Merry Christmas

I work for Calgary Catholic Immigration Society. People sometimes suppose that I am part of a large religious organization.

Well, we aren't particularly organized, and as for religion, we are all over the map. Me myself personally, well, I kind of hang in there with the Guthries, when asked on any questionnaire as to what my religion might be, I always wish there was an "all" box. I enthusiastically endorse all of the following (and a good deal more besides):

I am a Jew: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."

And I am a Christian: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

And I am a Muslim: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God."

And I am a Buddhist: "Suffering ends when craving ends, when one is freed from desire."

And I am a Communist: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

And I am a capitalist: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."

And I am an atheist: "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

Now I can hold all these apparently conflicting ideas in my head at once, with no stress or difficulty of any kind, and I have to wonder, why are we slaughtering each other over what we imagine to be differences in them?

Jesus wept. (And I am sure that Moses, Muhammed, Buddha, and Karl Marx and Adam Smith for that matter, wept from time to time too. And I, in my humble fashion, have wept from time to time myself.)

Merry Christmas.