In an issue of Time magazine, pastor Rick Warren from the Saddleback church was asked which of the two major Christian holidays is more important: Christmas or Easter. The pastor did not take the bait and said both were necessary and equal.
This gives a good place to compare atheism and theism, at least for Christianity. Christmas was declared a secular holiday by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984 (Lynch vs Donnelly). This did not diminish the religious meaning of the holiday but it said that Christmas had non-religious significance as well. I suppose there are some atheists who try to ignore Christmas completely. There are some who like to call it Newtonmas after Isaac Newton whose Birthday (in Gregorian or Julian calendar) was December 25th. But that is awkward to say and Newton was not an atheist.
Also, despite attempts to claim otherwise, most atheists don’t have a particular war against Christmas. If you say “Merry Christmas” to me then I will likely say the same thing to you. I’ll say Happy Holidays if I don’t know your religious background. I give presents to my wife, son and other family members on that day. I used to decorate a Christmas tree and might put some lights outside but I do so less and less often. That’s probably age more than atheism.
The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t feel a lot of friction between atheism and theism as far as Christmas is concerned. After all, the holiday claims to be a human’s birthday. That isn’t unusual. Believers will agree that the birth almost certainly did not occur 3 days after winter solstice. Also, the calculation of the exact year by Eusebius (263-339 CE) was almost certainly wrong. The story of the census seems to be an invention to get the expecting couple to be in Bethlehem instead of Nazareth when the birth actually occurred. The 3 wise men story is also a bit of a problem: what does a baby do with gold, frankincense and myrrh? It is almost certain that some males were born somewhere in Judea between 8 B.C.E. and 6 C.E. If Jesus existed at all, it is possible he was one such male baby.
Easter is quite different. Perhaps only because it always lands on a Sunday, there hasn’t been a push to call it a secular holiday. While Santa Claus and Christmas decorations seem to exist without a clear Christian connection, the disconnect between Easter and colored eggs, chocolate bunnies and jelly beans is greater.
The real problem with Easter is that unlike the natural story of birth, the story of resurrection is completely unnatural. People do not die and then are alive days later. The problems with Easter are many:
- Despite the number of writers during this period of time in Judea, very few writers seem to know about this extreme event. In fact, there is only one mention in Josephus and it seems to be an addition that was done much later. Historians don’t mention the resurrection until the 3rd century at the earliest and those are Christian historians.
- The notion of a resurrected deity was old news by this time. The Easter event and the subsequent ascension feel like a plagiarism. The idea of a virgin birth has a similar problem.
- If Jesus is god (and Christianity says he is) and if god knows all then Jesus had to know that he would be resurrected. So how big of a sacrifice is it to be buried in a tomb between Friday evening and the following Sunday morning? This sacrifice was supposed to be for all of our sins but it doesn’t seem balanced at all. How does it balance the sins of Hitler?
- If Jesus was crucified on Friday, spent 3 days in the tomb, then doesn’t that mean he arose on Monday? Well, no, and it is explained somewhat at https://www.bible-research.org/newsflash/3-days-and-3-nights.html with the result being that the crucifixion most likely took place on a Wednesday. If this bit of detail, the day of the week of the crucifixion, has been garbled in the retelling of this story, might there be problems with other details?
- Religion is often criticized as being superstitious. While not repeating that claim here it should be noted that 2000 years ago was a time of superstitions. https://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/lecture.html
- Matthew (28:17) says that after seeing the resurrected Christ there were some who “hesitated”, i.e. not everyone who should have been convinced was actually convinced.
- There is quite a lot of evidence that the early Christians did not believe in a physical resurrection at all.
- Originally the gospel of Mark ended with an empty tomb and a promise that Jesus would be seen in Galilee. A footnote in NJ says the next 12 verses are gathered from other writings. The first of those notes says that Jesus appeared first to Mary of Magdala “from whom he had cast out seven devils”. It would be reasonable to be very skeptical of such exorcisms but it also makes her an unreliable source so “they did not believe her”.
There seems little doubt that a lot of details regarding the resurrection have been added over time. This happens to a lot of stories. The details surrounding the birth of Jesus were similarly enhanced. Yet, the Christmas enhancements do not cast doubt on the likelihood that some male was born in Judea around this time. The enhancements around the resurrection make the evidence sound weaker that any such event took place.
The conclusion we can come to is that any decent god would not expect us to believe the resurrection story. The apostle Thomas is not condemned for being skeptical and neither should we be. And this is why Pastor Rick Warren doesn’t help the theistic cause when he says Christmas and Easter are both equally necessary. The never-existing war on Christmas has been called off. Do we need a war on Easter?
That won’t work. Believers are often quite aware that there is a cognitive dissonance. They know that their faith doesn’t fit with evidence but that’s a feature, not a bug.
