#44

How was your Christmas then? Good I hope. I was going to do a pre Christmas blog entry, but I couldn't manage to write it without it sounding sanctimonious, where as all I was trying to do was to save people from their own Christmas madness by saying that perhaps we should just spend less time and money on Christmas preparations and gifts..... perhaps then we might enjoy actual Christmas a bit more when it arrives: not being warn-out and skint. If we all spent half as much and gave half of what we had saved to charity we'd all be better-off. Well, anyway, then it started to sound preachy too, because even though I'm an atheist (admittedly with occasional attacks of agnosticism) I was trying to say we ought not to loose sight of Christ because even if you don't accept his supernatural nature, as I don't, he was at least, a darn nice bloke who, to say the least, meant well... he said a fair few good things and spread a fair bit of love and good will about and did it in a largely level-headed tolerant way... and, he sacrificed himself for mankind, making him symbolic of all those people who have sacrificed themselves for mankind: like, for example, the people who went-into the melting down Chernoble reactor to contain it knowing full well it would be the death of them, or people during World War II who went on missions knowing full well there was no chance of returning but they did it to stop a powerful evil regime spreading across the globe, and I'm sure there are contemporary examples. And then and I was saying we should try and remember the Christmas message too a bit more... but then I realised I had forgotten what it actually was...it's in my head in an abstract way but I just would not beable to recite it in words...I knew it when I was at school but the relentless accelerating march of the heartless commercial Christmas has slowly drowned it out in my mind, and I guess it must be the same for other folk who don't go to church: that's one problem about being and atheist -- while you're unlikely to be the immoral being that some religious people would fear you to be, you do miss-out on some regular formal moral tuning.... even watching 'A Christmas Carol' on the telly on Christmas Eve is probably a minority occupation these days. Anyway, as it turned-out I never managed to finish the blog entry anyway because all my time got absorbed by the very over-commercial exhaustive pre Christmas preparations that I was trying to wake people up to. I think just think Christmas should be more human for people like me and more spiritual for religious folk...which I personally think, amounts to the same thing.