An Atheist For Jesus At Christmas

I hate the word, "atheist," perhaps because I am occasionally called one.  Once I decided to think about important questions as if I was a scientist, holding all conclusions open to change as the facts change, I could not be a Christian in any orthodox sense. This despite a conventional and comfortable upbringing as a Methodist in a Protestant world.  Nor does "agnostic" work because I will only believe posthumously and in the Presence, and what I seek is a way to knowledge, and a way to live, here and now on earth.

But I am not hostile to religion as the anti-science, as many atheists are,  nor do I think I am superior morally and ethically to people afflicted by faith rather than doubt.  Indeed I adhere passionately to the cause of freedom of -- and from -- religion.  I am more than willing to tolerate the many kinds of folk myth and nonsense that infect and roil the world even unto these days.  Indeed, as I found out yet again on one recent day, the music, the words and the pageantry of a Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus have emotional power that reason cannot explain.  I suspect that all ancient and rooted religions so affect their apostates.

Picture a choir, voices filling a chapel built in accord with scientific acoustics and festooned with greenery, candle light and stained glass. When the choir bursts into the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brittan and Handel -- Handel above all -- my eyes and sinuses testify to the mind's response. Perhaps also it is the Christmas hymns of childhood that fire the emotions.  Who would not wish "Joy to the World?"  To please Jesus with your drum? To go tell on a mountain a tale of servitude and redemption found, ironically, in the faith of  oppressors?

More prosaically, Stetson University is a small faith founded college of our Florida neighborhood, now grown to university sized sophistication, that harbors an accomplished faculty and curricula for the musical and lively arts. That chapel is theirs. Students and teachers annually stage a Christmas show, which most years we attend with friends. The program is resolutely non-denominational: only the hard pews deliver a stern Calvinism.  (Veterans bring pillows, and do not share.)  Applause, like commercials on public television, has its appointed place.

More specifically, the moral teachings of Jesus are hard to ignore and harder to beat.  If you do what Thomas Jefferson did and strip away the embroidery of miracles most certainly woven centuries later to warm the gullible, you are left with a set of simple, yet profound, rules for a moral life.  They are easy to say and fiendishly difficult to live by.  Jefferson's life, famously ambiguous, attests to this.  Fluent in Greek, Latin and French and a master of English, Jefferson cut up new testaments in these languages and pasted together a version of his own containing only the sermons, parables and other teachings.  Versions of it, with commentaries, are still around (search for "The Jefferson Bible" on Google, amazon.com or abe.com).

A fictional case of the profoundly simple in Jesus' teachings is found in "The Answer," a slight modern parable by the late writer, Philip Wylie.  Set, and written,  in the cold war era of the 1950's when hydrogen bomb testing was in vogue, it concerns the deadly fate of two angels urgently bearing identical golden books directly into the sites of thermonuclear tests, one in Siberia and another on an expendable Pacific island.  One book, its dead bearer and its peasant discoverer are destroyed by a Stalin  figure with patented cruel efficacy by another thermonuclear blast.  The other angel's book is hidden by a young lad on a nearby island, where the angel crashed to earth, before investigators can find it's fatally stricken bearer.  Subsequently, the plane carrying the American angel's body to Washington is unaccountably lost at sea.

The scene is set for Russian and American leaders to do what they do best: say nothing and hope nothing comes of it.  But the American general in charge of the bomb test, who is the book's protagonist, is ordered back to the island of the stricken angel  to conduct another nearby test.  He encounters the boy and by a plausible plot twist or two knows to ask him what he is hiding.

"I never meant to keep it!  But it is gold!  And we were always so mighty poor. . . I hid it under an old rock.  Come on, I'll show you."  He did.

Then the author wrote: "[In the book]  there was one message only, very short, said again and again, but [the general] did not know what it was until . . . he found the tongues of Earth. . . For the message of icy space and flaring stars was this: '---- --- -------'."

If you cannot easily substitute the proper letters, one per dash, you will never be sure of the answer to that half ironical, ubiquitious question of our day: What would Jesus say?  Merry Christmas.
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