What is Christmas?

Christmas has varied from year to year for me. As a child, I remember times with family in Lebanon, traveling from one part of the country to the other to see everyone in the one day. In recent years we’ve gradually cut down on family activities during Christmas, and never established much of a tradition around the day.

If you want 5 different opinions on how a Christian should approach Christmas, you need only ask 5 different ones to get the varying beliefs! Give Me Truth has been an eye opener in pointing out the variety that can exist in traditions, standards, and positions on issues like this. Christmas has been one of those things that gets discussed often, often bringing out some strong opinions. I’d like to post some simple reflections from my pondering this occasion, and hope to point out some things we all agree on.

Christmas is a special time of the year, even if it’s just the busy shopping centres and public holidays. Regardless of what association Christmas has to you personally, you can’t help but notice the decorations, the carols playing in the shops and sung at church, and the general merry spirit the seasons seems to bring about.

Biblically there is no special association given to the 25th of December, to my understanding it’s not even the day Christ was born. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate Christ’s birth during this time, only that we’re not commanded to do so specifically. Personally I’ve yet to develop strong conviction either way of how much attention should be given to Christmas, which (hopefully) makes it easy not to offend anyone with this post.

Over the years I’ve found Christmas to be a great time to talk about Christ to family and friends. Christmas seems to create countless witnessing opportunities, this year I found unsaved friends questioning the appropriateness of carols and bemoaning the drudgery of going to church! If you have trouble bringing Christ into a conversation, Christmas makes it hard to avoid. I’d just like to encourage you to take advantage of such opportunities to share the story of Christ’s birth, and his subsequent life, death, and resurrection.

Update on the Internet filter

It’s been in the news constantly, here are some snippets:

In response to the claims that the proposed filter couldn’t monitor peer to peer transfers (which is where illegal material can be easily exchanged), the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, said they will be trialing software capable of filtering such transfers.

news.com.au ran a story mentioning how a couple of Internet blacklists blocked by two countries were leaked, providing everyone with the location of the material the governments carefully blocked access to, another article by The Christian Post here.

There is little new information to report on the situation, the uproar has been continuous. The opposition to the plan is based on both the the censorship it would enforce, and the technical difficulties and speed limitations it would bring along.

Personally I’m quite happy with censorship and believe it to be within a government’s rights for any medium, I don’t believe it’s doable without serious implications to the quality of the Internet as a whole in Australia though, which is my big fear here. We’re already very much behind most developed countries as far as Internet quality goes, we need a serious look at the infrastructure instead of pursuing a plan which is neither feasible nor capable of achieving its objectives.

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