By Simon Smart
This year children's author Frank Cottrell Boyce's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again breathed new life into an old story. In the latest version the magical vehicle is a broken down camper van that flies the Tooting family to fame, rescuing them from scrapes and propelling them to exotic adventures. I can see my seven-year-old just wishing the story be true, but deep down knowing it's fantasy. Perhaps that's the sentiment that was on display last Christmas when atheists in the US bought billboard ad space in New York. The ad showed a nativity scene with three men on camels, a bright star overhead. The text read, "You KNOW it's a Myth - This Season, Celebrate REASON!"
A ''sign'' of enlightened thinking perhaps, but the idea is not new. Those responsible ride on the shoulders of some formidable opponents of religion who regard it as a human construction emanating from our deepest fears, hopes and dreams. Various permutations of this notion gained popularity from the 19th century when Ludwig Feuerbach posited that God was the product of human wishes.
Others ran with that, giving their own slant to essentially the same idea. God is the substitute for living a life of drudgery in a factory while others get rich (Karl Marx), a projection of repressed desires and disappointment with our dads (Sigmund Freud), and a symbol of human potential (Erich Fromm). "In every wish we find concealed a god, but in or behind every god we find nothing but a wish," wrote Feuerbach.
"What is it that people wish for more than anything else?" asks French philosopher André Comte-Sponville. His answer: We don't want to die. We want to be united with lost loved ones. We long to be loved unconditionally and for justice and peace to triumph. Religion and especially Christianity promise all that, says Comte-Sponville, but like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it's too good to be true.
Religion ''as a human construction'' sounds potentially devastating for believers until you realise that something can be a human projection and a reflection on reality at the same time.
American sociologist Peter Berger illustrates this with an example from mathematics. Humans project out of their consciousness mathematics that somehow corresponds to a mathematical reality external to them, and which their consciousness appears to reflect. Berger argues that this is possible because "man himself is part of the same overall reality" and that "there is a fundamental affinity between the structures of his consciousness and the structures of the empirical world".
Berger suggests the same may be true of the projections of humanity's religious imagination.
As another year rolls around we get ever-diminishing glimpses of the ancient Christmas story. A child is born among straw, mud and poverty, who also, so the story goes, happens to be the one who was present at the laying of the foundations of the universe. Is it a story that has any currency these days?
I'm writing this from the children's hospital in Randwick where I've been for more than a week with my sick daughter. It's a sobering place. Some kids endure multiple operations and excruciating pain drawn out over months. And then there are the cases that you know won't end well. Parents of these children carry with them an inexpressible sadness. This is the world we live in. But Christmas morning reminds us that there is a promise that one day there will be a world of no mourning or crying or pain.
And so those in the West who still celebrate Christmas will do so with a profound sense that this day represents a moment of hope that, perhaps despite appearances to the contrary, God is real, and that he cares enough to get intimately involved in the human drama.
Simon Smart is a director of the Centre for Public Christianity.
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