This holiday, my dad and I tried to write about the commonalities among decent people. December 25 has long been the holiday to celebrate new life. Yet we also wanted to acknowledge that some bad people choose death. Prior to this year’s celebration, one murderer targeted Christians specifically. We wanted to discuss the significance of this crime in light of the time when Christians and others celebrate the birth of life. Here are a couple of quotes:
Christmas Eve offers a celebration of life
… Christmas Eve is the night of anticipation. It is the night when children sleep anxiously, awaiting the wonders of the new day. It celebrates the night when Joseph sat with Mary in a dirty barn in a strange city, in anguish that this was the best he could offer his young wife as she suffered labor pains with the hopes and the worries that comfort and plague every new mother. It is the night when the wise travel from afar to worship new life, when the very skies seem to sparkle in wonderment at the first breath a baby draws into his lungs. …
The murderer targeted Christians; he wrote that some Christians “are to blame for most of the problems in the world.” This prompted one Christian to reply that “the living God and his followers offend the world, the flesh, and the devil merely by reflecting light in the darkness.”
But whatever the problems of Christianity (real or imagined), whatever offense others may find in it, such things are irrelevant to the heinous crime. In a civilized world, people work out their disagreements through rational debate in the public square. In a civilized world, Christians, atheists, Muslims, and others live side by side as neighbors under a political system that protects each individual’s rights. …