This article reminded me of a conversation i had around the dinner table with some of my parents’ friends. [Name Redacted] began to tell us how she enjoyed Christmas time the most out of the year, not because of the presents or the meals or the lights, but because of the introspection and contemplation of the gift that Jesus gave to us. i can only assume she was talking about forgiveness or redemption or the directive to love one another.

What was most interesting to me about this moment is that as an atheist, i was effectively uninvited to the conversation. Because the matter was, for her, so personal, and absolutely true, there was simply no chance given for me (or anyone else for that matter) to offer my own perspective and engage in conversation. It was a one-way reverie.

This is the dilemma of the outspoken atheist: there is no room for conversation with most Christians. The mere mention of the possibility of love or morals or life without God and his divine grace is anathema, selfish at best. It cuts against the grain of the edict to fear God, and to even contemplate the debate is flirting with devilish temptation. But i am just as eager to share my good news too. The world is filled with all of the same joys and disappointments and love and hope and wonder even if you choose to leave the cult of association and eliminate the burden of a hierarchy of the holier-than-thou.

Jesus was on to something when he said that we are already forgiven. Guilt is a construct reinforced and manipulated by those who make their livelihoods ascribing and absolving it. Intrinsically, no human has any greater value than any other. Yet, in the context of my dinner with the folks’ friends, the assumption was silently implied that her faith was real, and my lack of “faith” somehow empty.

our existence is conjoined with our experience, and if you happen to be raised Christian, it stands to reason that your experiences will have filtered through that lens, but we shouldn’t let that lens limit our awareness of others. i’m not sure that we are necessarily aware of how often we shut down other perspectives or belief systems by our tone of voice or general ambivalence. We avoid challenges to our paradigm altogether, indicating subtly by our body language that our view is unwavering, and that we are unwilling to consider other convictions existing in parallel to our own. i think it is a sad thing to exchange intellectual curiosity for conditioned inflexibility and fear.

Like my parents’ friend, Dionne seems too enamored of his own brand of majesty to allow for a broader consideration: hope lives in all of us.

but in political speak it’s lethal because it falls in the category of that deadly duo, ‘stay the course’ - George’s favorite - to ‘it’s time to move on’ - the favorite of everyone who doesn’t have a clue what to do.

When I go up the freeway ‘off ramp’ and find myself confronted by massive head-on collisions, not to worry.  I’ll stay the course, move on, and hope for the best.  Kind of reflects our present foreign policy.

Trouble is EJ, that all those lovely messages of love and hope are only for those that believe what a particular religion preaches. The rest of us are going to burn forever in hell. Seems just a tad unloving to me.(Although most religious fanatics would “hope” it would happen to those of us that are otherwise harmless while living in our own state of disbelief.) It also seems to say to all the peoples of the world that the love of a deity is conditional. Could have “hoped” that wouldn’t be.

#122366 by Thomas Billis

• “…..and a guy who wears a dress…..”

Good one Thomas. I had to laugh, even though admittedly, you KNOW lots of clergy wear these things. (I hear Giuliani does too, but I’ve never seen it myself – and NO, I know HE isn’t anybody’s clergy)

Anyway, thanks for the chuckle. You’re right, I’d say the Vatican was pretty ‘opulent’.

On the other hand, I liked John Paul when he was here, and we’ve got other clergy (minus the dresses of course) who have done great work for humanity. Remember our dear Martin was a man of the cloth.

So, it really depends on if they’re sincere or not. That’s where the problem comes in. We get the holly rollers and the fundies, and they are only sincere about their hate of the ‘other’.

As for this, we probably didn’t need it. People are dying all over the place, from PREVENTABLE things, (specifically war) and what we know about that, is that they frequently claim to be doing it ‘for god’.

THAT doesn’t fly.

E.J., since the alleged birth of the “Prince of Peace” in 1 A.D., we’ve experienced ongoing unparalleled destruction of human life as the result of war and other atrocities.

My question:  Where’s the hope? 

Nice, feel good try.  Even the people who invented this rather admirable and noble idea have taken part in the blood bath.

E.J. Dionne: WASHINGTON - “Even more than faith and love, I think, hope is closest to the heart of the Christmas story. In an anthropological sense, Christmas celebrates new life and birth, a theme that crosses cultures and traditions. This sense of Christmas has a beauty all its own and embodies a nearly universal quest for renewal....”

Well, first of all, I don’t understand what Washington has to do with “hope”. It is the very antithesis, uhh! And it is utter garbage to refer to Christmas as being in any way “anthropological”.

The REAL story of Christmas is either one of two. It is the Northern winter solstice traditional celebration of millenia before Christianity ever came on the scene - or it is the story of the birth of Jesus. They are NOT the same!

If you consider the winter solstice, it is indeed a time of “hope” and of “renewal”. Sad about E.J. Dionne’s delusion of “the conviction that we live in an ultimately trustworthy universe”, though. He has a lot to learn about climate change and nature in general.

If we think of the story of Jesus, however, it was a birth in very shabby surroundings even to the point that his mother had to be lifted into the “manger” that the cows feed from in the stables at the back of some inn so that she could be out of the shit and piss of the animals and the filthy dirt floor.

If Christians are actually serious about celebrating the birth of Jesus, they should leave their ostentatiously comfortable churches on Christmas and go to some old early 1900’s farm style of cow shed (with cows, etc) and try the experience for themselves instead of indulging their spurious fantasies.

It is also garbage that “the Christmas, Easter and Exodus stories are about freedom and liberation”. Lets forget about the Jewish Exodus story for a start as it is not even relevant. The key to understanding Jesus is self-sacrifice. It is something that people are not very fond of these days. I wonder why? Just ask any mother.....

While the fools from the Washington Post Writers Group are rabbiting on about hope and fawning over Truthdig readers, let’s remember that the celebration of Christmas is followed a mere few months later by the commemoration of Easter which is specifically about the savage brutal murder by the church and the state of a man we all presume to believe was spiritually enlightened enough to be the great healer and teacher that he was.

Ironically, it is the followers of the latter-day Abrahamic religion of ISLAM who have the better understanding of sacrifice as a core tenet in their faith and beliefs. Their festival of Eid is one example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eid_ul-Adha and the story set in Karbala in IRAQ is another http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karbala Think about that these days whenever you think of “hope”, as we all should.....

EJ if you chose to believe in a book put together to control people and a guy who wears a dress and talks about helping the poor while living in opulence that Jesus would have detested you go for it.But as Mitt Romney’s confusion about religion and liberty you seemed to have confused religion with hope.Your point I guess is that hope started beating in the heart when Jesus walked the earth.I guess the 8000 years of recorded history before that event were hampered by despair.I know at this time the pundits feel that not writing one of these soppy irrational columns would be a sin but trust me it is not.