By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Here we are, then, ready to celebrate Christmas 2009 and brace ourselves for the final year of a decade that will go down in history as the volatile introduction to a turning point for humanity. I suppose we could pretend that it’s just like any other holiday season we’ve celebrated, same old same old, but that would be missing the point entirely. This ain’t yer average holiday season; this one has potential to be something more. And in the amazing energy of this Shift of Ages, it is incumbent upon us to take the time to create it differently.
Despite what Jesus, the teacher, told us so long ago about not creating him as a person to worship, we did. It all got contentious after that. The mythologies surrounding his birth are softer than those of his death, easier on the ear and heart. Both speak of hope and the overcoming of darkness, but most of us can take more joy in such a portentous beginning than muster the faith required to accept the end as a metaphysical miracle. Consequently, Christmas is easy on the heart even for those who don’t believe it ever happened. Hard to argue with a baby in a manger and the gentle feelings we can bring to such a moment, and infinitely easier for capitalism and consumerism to ride roughshod over than the sobering energies of Easter.
For many of us, Christmas is a cultural exercise. If we aren’t religious, we still have secular options during this period. Santa, magnificent though he is, isn’t a religious icon, and gives us a place to weather the holiday storm. Particularly since the turn of this new century, the ‘reason for the season’ has morphed in our minds with those who practice a violent, extreme Christianity. It’s pretty hard to warm to a religion that has become repressive, repugnant and so emotionally skewed it feels virtuous in collective prayer for the death of a frail and beloved senator so that its political agenda can be realized.
Hard-core religiosity has always had the ability to harm, of course, to perpetuate the aggressive “us/them” dialogue we’ve been trapped in for the entirety of the Piscean Era. Karl Marx, villain in the eyes of so many, is quoted as saying that religion is “the opiate of the masses,” wielded like a club to control the great unwashed and keep them lulled. Yet that isn’t all he said, and when you examine his commentary in Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, you might even nod your head in agreement:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.