It's that time of year, formerly the season of Christ's Mass (Christmas) then sanitized to 'the Holidays', and currently, according to many voices in the news media, 'the Shopping Season'. And people tend to throw around the word 'nativity' a lot.
What's YOUR nativity? Mine was Oct. 5th, in a year somewhat before 1965. My mother's was June 4th in a year before 1932. My nation's nativity is July 4th, 1776. Because 'nativity' comes from the Latin 'natus', which means 'born'. The word 'native' is also of this origin.
Before I became a Christian I for many years was a Neopagan and did a lot of astrology. The word 'nativity' is often used in serious astrology books, because one concern of astrology is predicting things based on the position of the heavenly bodies at the moment of a person's birth. The book illustrated above is one example of that usage.
Now that I'm a Christian, I no longer recommend dabbling in astrology in that way. There are a couple of sound Christian books based on the idea that the zodiac constellations actually are a prophecy of the story of Jesus Christ, a Gospel written in the stars. One of these days I shall unearth those books and blog about them.
The Nativity, capitalized, in Christian and formerly Christian countries, is understood to refer to the Christian Feast of the Nativity, otherwise known as Christ's Mass. I suppose in Buddhist countries that celebrate Buddha's Birthday as a national holiday, Nativity, capitalized, would be understood as referring to that day.
The Nativity, Christian version, when depicted anywhere that an angry atheist might view it causes anger in the way, say, a depiction of Saint Nicholas AKA Santa Claus does not. The angry atheist community has not yet thought of boycotting Christmas/the Holidays and coming up with some holiday of their own to celebrate. I guess they just don't have anything to celebrate, so they have to try to stop others from celebrating.
What the Nativity, and Christ's Mass, means to an individual depends on their opinion of Jesus Christ. Even when I was a non-Christian I understood that there was a good body of evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus, and that the earliest and therefore most important record of Jesus' life was to be found in the books of the canonical New Testament--- those much-talked-about 'other Gospels' are uniformly written considerably later.
An educated person in our (post)-Christian culture, regardless of religious beliefs, has to come to a basic understanding of Jesus Christ, who he was and what he taught, just to be culturally literate. Because just parroting what other, possibly ill informed people have to say about Jesus is not the act of a logical, rational and scientific-minded person. Find out for yourself!
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I always go to the source - the Bible.
ReplyDeleteNow that you mention it, I'm surprised they haven't boycotted the holiday. Guess they still want presents.