"Christianity is, and has always been, a West Asian / Middle Eastern religion. Its geography, culture, worldview and founding stories are rooted in this land among peoples, languages and social structures that look far more like those in today's Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan than anything imagined in Europe. Even Judaism, invoked in the term Judeo-Christian values, is itself a thoroughly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West received Christianity it certainly did not give birth to it."
"The season has become a performance of abundance, nostalgia, and consumerism a holiday stripped of its theological and moral core. Even the familiar lines of the Christmas song Silent Night obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born into serenity but into upheaval. He was born under military occupation, to a family displaced by an imperial decree, in a region living under the shadow of violence."
Christmas is a story of empire, injustice and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path. Christianity is and has always been a West Asian/Middle Eastern religion, rooted among peoples, languages and social structures akin to those in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. Judaism is also a thoroughly Middle Eastern phenomenon. The West received Christianity; it did not give birth to it. In much of the West Christmas functions as a cultural marketplace: commercialised, romanticised, sentimental, and marked by lavish gift-giving that overshadows concern for the poor. The familiar nativity imagery obscures that Jesus was born under military occupation to a displaced family amid imperial violence.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
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