{Renato Fontes (thank you!) did this nice English translation of my Portuguese Christmas Message to Unbelievers, so that I'm also spreading it!}Message of good will to those who believe in other religions, toatheists and secularists of all kinds:Please - just for this time - yield to the temptation. CelebrateChristmas too (without solstices or other jokes, please). Don't impose that new year's negationist penance upon yourself ... "Celebrate what? Christianity has brought only oppression to the world!" Yes, Christianity is not innocent. I didn't forget about the Crusades,Servetus, the indigenous genocide by the "Christian" settlers, not tomention the persecution to heretics, the religious wars in Europe, thepriests' pedophilia, Edir Macedo (translator's note: Brazilianequivalent of Crefto Dollaror Benny Hinn), the spankings from your overpiousmother, and so on... But, anyway, those evils were already in theworld before Jesus appeared. Even the persecution of "heretics" wassomething that Antiochus Epiphanius (pagan) already did - that's whatthe book of the Maccabees says. Humans have always had reasons to dosuch evil things. It doesn't take a special inspiration or ingenuityto do them. On a second thought: maybe Edir Macedo has been a genuine Brazilianinnovation. :-D But, even if you don't believe that Jesus is the divine Logos in humanflesh and are mad at the tithe, you have to admit that, without Jesus,there wouldn't be some innovations that demand inspiration, ingenuityand virtue. Without Jesus there wouldn't be Christian anthropology, orChristian universalism, or the Apostle Paul (see Slavoj Zizek), orSt.Patrick's and St. Columba's missions, or thephilosophical-religious synthesis of the semitic mind with the Greekmind to form Europe, or the linear view of History, or thedesacralization of nature, or the rupture from Greek rationalism, orAugustine (and, in the future, the concept of Self), or the abolitionof the infanticide and repression to slavery, or Christian "caritas",or the preservation of the Latin and Greek heritage after the fall ofthe Roman Empire... And then there would be no West, as well as the first hospitals, orChristian aristotelianism (or the rupture from Christian aristotelianism),or Cambridge and Oxford, or Dante Alighieri, or Pico Della Mirandola,or the Renaissance, or Rafael, or the Reformation, Luther with hisfreedom of belief, or public schools to teach how to read the Bible(and other things as well), or Johann Sebastian Bach, or Rembrandt, orempirism, or the Royal Society (see Hooykas), or the scientificrevolution, Pascal, Martin Bucer, the modern constitutions, or even"Lex Rex" (see Rutheford), French huguenots, or the French Revolution(or the American Revolution, for that matter, or even Marx, if youwill), not even Harvard, Yale and Princeton with their respectivefounding churches, or the modern idea of human rights (seeWolterstorff), or William Carey and the end of the burning of thewidows in India, or the abolition of slavery (seeWilberforce), or Comenius, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, not to mentionnegro spirituals (or Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Rock'n'Roll and maybeeven... Heavy Metal!), and the list goes on: the Red Cross, Maritain,the modern universal declaration of human rights, Martin Luther King("I Have a Dream"), Solidarnosc in Poland, Tarkovski, Arvo Part,Malick, or Desmond Tutu and the Commission for Truth andReconciliation, in South Africa, and so forth... Yes, you can curse the misery