Read The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas Online
Authors: Robin Harvie
The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (3 page)
E
MERY
E
MERY
Being born on December 25, I often found myself quite melancholy around the holidays. When I was a child it was simply not possible for my family to give me the special attention that most enjoy on the hallowed day of their birth. For children unfortunate enough to share their birthday with Jesus, Christmas is an unholy day of disappointment and loneliness.
Every other birthday party I attended was clearly a day set aside specifically to celebrate one person’s most important life event: emerging from deep within his or her mother’s womb and surviving the ordeal. I had survived, but as it turns out, the Christians believe that Jesus was born of a virgin on December 25, and they deem it a miracle. How can any kid compete with that?
My grandmother raised me for my first ten years, and she tried her best to make me feel special every Christmas. She would bake a cake just for me. One year it was in the shape of a snowman, and another it was Santa’s face. I especially enjoyed the Santa cake because I was allowed to take a knife to good ol’ Saint Nick. There was a cathartic quality to it. I don’t remember any Jesus cakes, but that would have been nice as well.
Even though Grandma tried to make Christmas just a bit more about me, her efforts always fell short as throngs of family poured into the house to exchange gifts with each other and give me my two-birds-with-one-stone presents. “Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas” was often written on the gift tags. I recall plotting to give people birthday gifts that said “Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas,” and I would then make a conscious decision to not give them anything on Christmas Day. But somehow I just couldn’t go through with it.
During one of my early teenage years, in a conciliatory effort, my mother decided my birthday would be celebrated on the half year, June 25. I thought this was a really great idea, and I was insanely excited. I ran to my room and marked it on my calendar. Sadly, Mom was not very good with follow-through, and while she may well have marked a calendar herself, she had forgotten to check it. June ca
me and went without any fanfare. Needless to say, my disappointment grew even more profound.
Every year that passed brought another Christmas that left not just me unfulfilled but my sister as well. Unfortunately, she had been born on Christmas Eve, one day short of a year after I was born. Just as I suffered the unfortunate side effects of being swept aside to make room for a grand celebration of the birth of the Baby Jesus, my sister endured the same profound injustice. Not only would our day not be ours, it would be everyone’s. Both my sister and I had to split what tiny amount of birthday we were able to cobble together.
One particularly lamentable Christmas, my sister received two identically wrapped packages from our mother. She unwrapped one to find a single, fairly cheap earring. As she unwrapped the other box, revealing the matching earring, Mom exclaimed, “One is for your birthday, and the other is for Christmas!” I wish I could report that my sister let loose with an impressively long string of absurdly creative expletives, but I have no memory of this particular event. I suspect I was sitting quietly next to the tree attacking the manger with GI Joe, a common, seasonal practice of mine.
One year, according to my mother, she had done everything she could to give us a classic birthday. She had planned a huge party for my sister and me. She invited all our friends and scheduled the party for December 23, which fell on a Saturday that year. While not all my friends were able to be there, with holiday travels and family gatherings preempting our party, many of our friends were indeed present, and I am told we had a great birthday party.
While I have no doubt that my mother remembers it that way, I do not have any memory of this amazing party. Any psychologist worth his or her weight in Freudian dogma may be able to explain why I would have no memory of it or why my mother would remember it so clearly, but what I know for sure is that I have no recollection of any Christmas that is fond. This party may have happened and my mother may have had an amazing time, but I was not present at any such event.
Through most of my childhood, I wished Christmas didn’t exist, and I harbored ill will toward all who enjoyed it. It made me angry and sad. I felt that I was being robbed by Jesus, Santa, all the reindeer, and everyone I knew. Then, as a young adult, I found myself investigating Christmas, and discovered some interesting information.
While no one seems to agree on the actual day of Jesus’ birth, most scholars agree that it wasn’t December 25. Some have it in November. Others claim it was in March, and still more believe it must have been in September. But whatever day it was, it clearly wasn’t on my birthday, and that makes it even worse. Here I am, being robbed of my very o
wn day by a ritual that isn’t even accurate! If only there were a God to pray to and ask for some kind of retribution.
The history of the day of my birth is tainted by an unthinkable practice, and here I am in the twenty-first century, feeling slighted and sad.
My point is this: any child born on Christmas cannot have a real birthday. It’s not possible. There are some who have claimed that I turned to atheism due to my birthday melancholy, but while I will never celebrate my day of birth on the level that most enjoy theirs, I am not an atheist because of this. I am an atheist because I reject all stories that are not rooted in and supported by empirical data—because I do not need to have stories that make me feel better about that which I do not know or that which I fear.
Now, as a full-grown adult with my destiny in my hands, I hold myself responsible for my own happiness and no longer sit around, sullen and depressed, every Christmas. In fact, I enjoy celebrating Christmas in my own way. My wife and I fly out to visit her parents each year—usually on Christmas Day, in fact. Since most people think the day sacred, flights are usually half price, and if they’re overbooked, we often give up our seats in exchange for travel vouchers. One Christmas evening we did just this, had a lovely evening in a nice hotel, got up on the twenty-sixth, flew into our destinat
ion, and had a wonderful dinner with my wife’s parents. We awoke on the twenty-seventh, had a very nice gift exchange, ate birthday cake, and played in the winter snow. While my wife’s parents believe in God, they aren’t really much for ritual. They just look forward to seeing us for the holidays, whichever day we arrive.
Whether we’re traveling, staying in a hotel, or enjoying my wife’s family, December 25 isn’t Christmas Day to us. My wife has taken to referring to it as “Emerymas.” Sure, Emerymas is a contrived and fully invented construct meant to mark the birth of my wife’s husband. But why not? If ancient priests could do it, so can my wife.
If you’re a kid born on the twenty-fifth, Christmas sucks. Emerymas, however? A day like any other day, with one very distinct exception: I was born. And according to my wife, that’s something to celebrate.
I appreciate all that my mother and my grandmother tried to do. They can’t be held responsible for my failed childhood birthdays—they were up against eons of ritual and tradition. Still, if I’d been alive in the fourth century, I could have been sacrificed by pagans, so perhaps I should count my proverbial blessings and be happy that all I had to deal with was losing my birthday to a holiday. It could clearly have been much worse.
C
ATIE
W
ILKINS
I remember being confused as a four-year-old as I sat in assembly at primary school and everyone said the Lord’s Prayer. I did as I was told and joined in, saying, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” But I thought we were thanking our dads for working hard at their jobs to bring us, their families, home our daily bread, so that we could have Marmite on toast, and jam sandwiches, and other nutritious bread-based snacks. I remember thinking that perhaps I wasn’t really eligible to join in anyway, as my dad didn’t actually work in heaven—he worked for Tesco. I kept my fears under my hat but felt like
a potential fraudster.
My dad, a supremely rational man even when addressing four-year-olds, answered my question “What happens when you die?” logically and truthfully. He replied, “No one really knows, but we have lots of theories. Some people believe in heaven and hell, some people believe in reincarnation, and some people believe that nothing happens.” The other four-year-olds were not privy to the open, balanced information that I had, leaving me the only four-year-old to suggest that heaven might not exist. Unlike John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” this suggestion was not met with delight or praise or musical accola
des. The other children just said I was wrong. I became more of an outsider.
I guess I must have continued to feel like an outsider, as when I was five I attempted to send a Christmas card to the Devil. Not to rebel—I was trying to cheer him up. I sent one to God as well, to keep it fair. I wasn’t taking sides in their cosmic disagreement.
The card to God (complete with made-up address, 110 Love Street) said, “Well done, you must be very proud.” The card to the Devil (who of course lived at 110 Hate Street) said, “Please try to have a good time, in spite of everything.” I guess I thought he might be feeling blue or left out on the birthday of his arch-nemesis.
But I think I could relate more to the Devil, and could associate more with his underdog status of everyone hating him. I was chucked out of ballet at the age of four for being disruptive, so I think that the Devil and I both knew what it was like to be excluded from things—he from the eternal paradise for rebelling against the supreme being, I from
a ballet class for finding it hilarious to say “no” instead of “yes” when the register was called.
I didn’t expect the Devil to write back. Everybody knows he’s a bad boy. But God didn’t write back either, and he had no excuse. I’d heard the phrases “Ask and you shall be given” and “Seek and ye shall find,” but I had scientific evidence that Father Christmas was more communicative than either of them. I’d seen that he’d eaten the mince pies I’d left out for him, but when I’d asked God if I could become a mermaid, my legs had stayed resolutely in place.
However, I decided it was understandable that God was far busier than Father Christmas. After all, while they were both very old and had to keep their long white beards in shape, God had to work 365 days a year (except for Sundays), while Father Christmas only worked for one night, and he also only had to help children, not adults, leaving him more time to stuff his face with mince pies. I guess Father Christmas just had a better union.
I think I partly wanted to become a mermaid because of the biblical story of Noah’s Ark—if it happened again, at least I’d be able to swim away. I had always been a bit worried about this story from an animal rights perspective: the other children enjoyed the bit where the animals went in two by two, but I felt sorry for those who hadn’t made it onto the ark. For them, it must have been like an animal-based
Titanic
. My one consolation was the fact that all the sea creatures (including dolphins and sea horses) would have survived.
I officially called myself an atheist from the age of ten. I was the only atheist in my class, but the other kids and I did agree on one thing: I wasn’t going to heaven. (Though my reasoning was that you couldn’t go somewhere that didn’t exist.)
I had one ally in our physics teacher (who was an atheist, even though it was a Church of England school). He told us the various things humans have believed about the world, from it being flat to the sun going round the earth, and also told us about the various scientists who had been killed or imprisoned for making new discoveries that went against the doctrine of the church at the time.
He also made a joke that delighted me. Gesturing at the whiteboard, he said, “People used to believe that heaven was up here, earth was in the middle, flat, and hell was down there, below Earth. Which of course we now know can’t be true, because hot air rises, and all the people in heaven would have got burned.”
This teacher said that science was like a box, and that we could never open its lid. We could, however, investigate in other ways: we could conduct experiments and try to re-create events to get the same results. So we could build an identical box, the same weight and size
, and say, “I have discovered what is in the box”; but then, if the first box suddenly turned green but our box didn’t, we would have to conclude, “Okay, I was wrong,” and start again to try to make our own box go green. In this way science was always learning, changing, and expanding, but admitted to not being absolute.
When I heard that the money from this book was going to go to the HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust, I was really glad it was going to such a fantastic and worthwhile cause. And it seems appropriate that money raised from a book by atheists is going toward humans helping humans, in both a literal and practical sense.
December is historically a time when humans have a festival to cheer them up because the sun has gone, and Christmas holds the current title. Christmas has done well, to its credit. It’s beaten off the competition and is the reigning champion.
There’s also a lot to be said for Christmas. The high spirits, good food, and bringing people together are excellent things for humans. Although anyone who says it is the greatest story ever told clearly hasn’t read
Watchmen
.
Now that I am an adult, I can look back on the things that used to make me feel confused, alienated, and excluded as an atheist, and take the positives. And in retrospect, sending a Christmas card to the Devil is ironically possibly the most Christian thing you can do—what with all those parables about turning the other cheek.
So my advice to anyone wanting to celebrate an atheist Christmas would be: imagine there’s no heaven, then try to have a good time in spite of everything.
S
IMON
L
E
B
ON
I love Christmas. I always have, ever since I was a child. Back then, Christmas was all about the Baby Jesus—my parents encouraged belief in him. But even if they hadn’t, church and school—which were both Church of England—would have greatly influenced my beliefs.
School was very Christian. At Christmas, we had Nativity plays, but I never got a good role in them. I think I was a sheep. I always believed I was destined for great things there, but I never achieved them.
However, though I was Christian and believed in Jesus, I remember that at school there were these fascinating children who were excused from assembly. They didn’t have to attend, and for a long time I thought this was because they were atheists. It was only later that I realized this was because they were Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu.
I was fascinated by the fact that they were allowed to stay out—I would have loved to. While everybody else was in assembly, you could have wandered around the whole school by yourself without anybody watching you. That was my fantasy—to get up to mischief in the back of the art room.
I had a lot of faith at one time. I was tempted to go to church as a child, because they told me you earned a shilling every week for singing in the choir. I thought, “Mmm, wages!” and became a choirboy.
When you’re in a church choir, you actually go to church about five times over Christmas. You go twice on Christmas Eve, and three times on Christmas Day, if you’re doing matins, the communion service, and evensong. So that’s potentially five professional engagements for a shilling a week over Christmas. The music and the choir was very important to me, and it gave me this feeling of godliness, which I really liked—and I prayed.
But I don’t miss that feeling—when it went, it went. It was like somebody pulled the plug out of the bath and the water went down. It didn’t feel good while it was going down, but by the time it had gone you’d got used to your body weight, got out of the bath, and got on with something else. That’s kind of how it was.
Losing my faith was very gradual. I was confirmed, and I absolutely 100 percent believed in the Christian God. And then, after
a while, it started to change. I started losing my faith when I started trying to figure out what God was: “He can’t really look like us! This whole thing about how man created God in his own image . . .”
When it came to working out what I really believed in, I realized that, if there is a God, he doesn’t have a personality. He certainly doesn’t have a set of morals—certainly not human morals, which we impose. And then I started thinking, “Well, what if it’s just people trying to personify life? To personify the fact that there is matter, and that there is a universe? If there is a God, that’s it. God doesn’t have a brain, God doesn’t think, God is just existence.”
And when you get to that point, you realize that if that’s what God is, then there’s no such thing.
• • •
For me, the hardest thing about losing my faith was facing the possibility that this life is all there is. One of the foundation stones of all religion is people’s fear of death and nonexistence. People will do anything and believe anything if they can think, “You don’t really die. There’s somebody up there who says you carry on and you go to heaven.”
The Buddhists believe in reincarnation, but I tend to think it’s rather unlikely that we’re going to come back. However, I think there’s strength in agnosticism, because you accept that there are things that you cannot know—I cannot know if I’ve ever existed before this life, and I cannot know if I’m going to exist again. The idea of faith is almost as though, “If I believe it enough, it’ll be true.” It’s a romantic ideal that just doesn’t wash with me—I’m too logical.
It’s a hard truth, because our instinct is to survive and to continue existing, but I’ve come to accept that this is it. I’m not scared of not existing. Socrates said that death is unconsciousness, that there’s nothing to fear.
I don’t want to die, and I’m scared of things that can kill me, so there is a dread of not being around, of not experiencing things, of not seeing the sun rise in the morning, of not knowing what goes on in the world, of not being part of it. But that’s normal. There’s nothing I can do about it: it’s the one great truth, that we all die—you just have to accept it. I hope that when I do die, it’ll be at a point when I’m completely ready for it.
I quite like the Atheist Bus Campaign slogan, “There’s probably no God.” I didn’t like it at first—I thought it was too nice. I thought they should have been harder, and wanted them to say, “There’s no God, so forget it! You’re living in a dream world!” But then it made sen
se to me, because probability is one of the things I really believe in, in a scientific sense. It’s quite healthy to have an open mind.
Religion helps people cope with many things. It helps them deal with death. And I believe in marriage—I doubt the institution of marriage would have existed without religion. To some extent, religion has upheld essential morals and modes of behavior. There are some really important values in all religions.
However, I think human beings go through different stages. As a child, you have someone looking after you. And then you start to break away from that, and eventually you achieve a degree of independence from your parents. Maybe humanity needed a parent and that was the part religion played. Maybe we’re at a stage now where we are growing up and ready to achieve a greater degree of independence.
Although it’s very tempting to defer responsibility to God, I would like to see humanity taking responsibility for its own actions. There’s a certain bravery in standing up and saying, “We are alone, there’s no one looking after us.” It’s a kind of liberation.
Despite having lost my faith, I still celebrate Christmas and I love church music. I go to church to listen to the music. But there’s a definite school of thought that says, “If you don’t believe it, you can’t celebrate it. If you don’t believe in God, you can’t have Christmas. Sorry—you’re excluded!”
To me, it’s important that people can believe whatever they like. I’m a liberal; I’m just not religious. If someone else wants to believe in God, they have every right to. I always felt I had the right to believe when I was a Christian.
Most atheists and agnostics feel the same way—we say, “Okay, if you want to believe that, that’s fine.” Everyone must discover and develop their own beliefs.
Part of me would like there to be a God, because part of me wants there to be a parent looking after me. Someone to say, “Hey, it’s okay, it’s all under control. No matter how much you mess up, I’m here to save you.” That’s a very natural feeling, very normal. But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s enough. I’ve found I’m more responsible, freer, and more liberated living a life without God. And I love my freedom. I think we all overestimate our freedom. In reality, the freedom to think, to feel, and to experiment is one of the few freedoms we have left.