How can people really believe this stuff? Rising from the grave isn’t even the most preposterous part of the Easter story. Far more bizarre is the claim that God had to send his son to die for our sins. And if God really wanted all humanity to heed his message, why did the resurrected Christ only reveal himself to a few select people before ascending to heaven?
ReadIn the Balkanised age of the internet, bands that most people have never heard of can fill arenas, and TV series on platforms most people don’t use can have audiences of millions. Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, shows that intellectuals can play that game too. His YouTube lectures — with titles such as “Identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege” — have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
ReadDisgruntled Christians would do better to seek common cause with anyone else, including thoughtful atheists, who wants Christmas to stand for more than just shopping and gorging. If they did so, they would see that a good atheist Christmas looks a lot like a good Christian one.
ReadThere is no religion-shaped space that needs to be filled. Rather, there are many spaces which religions have managed to occupy. The need for meaning, for example, is not religious, but it is a need religions attempt to fulfil. The same is true of the needs for values, community, the marking of life-stages.
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