It's the economy, stupid?

There is a class of Christian businessman
Whose myth that Mary was God's courtesan
    They're yearly given to exploit,
    And even though they're maladroit,
They do it now again because they can.

It's more than a month before December 25, but the question, "Why Keep Christ in Christmas?" is being asked already by a paying advertiser in our local newspaper¹. I suppose, if the question weren't the title of a full-page ad, but were appearing on the comics page, one might retort something like, "But without 'Christ,' 'Christmas' would be more [Spanish 'mas']."

But it's an ad, and the page goes on:

Why is the Greeting
"Merry Christmas"
so important to the Christian
buying public at Christmas Time?

(Ah, the buying public!)

Because WE CAN NEVER forget
THE PERSON, THE MESSAGE,
and THE MISSION of
-JESUS CHRIST-
"THE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD"
"And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name
JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."

-Matthew 1:21

From "the buying public's" sin of putting too much on their credit cards during shopping sprees? Was Christ's mission, then, to improve "the buying public's" finances?

Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason (1794), wrote that

It is not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born at a time when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing, at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion.

Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or Mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it.

...It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology...The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue...

Aha, revenue!

MANY OF YOU CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS BY PURCHASING
GIFTS TO GIVE TO OTHERS. PLEASE PATRONIZE
BUSINESSES THAT INCLUDE THE GREETING
"MERRY CHRISTMAS"

---

Without CHRIST
there would be no
CHRISTmas.

Tom Paine's final clause, following a semicolon;

...and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious² fraud.

And remains,

Too, perhaps, to ridicule with limericks,
To prick in verse with pointed rhymer's tricks,
    And, by means of jokes
    And of jibes and pokes,
To sting sharply with mocking laughter kicks?

_________________

1. The paid advertising was

   Sponsored By: Upper Room Church of God in Christ • Superintendent Patrick L. Wooden, Sr., Pastor • www.plwooden.org • Called2action.org
   96% of American consumers celebrate Christmas and 5% celebrate Hanukkah, & 2% celebrate Kwanzaa
   (FoxNews.com "Majority OK With Public Nativity Scenes" by Dana Blanton, June 18, 2004)

   "FoxNews"? Didn't you just know that the Busheviks' propaganda organ might be involved in this somehow?
    
2. "Amphibious"? I suppose Paine must have had in mind the word's sense of "combining two characteristics," not necessarily "able to live both on land and in water," but the myth that Jesus was "both god and man."