Midnight Mass
It has just turned Christmas day, which means many Catholics will be attending midnight mass at this very moment. My own feelings on this event aside, I thought I’d spend a couple of minutes writing about my thoughts on the Christmas in general.
Christmas, no matter what they tell you, has nothing to do with Christianity and nothing to do with religion. Not anymore. In modern England, Christmas is a time of year where we make a special effort to celebrate the love we have for one another and joy of giving, sharing and being kind.
These are all qualities that nice, sensible people display as often as possible, whether it is Christmas or not. Yet, alongside every other moral quality that people possess, these are entirely independent of religion and can – indeed must – be found and cultivated without the need to declare any far-fetched meta-physical claims.
‘Good’ people don’t need religion to be kind to each other. We are civilised and learned enough to make moral judgements and decisions without appealing to archaic texts and the barbaric principles they prescribe (if you can wade through the bile and hatred contained in these texts, you can occasionally find an appeal to be ‘nice’ to each other).
Christmas time, more than maybe anything else we share, proves what an enormous capacity for love we possess, irrelevant of what we believe. This is what we should celebrate.