The New York Times’s Christmas essay (Trigger warning: atheism)

December 25, 2023 • 11:30 am

Far be it from me to criticize the Jesus story on His birthday. Actually, it isn’t far at all, for the New York Times, in today’s op-ed, buys the whole hog of the Jesus myth related in the Bible. I don’t recall them accepting the myths of Judaism on Hannukah, but maybe I missed that column. Regardless, I suppose the paper had to publish something about Jesus today, and so it did: an anodyne piece that not only accepts Bible takes like the reviving of Lazarus, but also conveys a message that is the same as that of secular humanism: it’s most important to be compassionate and kind to others.

Click to read and weep; after all, Jesus wept too. The author, Peter Wehner, is described this way: “Mr. Wehner, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, is a contributing Opinion writer. He attends McLean Presbyterian Church in McLean, Va.”  Why do they need to mention his church?

Why did Jesus weep? Because he had compassion. Even for Lazarus, who Jesus knew He could and would revive through magic:

In the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, we’re told that Lazarus, the brother of Mary of Bethany and Martha, and a friend of Jesus’ whom he loved, was sick. By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had died and had been entombed for four days. Both sisters were grieving. Mary, when she saw Jesus, fell at his feet weeping. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she said. We’re told Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”

“Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied. And according to verse 35, “Jesus wept.”

“Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in the Bible and also “the most profound and powerful,” the artist Makoto Fujimura told me. For him, those are “the most important two words in the Bible.”

And understandably so. Earlier in John 11, we’re told that Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, which he did. So Jesus wasn’t weeping because he wouldn’t see Lazarus again; it was because he was entering into the suffering of Mary and Martha. Jesus was present with them in their grief, even to the point of tears, all the while knowing that their grief would soon be allayed.

I suspect that Wehner actually believes this stuff. But if the lesson is that it’s good to be compassionate, why do you need a myth to teach that? Won’t secular humanism do? But that, I guess, is what the NYT figures people need on Christmas. And it’s not just metaphor, either:

“Jesus ushered in a compassion revolution,” Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church, told me. Before Jesus, compassion was primarily thought of as a weakness, he said.

“When Jesus says he is with us, that’s not a metaphor or a trite offer of ‘thoughts and prayers,’” the pastor said. “He’s literally in it with us.”

LITERALLY!  Here we have a NYT author telling us that Jesus is for sure with us. He really lived, and in the way the New Testament describes. But is he with all the Jews, Hindus, and Muslims, too?

I’ll let the historians decide whether Jesus actualy did start a compassion revolution, but surely you can make a case that the Buddha, who lived five centuries before Jesus—I’m assuming here that there was a Jesus person, though I don’t buy that—also ushered in a compassion revollution. At any rate, we now have secular humanism and don’t need Christianity to make us compassionate.

But Wehner apparently thinks we do, and that that the LITERAL stories in the Bible teach us that. One more quote:

During times of sorrow and times of tears, when it feels like we’re “being broken on the wheels of living,” in the words of Thornton Wilder, there is great comfort in believing God empathizes with our suffering, having entered into suffering himself. But we also need his emissaries. We need people who see us and know us, who enter our stories. Through their compassion and love, we feel, I feel — even if only partly — God’s compassion and love. That doesn’t eliminate the storms from within or without. But it makes greater room for joy in the journey.

Here we learn that what comforts us must be true, a form of the “reverse appeal to nature.”  As for me, I simply cannot force myself to believe myths for which there’s no evidence, nor accept a God/Son of God who used to appear regularly but seems to have vanished in modern times.

But there is reason enough to be compassionate without God.  As the Christmas carol goes, “Be good for goodness’ sake.”

44 thoughts on “The New York Times’s Christmas essay (Trigger warning: atheism)”

  2. Jesus launched a compassion revolution? Perhaps, but the institutions that grew up around his teachings didn’t seem to get the message.

    Why give the name of Wehner’s church? It’s the NYT caving to those who expect “positionality” statements. After all, how can one judge the merit of an argument without knowing the positionality of the speaker? (Obvious sarcasm.)

    1. Jesus launched a compassion revolution? Perhaps, but the institutions that grew up around his teachings didn’t seem to get the message.

      I’ve certainly said the same myself. But if you consider the slaughter and bloodshed done by preceding adherents to various beliefs, it’s possibly a step in the right direction. I believe Buddhism stands apart as an inherently peaceful philosophy/religion, but I’m guessing.

      In any case, its not surprising that people are sometimes subjected to uneccessary suffering on spiritual matters. The oft used paradigm of the spiritual plane as superior to the physical one, excuses the cruelty, since it’s assumed that life is just some runway to the afterlife of the soul. I believe there’s a platitude stating “God gave man just enough religion to hate, but not enough to love.”

      The thing is, it seems to me that there have always been people with beliefs, that pair off into groups, who will discriminate on any number of characteristics, be it sex, race, ethnicity, ideology etc. Our chimp like need to form in and out groups, seems so instinctual that one can make a claim that wokeism is beginning to reveal some religious dynamics. My overtly progressive sister in law and brother won’t keep a bible in the house. She’s a great mother who does social work, enjoys the fawning praise of friends on facebook, and threw herself a pity party when my father passed; never sending a single message of condolence to my mother. Some human themes don’t change but seem to mutate as time goes on.

  3. Compassion good. So many who pride themselves as chtust followers, fail to have the compassion for others

  4. Re “This is Why Jesus Wept” — that’s the kind of article I always skip and I appreciate your commentary — someone’s got to.

    One might take the bait and ask: why Lazarus when the day is about Our Dear Savior’s Birth, etc.? (something about genome analysis might be fun) Wouldn’t Lazarus be more about adult JC & the fol-de-rol around those myths, more suitable for Easter?

    I certainly enjoyed the reindeer post! And — Merry Christmas, a fine quaint expression.

    1. Yes, Robert, quite a read. I face palmed several times while reading it.
      As much as I admire Bari Weiss as a writer, I am sensitive to her osculations of the rump of religion, as Jerry would put it, which compromise the reliability of her opinions in my view. I feel the same way about Andrew Sullivan.

      1. Stephen, yes I did the same. I also agree with your B Weiss comment.
        I could identify with his childhood, not necessarily the defacing of the church register, but in the atmosphere and the liking of the architecture and music to this day, however as a long time humanist and non believer his journey not so much. I grew up in a Christian household and community and are left with whatever that means and still do not it believe it harmed me.
        Age and its effects can affect some when it comes to change in belief and this may have been so in his case. I however are well into my seventh decade and remain unconvinced regarding the supernatural.
        We lived and worked in Norway for some time and still celebrate the season in the Scandinavian style, so God Jule and keep well.

    2. I found his revelatory experiences rather forced and certainly self-inflicted. Interesting illustration of the psychopathology behind it, he describes himself making a decision, almost subconsciously (without free will, our host would say) and then feeling surprised when it emerges full-grown in his consciousness, an experience he attributes to God.
      He evidently has a string religious bent, with a preference for ritual, and if that floats his boat, well, good for him. I don’t think he should expect us to fall for his self-delusions though.

  6. It is painful to hear otherwise intelligent people regurgitate claims about this Jesus character, even worse when anyone says that “Jesus said this” or “Jesus said that”. The fact is we can know nothing about said character (if he existed at all), as everything we read about him was penned decades later (at the earliest). That so many people inflate this character to hero status just reveals the idol-worshipping tendencies of the tribal human brain that still lingers.

  7. It’s the mythical birthday of their mythical “savior”, so articles of this kind are, unfortunately, to be expected. Indulging Christians is the national pastime for most of the American media. Christians not only expect it, they believe they are absolutely entitled to it, and insufficient indulgence by the media, and the public generally, results in howls of outrage about the “war on Christmas”.

    It would be nice if atheists, who have plenty of positive, life-affirming messages to deliver (with no supernatural intervention required), would be given equal time in their op-ed pages. But of course that sort of indulgence is a bridge too far.

    1. Apropos atheists getting equal time, there’s a long-running segment in the daily news and current affairs programme “Today” on BBC Radio 4 (the BBC’s national radio channel which is similar to NPR). The segment is called “Thought for the Day”, and the speaker is always a religious figure, most often Christian, but there are also Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist speakers. As readers of this web site can easily imagine, the religious messaging is laid on pretty thick. For many years, there was an excellent parody web site called “Platitude of the Day” which lampooned each morning’s “Thought” with barbed wit.

      Humanists UK has long campaigned to have non-religious speakers on TFTD, on the entirely reasonable grounds that a large and growing proportion of the population are not religious. But the BBC has steadfastly refused these requests.

        2. Good to see that Peter Hearty is still skewering the purveyors of platitudes. He stopped doing them for a while, and I think he may have mellowed since he resumed. His earlier work was much more pointed. It’s still available as zip files via platitudes.org.uk and I recommend it to readers of WEIT.

      2. If they are not willing to give secular thoughts equal time, then perhaps the segment should be renamed “Dogma for the Day”. It seems quite the misnomer to call it “thought” for the day, since actual thought is rather antithetical to religious belief.

  8. It’s not just the NY Times that features stuff like that at this time of year. The (London) Times had an article in its emetic ‘Credo’ column on Saturday by someone called Canon J John, who appears to take the existence of angels entirely seriously: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/forget-secret-santa-be-an-anonymous-angel-instead-cb83hrg68 The conclusion (‘do good anonymously’) is both secular and anodyne; the series of assumptions that lead up to it are credulously bonkers.

  9. In my view, one of the most sane-making essays on Christmas was, somewhat ironically, written by C.S. Lewis, one of the most well-known Christian apologists of all time, and titled “What Christmas means to me”. It’s not long, and well worth the reading.

    https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~tim/study/CSLewis.pdf

    Two memorable quotes:

    “If it were my business to have a ‘view’ on (Christmas as a popular holiday), I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business.”

    “… can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.”

    I’d say “Merry Christmas”, but what I really want to say is “My unqualified and unmitigated best wishes to all people of good will who value truth and honesty as well as compassion”.

    1. I dislike and disagree with a lot of what Lewis wrote, but this is rather good. Thanks for drawing it to our attention!

    2. Re: “… can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?”

      If the past is a decent predictor, in a couple of weeks we’ll see in the media retailers quoted as being “disappointed” with sales figures. No doubt by inference they will also be disappointed with consumers.

  10. Oh SO F.. the NYTimes. I did this the other day, sharing with you my thoughts on the ACLU and my (former) funding of them.

    The Time’s embrace of all types of woo mentioned above is a contributing factor.
    Here’s a letter to my fellow NYC liberals I sent lately:

    “Friends,
    I’m unsubscribing from the Times. I can’t stand being lied to anymore and this has gone on for nearly a decade.

    Reasons:
    Their CONSTANT lying about race. See the engram I sent of mentions of “white supremacy” and “racism” since 2013. It is an incredible engram (also applied to Wash Post, WSJ, LA Times).

    Denial about factual biology in favor of the trans cult (which will be looked back on as being somewhere between thalidomide, FGM and lobotomy in a few years).

    And the last straw for me is evidenced by this shit, almost every day. Best shown by today’s factually absurd commentary on:
    lie:https://twitter.com/GazaHealth/status/1739042000949674370
    Where do I start with this one?

    Any rag which is all in for Al Qaida, Taliban, Hamas or the Palestinian curse is not for me.
    A leftist, feminine tilt is fine, lying to me consistently is not.—————————-

    So…. instead I’ll read and pay for The Financial Times and the Economist because unlike city papers, vanity presses for upper class liberals enjoying confirmation bias, you just can’t LIE to the investor class and keep a business. I trusted them as an equities trader when Money was on the line, not fantasy, and still do.

    I have form in this: as a trader occasionally I’d make actual take home money in the arbitrage between (usually right wing then) nonsense verses actual verifiable reality. Numbers, say. 
    Now, two decades later, I see the same difference between lefty nonsense and verifiable reality. 
    I’ve seen the numbers and ratios against, say, BLM. 
    I know the science/ endocrinology about “trans” well. THIS topic got me shaky on The NY Times in 2017. Sadly I don’t have a trading a/c now but I resent being lied to by woke journalists. 

    I notice when our train jumped the tracks and is in a ditch.
    Note how the Times has changed in the past decade or so, particularly the last 5 years. You must have seen it. Our culture has changed, and our circumstances but some institutions can’t keep up and I want no part of those institutions.

    If I’m a “grumpy old man” – an easy dodge for sure – you also have to account for the vast numbers of leftists – many black or gay – who feel the same as I do. I have a very long list. They grumpy also?
    Note: it is all the SMART observers. That’s the thing for me: I’m far from alone. There’s an IQ gap here.

    Or… of course.. people can still live like it is 2013.
    That wasn’t a terrible time. Then.
    D.A.
    NYC”
    https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/

    1. Liked what you wrote. Can you supply a link to the engram entailing “white supremacy.” I’d much appreciate the chance to read it.
      Another grumpy old man

  11. The NYT didn’t allow comments on that article. If so, I would have posted this:

    What a brilliant marketing tactic it was back in the day to imbibe The Lord with mercy. Up till then, gods were only to be feared and appeased, but now you could have one on your side. A Personal Savior! Who wouldn’t want that? Whoever came up with that would have done quite well in today’s Madison Ave.

    Of course, it’s a classic controlling method: I will love and care for you so long as you do as I say, otherwise I’ll send you to Hell.

    And the thing about Stoics being uncaring is bs. It simply means that you accept suffering as a fact of life, it doesn’t mean you lack compassion about it or won’t act to try to prevent or allay it. This is just more Christian arrogance and hypocrisy, acting as if they alone invented compassion and no one else is capable of it, while in truth a great many of them have little compassion for others.

    1. “A Personal Savior!”

      Hmm… your own Personal Jesus? What a send up. I love the song’s double entendre, “reach out and touch faith”. Indeed.

  13. I really wish that there had been angels to warn the Jewish folk that Hamas terrorists were going to attack on 7th October. Could have saved much suffering on both sides.

    Matthew 2v13 has angels warning Joseph to flee to Egypt. Luke chapter 2 has angels appear to shepherds giving very vague directions to a manger. (Maybe the biggest miracle was that they managed to find it) . So if the angels could do that then how come they failed to do it at other useful points in history. Mind you they forgot to book the hotel in Bethlehem for Mary and Joseph to stay in so even back then they were a bit unreliable. Also forgot the street name. 1oo yards from the prison ?

    One of the biggest sins of Jesus was giving the impression that all that could be done to alleviate human suffering was to pray and hope for a miracle. Would have been helpful if he had prophesized that in the future people would find cures for many of the ailments which kill children. Jesus could have said seek and you will find that medicines can be made from chemicals and plant extracts that cure diseases and relieve pain. Making a clear glass in the shape of a human eye lens will magnify tiny things so that they become large enough to see. You will be amazed an how many things there are which are too small to see with the naked eye. Boil water to kill the tiny organisms which live in water and once cooled it will be safe to drink and you will get less illnesses. Wash you hands with this water before helping with child birth.
    Jesus could have prophesized that there are plants on the planet which are unknown to Jewish folk and which could help give more abundant and reliable year round food supply and be make a more interesting diet. Seek and you will find them. He could have also hinted that there are types of rock which if sprinkled over the soil will lead to improved yield.
    What about if Jesus had said in Matthew 24v7 that there would be earthquakes in various places but strongest along tectonic plate fault lines ? That prediction was one of the closest to being correct. Pity that Yahweh has continued with his policy on not issuing early warnings about imminent earthquakes which would allow people to flee to safety. Yet even in the Joseph in Egypt story we see the claim that Yahweh could predict famine coming seven years in the future ( yet although it is claimed the Yahweh can direct the rain to fall where he chooses he doesn’t use this to prevent the famine) . From what we are told in the Bible Yahweh is a very half hearted god, apparently having the tools for overwhelming victory but using them so sparingly that there are serious doubts about the reality of the stories.
    Quite interesting that on the internet today there is an altered vision of the Moses parting the Red Sea story where the Israeli army is cast as the Egyptians and the Hamas terrorists are the escaping Israelites. This could be an example of how the shifting sand of mythology change through the centuries, older ideas reworked. I read that some of the Matthew and Luke nativity ideas could have come from earlier Jewish writings:
    In Antiquities of the Jews 2.9.3. the Exodus story Moses’s father received a dream warning about his son similar to Joseph & Mary’s first dream warning.
    Studies like “The Bethlehem Star”, by Dr. Aaron Adair, make the scripture stories more interesting but probably leads to the congregation being less likely to put money into the collection plate so that is a major snag from the point of view of the churches.
    There is also a funny contradiction between the Matthew 6v25 which has Jesus tell people to think of how God cares for the sparrows ( birds of the air ) but then in Acts 10v10 Peter has a vision where Jesus tells him to kill the sparrows (birds of the air) seen on the table cloth and eat them.

    1. God cares for the sparrows in order that they can survive to be delivered in their time to a waiting table cloth. Probably takes more effort to catch and clean sparrows than there are calories in them, though. Maybe this is the origin of the expression, “the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”

  14. “I’ll let the historians decide whether Jesus actually did start a compassion revolution…” – J. Coyne

    He certainly wasn’t the first to teach compassion. For example, here’s what the Confucian philosopher Mencius (4th century BCE) taught:

    “One of Mencius’s most influential views was his list of four innate ethical dispositions, which he treats as what Western ethicists would call cardinal virtues: benevolence (rén), righteousness (yì), wisdom (zhì), and propriety (lĭ). Each of the four virtues is associated with a characteristic emotion or motivational attitude: “The feeling of compassion is benevolence. The feeling of disdain is righteousness. The feeling of respect is propriety. The feeling of approval and disapproval is wisdom” (Mengzi 6A6; Van Norden 2008, 149). Among these four, Mencius devotes the most discussion to benevolence and righteousness. Benevolence is manifested in the affection one has for his or her own kin, as well as compassion for the suffering of other humans, and even concern for non-human animals.”

    Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mencius/

    1. Thanks, Oliver. I think historians would agree that the ancient Chinese were way more civilized than the ancient, barbaric Hebrews and early Christians.

      1. King Solomon, arguably the high-water mark of Israelite civilization, lived 500 years before Mencius, so the ancient Hebrews had a bit of a head start on the Confucians on the road to pluralistic benevolent democracy…which the Chinese never did get to to this day despite Confucian compassion. Because the Israelites were a theocracy we can interpret the activity of the state out of the teachings of its prophets. It can’t be assumed that the Chinese imperial dynasties hewed similarly to the tenets of Confucianism even if they adopted it as an official ideology. As states, both ancient Israel and ancient China would be as ruthless and as barbaric as necessary to suppress internal divisions and acquire territory from their neighbours and competitors, regardless of the teachings of the various philosophers their civilizations spawned from time to time.

        1. While I don’t disagree that the ancient Chinese could be brutal, I would hesitate to call them barbaric. I would also point out that David and Solomon were likely completely made-up characters, whereas the evidence that Confucius and Mencius existed is stronger. I don’t consider either David or Solomon to be moral exemplars as I do Confucius and Mencius. Indeed, the Biblical portrayals of David and Solomon show them both to be ugly and repulsive, much like their god Yahweh, whose orders they take.

  15. Glad that you mentioned the Buddha; for some interesting reading, Google “Jesus was a Buddhist” – I’m convinced!

    1. Yes, there is a legend that the missing years of Jesus, that is, the long gap in the Gospel accounts between his “bar mitzvah” and the beginning of his ministry at approximately age 30, were spent in Egypt at a Buddhist Sangha there, based on some evidence that Buddhist missionaries traveled to the Middle East at that time.

      1. There are also a couple of quotes/stories in the NT that are basically the same as those of the Buddha.

      2. I understand that the first Buddhist traders and missionaries were sent out by the Emperor Ashoka of India, and had arrived in Persia, Judaea and Egypt by about 250BCE. The influence of Buddhism has been detected in Greek and Jewish philosophy as it developed from then on.

  16. I’m not reading that cr*p when I’m enjoying the pagan midwinter festival. I watched Armageddon. No, not the one with Bruce Willis, the new show from fellow atheist Ricky Gervais on Netflix 🙂

  17. Peter Wehner, emphasis his : “Through their compassion and love, we feel, I feel — even if only partly — God’s compassion and love.”

    In this way, I think religion is evil – evil because it deliberately manipulates people by their emotions – which everyone knows makes people vulnerable.

    I think this is similar to gnosis – self-knowledge – the epistemology is rooted in emotion, which is to say partly how brainwashing works.

    See Robert J. Lifton’s study on brainwashing (hse nao – “wash brain”) in China. For gnosis, there are in fact gnostic gospels – of John, for instance – or gnostic temptation, such as the serpent in the garden of Eden.

    1. “God rest ye merry gentlemen
      Let nothing you dismay
      Remember Christ our Savior
      Was born on Christmas Day
      To save us all from Satan’s pow’r
      When we were gone astray
      Oh tidings of comfort and joy
      Comfort and joy
      Oh tidings of comfort and joy”

      If that’s not crazy I don’t know what is. Funny thing is, I like the song.

      It’s hard to believe in this day and age that quite a few people still believe every word of that, but I’ve learned over the years to take them at their word when they say they do. When they say Jesus is necessary for compassion? Necessary to prevent rape and pillaging? I take them at their word.

  18. There are also a couple of quotes/stories in the NT that are basically the same as those of the Buddha.

  19. For your consideration, agnostic sociologist, Rodney Stark states that Christianity exposed the weaknesses of paganism and provided an alternative way of life, one in which love, acceptance, and care were central. Highlights from his seminal work, “The Rise of Christianity” here: https://thejesusquestion.org/2013/01/20/the-rise-of-christianity-by-rodney-stark/

    Why can’t this pesky, itinerate, broke-poor radical rabbi just fade away into oblivion after 2000 years???

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