Epiphany

So, although I'm not a trinitarian and so have (minor, in this case) disagreements with the details in the post, overall, I'm very fond of this post by Fred Clark over at slacktivist, because it's a great explanation of what's so important about this holiday, which means once again it's time for me to wonder why it is that it isn't a bigger one. Like I said last year, it would seem like a holiday tailor-made for those people who feel secular Christmas and the generic "holiday season" in December are terrible things. Yet the people who scream loudest about how their holiday is being ruined by evil liberalcommienazisecularists don't even tend to notice the holiday exists. Go figure.

It seems to me that today is an excellent day to talk about something I bet most Christians don't think about today (or, in some cases, any day): what if it didn't happen? I mean, what if Jesus was just some really nice guy who didn't even have a pipeline to God? Or, you know, if that's because there is no God? Or what if there wasn't even some guy named Jesus or Yeshua or whatever and the Gospels were the result of a really drunken bet about starting a new religion? What if today was the celebration of fiction?

Well... what if it was? What if Christ didn't exist? Would that make the message any less meaningful? Is charity and brotherhood a bad message? Empathy a bad idea? Even if it were a total fabrication, the message in the Gospels is a good one. It's not a bad way to live your life, after all: caring about what happens to people, wanting no one to have to suffer, doing at least something to leave the world a better place in however small a fashion you can accomplish. If everyone did it, the world would be a better place, and it really wouldn't matter that much why they did it at that point. Even people who give to charity so they can Be Seen Giving to Charity are accomplishing something useful. One less person going to bed hungry, or living on the streets, or being stuck in poverty because they lack education, or dying young because they don't have access to clean water... any of those things is worth a celebration.

And that's an epiphany more people could stand to have.