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Christmas For a Secular Humanist
Can a person be both a postmodern secular humanist[1], a critical thinker and activist who rejects superstition and supernatural entities, acts, and places, and also be a Christian, who follows and learns from Jesus, a Jew from Nazareth living around 2000 years ago, and who believes that Jesus was on track to create a new more just and loving world before he was snatched away and killed by agents of Empire who considered him a troublemaker?[2]
I know that it is possible because I am one of those persons in communication with many others who celebrate the birthday of Jesus and calls him the Christ. Not for the boost it gives to the economy, nor for the fun of the decorations and parties, nor for the songs and childhood nostalgia. But because the Christmas story of the child who became a man for others so that his followers long after he died said he was the way, the life and the truth and even the image of the divine for humanity.
The Christian myth derives from the Hebrew, the Greek and Roman, and many Eastern myths of godlike heroes, gurus, teachers, and philosophers searching for the meaning of humans, especially those who suffer the miseries of life and in so many ways were treated as weak, ill, and worthless.
Scholars of human being and history have shown that myths have played a major role in the development, socialization, and…