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SANTA'S NOT THE PROBLEM, VIRGINIA!

It happens every year, but this year the shrill whining of the religious-right over "the secularisation of Christmas" and how "traditional family values" are under siege has come to a nauseating crescendo.

These are largely the same people whose ill-formed concept of the Sacred, combined with an unhealthy belief in a mythical "God" lacks the radically inclusive compassion that marked the life of Christ. They insist the "world" is attacking them, by secularising Christmas.

Then there is the other side - the so-called civil libertarians and groups like the Liberty Counsel and other divisive organisations that waste precious resources fighting to have manger scenes removed from public property, and to ensure that we never hear the word "Christmas" in connection with a tree, a party, or a day-off.

And they're both wrong, in my opinion.

Just because a set of arcane and oppressive "values" have been adopted by the majority, does not mean that there is any intrinsic real value to them.

The "real" meaning of Christmas was obscured by those who co-opted the ancient mythos, and began the Greatest Bullshit Story Ever ToldTM, by pretending every word of it was original and historically accurate. In fact, it was merely a plagiarised and repackaged telling of a story that existed 5,000 years before the supposed birth of the Christ.

I was raised to understand the significance and importance of Christmas, as the celebration of the birth of Jesus whom legend tells us was God Incarnate. Macy's Christmas Parade, Santa and Jingle Bells never diminished that for me. The metaphor of that Holy Night was bigger than all of that, and nothing anyone could do would ever diminish it.

As I matured, I came to realise that what humanity had absurdly attempted to personify as "God" was actually a metaphor, which changed over time. At the time of the historic Rabbi Jesus' life, the metaphor represented the violent, temperamental, bitchy and judgmental Cosmic Drama Queen, created in the manipulative and pathological mind of Moses the wealthy land baron, and perhaps first of the great religious terrorists.

Seeing this, Jesus dispelled the need for such an unhealthy metaphor, and introduced the metaphor of the Cosmic Abba, or Daddy in Aramaic. But He made it perfectly clear (to those who are paying attention) that there was no literally "dude in the sky" and not even a "higher power" existing separate from us, when He taught: "The sovereign domain of the Divine exists

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