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<\/a><\/div>\nHere\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This leads naturally to a second point, which is that attributing the status of \u201cmyth\u201d to the Christmas stories is not a perspective unique to atheists<\/a>. 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\u2019s more, even more conservative Christians<\/a> might accept that there are mythical elements<\/a>, 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<\/a>, and speak of three<\/i>\u00a0wise men (as depicted on the billboard). If you don\u2019t know that those<\/i>\u00a0are myths, you don\u2019t know as much as you should about Christmas.<\/p>\n
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