itself still did not answer many key questions of human society. Greek thought had a tragic and fatalistic view of life. Its famous theatre plays by Sophocles, Euripides and others stressed tragedy and fate overcoming heroic figures.

The great Greek thinkers, playwrights and philosophers tried to help Man come to terms with his mortality and while on earth live his life productively and pursuing virtue.

But as important as that was, the human being would not easily settle for this fatalism. If we are all going to die eventually, then what does it matter that one is educated or not, cultured or vulgar? There had to be a way round this fatalism.

This yearning for answers to our human mortality, seen in everything from the Egyptian pyramids to the Taj Mahal to statues of famous people, Hall of Fame celebrity entries and Madame Tussaud’s wax models in London, tell of mankind’s search for that which Otto Rank described – eternal life and meaning.

Religion and faith are not just for the superstitious and weak. I notice that even in Western society that has largely abandoned religion, the worship of celebrities is now at an all-time high. Many Europeans reacted to Nelson Mandela’s death as if a Messiah had died.
The religious and the atheists have one thing in common – a search for ultimate answers and survival beyond our physical death. This is where religion comes in.

As the American theologian William James accurately put it, “To scribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one’s brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure. The fact that we can die, than we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature. (The Varieties of Religious Experience)

This is the existential issue and crisis facing mankind. If we all had a $100 million, we would gladly pay it if that could bring back our many loved ones back to life.

If there had been a cure for his cancer, the legendary computer icon Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, would have spent his $13 billion personal fortune on that drug. That is the part that atheists miss. Nobody, if they had their way, would wish to live only 70 or 80 years, nobody would wish to ever get sick, grow old and weak and then die.

The message of Judaism, Christianity and later Islam was that there is an afterlife. This present mortal life is only transient but the life after this is what this life is a dress rehearsal for.

The crucial question, though was, what if these three faiths were mere superstition, like the many pagan religions before them? What if there was no after life and it all ended here?
Christianity then went on to give a specific strand of hope. It rested on the claim that Jesus Christ of Nazareth, its founder, had died and rose again from the dead and that this was proof He was the long-awaited Messiah in whom resided any hope of an afterlife for the rest of mankind.

As one of His leading Apostles Paul would put it, if the Christ they preached had not resurrected, then they preached a dead Christ and the people to be most pitied were those who called themselves Christians.

New Testament Christianity, with its simple living, sense of fairness and quiet grace, its rationality and benevolence, changed the world and eventually was adopted by European tribes and nations that had known only war and barbarism as a way of life.

Out of it came the familiar modern world --- Classical music, the humanitarian concerns of the West, the education system, great centres of learning and much of the Common Law in force around the world.

But the issue around which Christianity revolved was not its good works, hospitals, schools, charities, church buildings, but if Christ had indeed risen from the dead, as He claimed He would.

Men who had trembled when Christ was arrested, suddenly lost all their fear, faced the Roman Empire, were frequently jailed, persecuted, most martyred, all exiled on the basis of this one belief: He had risen from the dead.

And so as millions of Christians, both the devout and those who are Christian in name only, celebrate the birth of Christ at this time, it is still His resurrection (or alleged resurrection) on which everything that mankind fears most and hopes for most, rests.