The Cynic Express(ed) 1.22: Defending Nativity

     The Supreme Court recently allowed the city of Syracuse, New York, to continue to display a nativity scene in a city park as during the Christmas season, throwing out a lawsuit by an atheist who claimed that the city's display amounted to an endorsement of religion and that she was traumatized enough to require money to salve her wounded sense of dignity and her persecuted status as an atheist in modern society. The Supreme Court did not point out that her arguments endorsed a different religion, namely the woman's deification of the self and litigation in a holy duality in the civic cosmos.

     The American Civil Liberties Union, defenders of American lunacy almost as often as they are defenders of American freedom, and the traditional holiday-time lawsuits against little municipalities who make the mistake of associating Christ with Christmas in their holiday displays bore me already, with the assertion that displays about the tradition and the heritage of Christmas endorse Christianity to the detriment of --whom? Some smaller sect of the population might celebrate the holiday by giving and especially by receiving gifts, but without any association with the actual purpose of the holiday? Shrill atheists who have some desire to prove to everyone that there is no point to anyone else's existence either?

     Christmas is the Christian holiday, celebrating one of the two big miracles that are so pivotal to Christian theology. Of course, it falls in a time that is traditionally associated with Winter Solstice and Yule, with the traditions of gift-giving and Yule logs they bore, and the cult of Attis, whose annual rebirth was marked with a tree. Christianity, though, and the masses the masses attended to mark it, are what made it a national holiday. To strip it of its conventional Christian symbolism and importance are to do what every child would like: make Christmas just like the birthday, but better. It is several weeks of build-up to lots of presents without having to go to church.

     So if a city wants to display a nativity scene, I think it falls more under its educational or tradition-observing practices than to endorse or establish a religion. The scene of Christ's birth reminds viewers of the celebrations of the holiday as historical observances were meant to be and as they were, outside of the godless (or perhaps only Godless) secular commercial season. Nowhere in the county park was the assertion of virgin birth made, and although there might have been an angel announcing the birth, nowhere in the park was the assertion that there was a war in heaven or treatises on how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

     Even further in Syracuse's defense were the other displays, including a menorah, depicting other religions, which would hardly bolster the assertion that the Syracuse parks department was a gang of fundamentalists seeking to throw atheists and other non-Christian elements to the holiday lions of loneliness and non-representation.

     The Supreme Court and Syracuse have determined that such representations as a nativity scene are allowable. The decision also proclaims that the only religion not to be represented is the nihilistic atheism that would replace all civic and private recognition of religion, all displays tipping the hat to the various denominations that made this often-Christian nation into the heterogeneity of tolerant traditions it is, with the nihilistic atheist's icon, relic, and sacrificial dagger--a giant mathematical empty set symbol, lightly dashed with snow, on the front lawn of city hall.