Atheists' Christmas Billboards

I recently saw a news report about atheists putting up billboards denouncing Christmas.  I went to Google and found several examples such as "Who Needs Christ for Christmas?  Nobody!"  Really?  Apart from Christ, there is no Christmas.  If there were no Christ, there would be no Christmas.  Whatever some choose to make of Christmas, it only and ever began because of our recognition of God's Gift to mankind - Christ.

But why do atheists go to so much trouble to debunk the meaning of Christmas if they believe the whole thing to be a myth?  Why is there such a resistance to others celebrating the birth of someone they don't think ever existed?  I don't hear them rearing up against Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.  No one cares if you believe in myths. They may feel you are foolish or silly or sad, but there is no need to make a big deal of it.

But, there is a need for atheists to make a big deal about our faith in Christ and our celebrating his birth.  Why?  Because they are threatened by our faith.  They are threatened by the very thought of a divine standard of good and evil.  They are threatened by the truth that man is not the zenith of all things, self-made and self-determined.

There is something in them that wars against the very idea of God, of Someone to whom man must answer, to whom man must one day yield.  But if they really believed, in their core, that there was no God, no Christ to be in Christmas, how could they be threatened?  Why wouldn't they simply shake their heads at the silliness of we Christians?  Because, in their core is a spark of divine that begins to burn when the truth is being revealed around them and their inner darkness is challenged by the light.

Man is made in the image of God (cf. Gen 1:27) and that image burns within us even as many try to cover it over and snuff it out.  Regardless of our desire to be other, we are children of God - often rebellious children, but children nonetheless.  It is the reality of God, of His Son of His Spirit that calls our spirits that creates their concern, their hostility, their desire to remove His very name from the public square.

You really can't take Christ out of Christmas, he is the only reason it came to be in the first place.  Atheists and those of non-Christian beliefs of any stripe can choose not to celebrate Christmas just as we can choose to celebrate it.  Why not, in this era of so-called tolerance, do not the atheists just tolerate our choice to worship as we tolerate their choice not to?  Jus' Ask'n.