A Merry Christmas to All My Pagan Friends

In the spirit of the holidays, I wanted to cut back on the vitriol and share the gift of good will with all my friends and readers, be they Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Pagan. I would like to invite all of us to break spiritual bread together in the knowledge that we are all cut from the same cultural cloth, part of the same people.

I know that fact is difficult to recognize sometimes with all the doctrinaire dolts getting airtime, walking around in the cloth of my faith, along with all of the religious nay-sayers who have elbowed in to compete with them for space on the shelves and on the airwaves. Yes, it’s become all the rage in our great public forum, the mass media, to pit the secular against sacred, the God fearing against those who deny his/her/its very existence. But I encourage everyone to take a step back from this simplistic, two-dimensional debate and recognize the common intellectual heritage we all share. It is not too late to pull ourselves from this cultural precipice, to hark back to the not-so-distant past, when we made room for both Bertrand Russell and Reinhold Niebuhr, when great minds were at the center of our culture, unlike the trivial combatants who have come to dominate the current age.

I share a common cultural heritage with all my atheist and pagan friends, one based on the scientific method and belief in the ability for the common man to decide own his spiritual fate, both gifts from the Protestant Reformation, which began when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg and may have reached its zenith when Francis Bacon advocated for the first time in human history the primacy of inductive reasoning. Whereas classical Greek and Roman logic was based around deductive reasoning, that the truth was best divined after first developing abstract concepts to look at the world that could then be used to decipher specific evidence, Bacon turned Classical logic on its head, saying that you can’t decide the truth of overarching theories without first examining the specific evidence, paving the way for the modern, experiment-driven scientific method that we all benefit from today.

But enough of my Protestant apologia. I’ll just say that I am quite comfortable in debating the facts of the world with a Born Again Christian as well as any one of my many pagan/agnostic/atheist friends in a way that I would not be with someone from a different cultural history, because somewhere back in our cultural genetics is the recognition of debate as a good thing, that this type of argument takes place in a sacred space where everything may be questioned because that is the only way that the truth will be discovered, both for us as individuals and for our society and the planet as a whole.

So I break bread with the Pagan and the Jew, the Agnostic and the Methodist, because all are united in our search for meaning. If I have an issue, it is with the Humanist, because his worship of man ignores our base monkey selves, the carnivorous primate in us who tracks across the planet, alloying vision with blood lust.

It is no coincidence that our most famous current humanist, Christopher Hitchens, is also one of the most vociferous defenders of the war in Iraq. It is a man with dreams that is to be feared, not a man with religion. It is when a religious man dreams of changing the world that he causes problems, but as Hitchens demonstrates in his abject support of the American military empire, beware a Humanist with dreams most of all, for all too often the gulags are soon to follow, and Robespierre may soon be lying bleeding to death in his bathtub. The modern anthem of the humanist is John Lennon’s “Imagine”, which I had an immediate aural revulsion of when I first heard it, like I could instinctively tell at age eleven that it was a song written by a man in his pajamas, both vacant and scary.

But I trust that you, my dear reader, are the antitheses of that, no matter what your religious persuasion, or lack thereof, and I encourage you to pursue your own spiritual quest in this solstice season, whether that involve taking communion or howling at the moon.