New Year’s Day – 1 January 2024 Luke 2:16-21
Peter Boghossian used to be one of the most shrill voices in the atheist blogosphere. He had written a book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, and had even suggested seriously that religious faith ought to be classified as a mental disorder.
That was then.
Now, though not yet a believer, Peter Boghossian has decided that Christianity is not the enemy of evidence-based thinking he had once imagined. He now believes that secular, “post-Christian” culture is the real problem, and along with a number of his erstwhile secularist colleagues he is beginning to suspect that a re-appropriation of the Christian story may be part of the answer.
At the start of this century it became very fashionable to jettison religious belief – people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and many others became rich and famous doing it. They thought the embrace of naturalism and materialism – the claim that there is a physical explanation for everything that makes us who we are – would issue in a society that was rational, scientific, tolerant, intelligent and peaceful. What we have gotten instead is a society that is irrational, intolerant, unscientific, opposed to free speech and other civil liberties, unable to provide the sense of meaning and purpose that even minimal mental health requires. We have a society with greater access to information, leisure and wealth than ever before, and yet we are more unhappy than we have ever been. You don’t have to take my word for it – the mental health data available from the CDC, especially relating to suicide, speak for themselves. Scientists, philosophers, podcasters and pundits of all kinds have been wondering about this, and have been struck by the fact that the people who have the greatest amount of meaning, joy and peace in their lives seem disproportionately to be people of serious Christian faith.
They know what coincidence is, and they know this isn’t it.
So they find themselves, often despite themselves, open to conversation about Jesus. They find themselves reaching tentatively toward those words that Mary treasured and pondered in her heart, wondering, perhaps even hoping that these might be after all the healing that centuries of believers have known them to be.
Maybe the conversation about Jesus interests you, but you don’t know where to start. It isn’t hard. Start with just one thought – turn it toward Jesus and see what happens. Try this one: Jesus himself is here, now – as human as he was when he came out of the womb, as divine as he was when he created the universe. He is here, now, and he’s working on you. What is he doing? If you don’t know, ask yourself, “What did he say he would do?”
“I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Hebrews 8:12)
Reflect on just that much, and watch where it goes. Be honest. Take your time. Ask yourself, “If this is true, what else has to be true?”
Ask yourself if you want that.
Don’t be surprised if you do.
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