Christmas is upon us, as our volatile Malaysian year of 2007 grinds down to an end, while the prospect of a general election simmers uncertainly in the not-too-distant horizon.

Many people must be heaving a giant sigh of relief. Our country has just gone through a few catatonic moments that have shaken the national soul to the core. The government is now pre-occupied with damage control. The political drama unfolding before public eyes may be just the prologue of more disturbing events to come. But at least, we have the reprieve of a long festive period ahead.

First, there is the Hari Raya Haji, followed closely by Winter Solstice Festival for the Chinese, and Christmas for all Christians. In a flash, there would be the Gregorian New Year and the Chinese New year in quick succession. This is the favourite time of the year for office workers in the cities, and many of them take long leave to go home to their kampongs and home towns for various celebrations, and for the renewal of old family ties.

Christmas is also a time of rich picking for many businesses. From early to mid December onwards, the cavernous shopping malls all over Kuala Lumpur have been decked with all the usual Christmas paraphernalia of mesmerising decorations, with a huge artificial Christmas tree as the usual centre piece.

Newspapers are full of pages and pages of abundant advertisements, publishing all kinds of promotions and sales in all types of goods and services. Restaurants and entertainment outlets also offer all kinds of packages, and the youthful clubbing addicts in the Klang Valley can look forward to a riotous Christmas Eve with repressed excitement.

Christians form only 15 percent of our nation’s population, but Malaysians have more or less adopted this religious festival as a national event. How we Malaysians love a festival and a public holiday!

On Christmas Eve which falls on next Monday, Jalan Bukit Bintang will be turned into a massive street carnival. Tens of thousands of young people of all races will throng the noisy elbow-room-only street party that will last well past midnight, when they will do the count down. The same process will repeat itself a week later, on New Year’s Eve.

I wonder how many Christians there are among them. Christians are supposed to go to church to attend mid-night mass during that time.

Superficial tolerance

Christmas is the day to commemorate the birth of Christ, though it is almost certain that Jesus was not born exactly on Dec 25. Non-Christians tend to think that Christmas is the most important day on the Christian calendar. But according to the Catholic Church, Easter Sunday is far more important than Christmas from a theological point of view.

The reason is that Good Friday and Easter Sunday commemorates the death and resurrection of Jesus, and that is evidence of his divinity and immortality as prophesised in the Bible.

That Christmas is celebrated in a big way in Malaysia is good for our multi-religious multi-racial polyglot population. Diversity is more than the spice of life. It is the essence of national integration and social harmony.

Nevertheless, beneath the veneer of superficial tolerance, there are seething under-currents of inter-religious tension. In the context of Christmas, some die hard Malay nationalists tend to think of Christianity as a legacy of our colonial past. Given the world situation as it is, what with the developed predominantly Christian Western countries in the grip of hysterical Islam phobia, some Malaysian Muslims tend also to identify Christianity as the religion of Western hegemony.

Then again, relations between the different faiths in Malaysia can be a mirror image of our tenuous racial relations, especially when racial identity of the Malays is directly tied to their Islamic belief. Whenever there is any suggestion of an inter-faith dialogue, it is assumed that the meeting would see Islam head-to-head against all the other religions.

Naturally, many Christian clerics and laymen must be seething with discontent with what they perceive as official injustices against their freedom of religion. In a Malaysiakini report, a church publication has just been suspended by the authorities for using to word “Allah” to signify God in their Bahasa Version. Christian Bibles which committed the alleged offence in the past had also been treated likewise.

You would think that a monotheistic personalised God by any name would be almighty and could not be diminished in any way by being given various human signifiers. But then, over-zealousness has always been the mortal sin of the faithful of various monotheistic religions down through the millennia.

In this country, the primitive official narrative gives the impression that Malaysians are all very sensitive about their faith, and there should be no open talk or comment about other people’s religious beliefs or else there would be a riot. This same primitive Third World mentality also bans gathering of more than a few people on the street according to the whims and fancies of some police officers, because they think all Malaysians are born natural rioters.

These frogs under the coconut then unashamedly declare their ambition to achieve First World standing for Malaysia by 2020!

Exercise in futility

I apologise. In this spirit of Christmas, I should not be such a caustic cynical grouch, or else risk being visited by Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. I am also infected by the air of happy anticipation around me. Having immersed myself in a pool of bile in the past month or so in this column, I ought to dispatch some peace to men on earth of good will.

Personally, I am grateful to the Catholic Church in Sarawak. They gave me an excellent secondary education in English, and the La Salle Brothers there never once tried to convert me to Christianity, though I studied Catholic catechism five years, from Form One to Form Five. The Brothers also imbibed me with a life-long love affair with literature and learning in general. What greater gift can any teacher give to his students?

When I studied philosophy in a university on the frozen Canadian Prairies in my 20s, religion was the main item on our intellectual menu, since, together with the philosophy of ancient Greece, Judaic-Christian traditions had helped shape the direction of the entire Western civilisation.

We had to go through the immortal works of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, St Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and other major Christian theologians. I now know all the major arguments for God’s existence, the First Cause, the Cosmological Proof, the Teleological Proof, the Ontological Proof, and so on.

In private, the argument about whether God exists goes on between friends. Usually, such an argument is an exercise in futility. The parties on both sides of the debate can never agree to what constitutes sufficient proof for the existence of God. I doubt many people have been converted to Christianity on the strength of all those ancient proofs anyway. Religious faith does not require logical or rational proof in order to nurture belief in God.

In any case, such argument about whether God exists is saturated with rhetoric. Rhetorical arguments are presented to win, and not to engage in mutual and common understanding. That is why this argument is an exercise in futility. What most people fail to examine though, is what is meant by “existence”! Then you will really have to understand the concept of “non-existence” or “nothingness”. I would say Buddhism is a little more thoughtful on this subject than Christianity.

At the end of the day, I remain detached from any organised religion. It does not mean I am not religious. I have problem thinking through this subject, and the need becomes increasingly urgent when I realise I am approaching the 6th decade of my “existence”.

Many of my friends think of religion as the utilitarian pursuit of avoiding hell and going to heaven after death. We are all utilitarian to various degrees I suppose. But in the end, only God will make that judgement of where we go after we live out our natural lives.

With love, comes forgiveness

What I respect most about Christianity though is their emphasis on love and forgiveness. The Christian imperative that would really bring world peace is: “Love your neighbour as yourself”.

Unfortunately for the faiths of the world, many believers consider only those with the same religious belief as neighbours. Worse still, they consider those who belong to their sect within the same faith as their neighbours.

Another problem is also that we fallible human beings do not really know all that much about how to love others and ourselves.

With love, comes forgiveness. The Lord’s Prayer, which billions of Christians all over the world recite everyday, contains these wonderful words to their Creator: “Our Father ….Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.”

In this spirit, I ask for your forgiveness if I have offended you with my words.

Peace to men on Earth of good will. May there be many such men and women. Merry Christmas, everyone!