Merry Faith Shaker - Gifts with strings

O.K. I admit I’m pretty much a scrooge when it comes to the December holidays. I  lost my excitement and enjoyment towards December 25^th, Christmas, some time ago. I probably learned it by observation of my own family and those impressions made upon me as a child. That’s not to imply that children are not intelligent, on the contrary they seem more insightful and capable of understanding many principles and naturally evident truths which the adult sometimes loses sight of.

Christmas does not make me angry. I’m not harboring feelings of bitterness and resentment at the realization of the illusion; the loss of innocence. It’s more a feeling of indifference than anything else, mostly... except for one thing, it’s such an abortion of truth. The whole religious concept, to the commercialization and co-opting of the following six weeks, if there be left any semblances to the former customs of the past they have rapidly been degraded beyond all recognition.

This is all a great boon for the economy but it’s also an insult to the intellectual progress and advancement of the human race. There is not much substance to any of these masquerades that we might caution a respectful restraint that we would otherwise afford to rational individuals, and that we should expect from an advancing civilization on the whole.

“When I was a child I believed in childish things…”

Father, in my estimation, is where any credit for my complete lack of enthusiasms towards Christmas should be given. Again, in hindsight and with the benefit of adult experience and wisdom, I can completely understand how Dad was anything but excited at the prospect of having to labor two jobs until Independence Day just so the family could get back in black from the annual red Christmas “cheer” debt. What I lacked in my child’s understanding concerning Dad’s disdain for the Christmas season, now makes perfect sense to my adult rationale. Just the thought of it might make one question their faith, which leads me closer to the point of this particular submission to the Blogferno.

Christmas is a Christian religious holy day. With all the pomp and festivities, the employee parties, the more frequent family gatherings, the joy, the whole celebration of the virgin birth and/or of the Christian God coming to humanity incarnate, the practical purpose has been lost. There are many who charades around, well wishing everyone with whom they make contact, reciting the mantra “Merry Christmas” or its current bastardization “Happy Holidays”. It's become so cliche' it smacks of an absurd insincerity!

Merry Fuck You!

I'm certain you know them of whom I speak, at least one. You have one in your family, or at work, or...you might even be one of them. These are the automatons; the Believers in shell form only, a living non-sequitur. They could hardly be considered as living the Christian faith of lore. Busily they run to and fro, living the cheap-polyvinylchloride-bumper-sticker life of “shop til’ you drop”. I can postulate that this is so they have less time to sit and reflect upon the absurdity of what they pretend to believe. Deep inside themselves, I believe, they have more certainty of what they do not believe rather than that of what they believe. This is the faith shaking. The only way to avoid it is to keep your head down while your eyes remain 'fixed on the lord'. It's a frighteningly unsetteling condition to the faithful, and it does lead to great tourmoil. It’s certain they lack that true and solid foundation.

It’s commonly taught by many Christian cults that faith is a gift from God. One of many blessings and gifts the Creator of the universe awards to his worshipers as an expression of love for our obedience to his will. To be sure, faith is but only one of the many possible gifts that Christians commonly profess the Lord does give them. One gift related to faith is the gift of healing the sick and infirm, even to the extent of granting powers over death itself. These gifts are almost always in proportion to one’s faith. That tells us that faith is the foundation of all theology. Faith is the foundation of Christianity. Without faith, God is merely another skeleton in the superstitious closet of mankind.

The very premise which is postulated by Christians fails to stand up to the light of reason and rational thought. Faith denies the evidence, refuses all belief in anything pertaining to everything of which we have natural explainations for - until it's convenient or forced to do so. Faith is, from the Christian standpoint, unarguably, the most important gift a God could give. From a practical standpoint, it’s the most important gift simply because without believers, without people whom have faith in that supreme being, that deity dies and becomes just another in a long line of dead, but formerly “living”, gods that have been cast aside by mankind for better gods. Truly in the religious sense, faith is the greatest and most blessed of all gifts because it’s the life-spring from which wells God's existence.

God, if you pay attention or have been a Christian long, is particular in his dispensation of gifts. A gift by almost every human cultural measure, is given to another person or group of people, usually, but not always without expectations of a reciprocal gesture in kind. Furthermore, a gift is almost never taken back from it's recepient by the giver in any but the most primitive of ethical standards any human society has produced.

So what can we say about a man or woman who lose faith, that most critical of “gifts”? Rather, and more directly, what does that tell us about God the benevolent dispenser of faith and other supernatural gifts? Two words from childhood come to mind – Indian giver!

[It’s interesting to think about how we must project any loss of faith as being somehow the inferior beings fault, never the deity. Some action, some sin, either in the present, or most likely the distant past, has caused that floundering or loss of faith. It’s very convenient, essential as matter of fact, that God remain benevolent and perfect, so therefore the blame for loss of gifts must lay with the created being and not the Creator. If God ever becomes imperfect, what’s to worship?]

It’s sadisticly comical that the foundation of Christian theology is faith and yet that foundation, a gift remember, is in constant danger of collapse from an unholy trinity of fronts. Not only must the faith of the Believer withstand the onslaught of erosion from the World at large, but it must weather and endure the often violent internal storms of “personal demons” while attempting a most difficult feat of reconciling the mind of reason to a belief in something with absolutely no empirical evidence. As if that were not enough, we have the object of that faith, from whence forth that faith springs, dispensing critical gifts of faith with conditional strings attached!

Any honest Christian will tell you faith takes work, lots of it. I fail to see as much of a gift when you must constantly guard it from others, yourself, and even the omnipotent deity which gave you that gift. Even so, there are many in crisis trying to just hold on to their gift, just finish the race, and maybe their hope for an eternal life of bliss will come true or have not been in vain. I almost wish it we're true but apparently God is not benevolent enough to create such a world the first time he gave it a go.

I take no joy in the very real Christmas story I am aware of. If were to feel any schadenfreude at all, it’s the joy in knowing others are soul-suffering because of, in their view, a foundational faith eroding slap in the face. The handiwork of God?

There is a woman in our small city with whom I’ve met on at least three occasions. I’ll call her Georgia. Georgia is, from my experience, a quiet and unassuming woman further reinforced by her small and thin skeletal structure. She’s not tall or short. I’d say of average height at around five-five, possibly an inch more at younger stages in her life, but time, gravity, and what looks to be the beginning stage of osteoporosis are waging that battles against her body and so she stands with a slight hunch in the torso. She’s approximately in her late 50’s and was probably never particularly attractive for a woman. Georgia is, in an unfair estimation, average to below average in physical beauty, not ugly, just “ordinary” and Georgia possesses no features unusually outstanding. Her hair is thin, and at shoulder length it’s easy to see that the condition of her hair is poor. It’s not dirty; it has that slightly heat damaged, frizzy-look about its grey and light charcoal length. It possesses none of the gloss or body that one sees in a well nourished and cared for woman typical in the West. Her face shows all the scars of a difficult life in the form of more wrinkles than she ought to have for her age. She has the eyes of a woman who has cried herself to sleep many a night in a river of tears, those wrinkled, tired eyes. She appears for all intents and purposes as a woman who’s worn out by life. [ "broken-in" if you’re the eternal optimist.]

Now picture in your mind this haggard woman and dress her into a pair of jeans and a sweater purchased from some garage sale, where, by the time she had came into possession of them, they already were second and third generation clothing. Look down at her feet and see those cheap, six-dollar, plain white sneakers made from a thin, low-grade canvas manufactured somewhere overseas and available for purchase at any U.S. Walmart or K-mart store. Notice that her left shoe, at the inside ball of her foot, has a quarter sized fraying hole in it. Both shoes are only slightly dirty and stained, having recently been washed by Georgia exposing personal pride in her appearance despite her condition in life. If I could see the bottom of her soles, I’m certain they would be worn through or nearly so. By almost all American standards she looks “frumpy”. She looks like a woman on a very low income or a very, very tight budget.

Now I can’t help but wonder if Georgia got any of her Christmas shopping done prior to the first week of December. I contemplate this because how would she be expected to know that the first week of December she would not only loose her only sibling to cancer (cancer after suffering a long battle over many years with a mysterious flesh eating type disease) and that two days later her house would be destroyed by a fire, which would also claim her infirm and bedridden husband less than thirty hours later. He suffered for over thirty hours his body covered ninety-percent in burns so severe that there was no skin on over fifty percent of his body. That’s a terrible fate for anyone.

In less than seven days Georgia lost her sibling, her house and her spouse. Two weeks before Christmas, Georgia will be burying two longsuffering loved ones and yet have no home in which to mourn. With little education, no work history, and what little government assistance she receives, her future does not look especially joyous this Christmas. It’s tragic story which continues to unfold for Georgia every moment hereafter until she too meets her own fate. For the rest of us, most of us, life will go on, we’ll remain if not unaware then unaffected by the misfortunes of Georgia. Only the faithful who knew this woman will remember her, if not for her selfless assistance to others, because she highlights The Problem of Evil and how severely it conflicts with the most common concept of God as he is understood within the U.S. as well as those places we’ve exported our His brands.