Do You Know It’s A Myth?

An atheist billboard in New Jersey about Christmas got mentioned in the iReport section on CNN. It seemed worth blogging about, for several reasons. But before that, here’s the billboard in question:

Here’s my first thought about the billboard and reactions to it: People have a right to feel offended at the billboard, and those who put up the billboard have the right to offend them. We have no legal right to live free from feeling offended. There are religious billboards all over the place, and some of those seem offensive even to me as a Christian, never mind to anyone else. One of the great things about the United States is the way it protects our freedom to say things that others find offensive. Without such freedom, Biblical scholarship would be facing constant legal objections from people who do not want their comfortable but mistaken ideas about the Bible challenged by those who have actually studied the Bible in greater detail.

This leads naturally to a second point, which is that attributing the status of “myth” to the Christmas stories is not a perspective unique to atheists. Liberal Christians, on the whole, would accept that the stories in the New Testament are mythical in any number of senses in which that term might be used, including recognizing that they contain information that is neither historical nor factual. What’s more, even more conservative Christians might accept that there are mythical elements, if not in the New Testament stories themselves, in the popular versions of the Christmas story which weave Matthew and Luke together, place the birth of Jesus in a stable, and speak of three wise men (as depicted on the billboard). If you don’t know that those are myths, you don’t know as much as you should about Christmas.

Finally, let me mention one comment on the post, which said (in response to the frequent claim that atheism is a religion): “Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.” Although there is a good point being made here, in a way that made me laugh, it might also be said that there is a difference between “not collecting stamps” and promoting and celebrating the non-collection of stamps in an organized manner. Surely the latter could take on “hobby” status, could it not?

At any rate, as Christmas music takes over the radio and the rhetoric of a “war on Christmas” begins to make its inevitable comeback, I encourage readers to celebrate reason, and Christmas if they are so inclined, in a manner well-informed by relevant scholarship on the history and literature connected with it. Because what troubles me most about these billboards is that few of those who find them offensive have ever closely examined the infancy stories in Matthew and Luke in a way that makes use of scholarly resources. And if that’s you’re case, then even if you don’t know it’s a myth, you also don’t know that it isn’t.