The ethics of regifting is always a hot discussion at Christmastime and the weeks that follow various office parties and family exchanges. Apparently, there are those who insist that regifting is a tawdry practice, and there are those who have practiced it for years and see no harm. For those who might not be familiar with the concept, Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary offers a helpful definition: To regift is “to give an unwanted gift to someone else” or “to give as a gift something one previously received as a gift.” In any case, two out of three people say they have either regifted or are considering regifting. And while there are no doubt many successful regifters among us, there are also unfortunate stories to show for the less successful, which make the discussion entertaining. Imagine opening the very gift you had given your mother-in-law a year earlier.

The concept of regifting is similar to a word coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit. “Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom,” writes Tolkien. “Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.” Whether Hobbit or human, regifting is evidently nothing new.

Even so, when a colleague of mine referred to Christmas as the “season of regifting,” I was certain he had been the victim of too many unfortunate gift exchanges. Except he wasn’t talking about unwanted scarves or random gift-cards. He was talking about the mysterious gift that is resurrected each Christmas and presented again as if new. Year after year, we reopen the story of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the magi, and the star. “God is a regifter,” he said. The child is the gift.

The season of Advent leading through Christmas to the feast day of Epiphany we celebrate today is a journey the church sets before the world to meet the Christ child… again. Each year the same story is recalled and the same expectant hope is given time to grow. Each Christmas is an opportunity to unwrap the same gift we were given last year and the year before and the year before and the year before. Once more we have before us the choice to set it on a shelf like an unwanted present or to receive the child—the gift of the Father—again as if new. Unlike the many mathoms that fill a Hobbit’s house with purposeless treasure, this gift is not useless; neither is it sent out from hands that let go lightly or half-heartedly.

In a Christmas episode of The Simpsons, the character who was playing one of the three wise men in a nativity scene admits to regifting the myrrh he’s brought for baby Jesus. “Because,” he pleads. “Nobody needs myrrh!” There is actually some truth to this. The uses of myrrh are few, and it is, by far, a strange and unlikely gift to receive. Myrrh is a rare and expensive spice, most notably used in embalming the dead. But this myrrh, as the magi knew and the prophecies foreshadowed, was something this child would use.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Mathoms and Myrrh →

The following excerpt comes from Ravi Zacharias’s newly released book Jesus Among Secular Gods coauthored with Vince Vitale.

It was years ago when I was speaking at an openly and avowedly atheistic institution that I was fascinated by a questioner who asked what on earth I meant by the term God. The city was Moscow; the setting was the Lenin Military Academy. The atmosphere was tense. Never had I been asked before to define the term in a public gathering. And because I was in a country so historically entrenched in atheism, I suspected the question was both hostile and intentional. I asked the questioner if he was an atheist, to which he replied that he was. I asked him what he was denying. That conversation didn’t go very far. So I tried to explain to him what we meant when we spoke of God.

It is fascinating to talk to a strident atheist and try to get beneath the anger or hostility. God is a trigger word for some that concentrates all his or her stored animosity into a projectile of words. But as the layers of their thinking and experience are unpacked, the meaning of atheism to each one becomes narrower and narrower, each term dying the death of a thousand qualifications. Oftentimes, the description is more visceral and is discussed with pent-up anger rather than in a sensible, respectful discussion. More than once I have been amazed at the anger expressed by members of the atheist groups at one or other of the Ivy League schools in the United States to which I have been invited to speak, anger that I was even invited and that I had the temerity to address them.

In theory, the academy has always been a place where dissent serves a valuable purpose in helping thinking students to weigh out ideas and make intelligent choices. And, dare I say, had I been a Muslim speaker, there would have been no such dissent as I faced. Evidently, being able to instill fear in people has a lot to do with how much freedom of speech you are granted. But alas! For some, at least, civil discourse is impossible. To her credit, at the end of a lecture, one senior officer in one club stood up and thanked me, a veiled apology for the resistance vented before the event. I did appreciate that courtesy.

This unfettered anger on the part of some is quite puzzling to me. I was raised in India where I was not a Hindu and, in fact, never once gave it any serious consideration. For that matter, I’m not sure if I even really believed in God. I was a nominal Christian but never gave that much thought, either. Most of my friends were either Hindu or Muslim or Sikh, with a few others of different faiths. I never recall feeling any anger or hostility toward those who believed differently than me, no matter how ludicrous their beliefs may have seemed to me. Nor do I remember ever being on the receiving end of such anger and hostility because I did not have the same belief.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Examining Religions →

The following essay from Vince Vitale is an excerpt from his newly released Jesus Among Secular Gods coauthored with Ravi Zacharias.

Suppose there was a machine (maybe before long there will be!) that would give you any experience you desired. You could choose to experience winning Olympic gold, or falling in love, or making a great scientific discovery, and then the neurons in your brain would be stimulated such that you would experience a perfect simulation of actually doing these things. In reality, you would be floating in a tank of goo with electrodes hooked up to your brain. Given the choice, should you preprogram your experiences and plug into this machine for the rest of your life?(1)

I join philosopher Robert Nozick, who first devised this thought experiment in the 1970s, in thinking that we should not plug into this “experience machine.” And this suggests the falsity of hedonism, a view dating back over two millennia to the Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus. If all that mattered were pleasure (in other words, if hedonism were true), then we should plug into the experience machine and we should encourage everyone we know to plug in as well.

We rightly care about more than just happiness or pleasure. We want to not only feel loved; we want to actually be loved. We want to not only dream of accomplishing our dreams; we want to actually accomplish them. We want to not only feel inside as if we have made a difference in life; we want to actually make a difference. Hedonism is not the desire of our hearts; it is all that is left when every other “ism” has failed us.

A recent academic book suggested that, on hedonistic assumptions, because some animals can feel pleasure like human persons but cannot suffer in some of the worst ways as human persons, those animals could be understood to be more valuable than humans.(2) If the acquisition of pleasure and the avoidance of pain is the measure of all, these animals score well on pleasure with fewer deductions for the complex psychological pains such as anxiety and disappointment to which the human psyche is vulnerable. This same assumption led utilitarian Jeremy Bentham to the view that “the game of push-pin [a children’s game] is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.”(3) The problem here is not with the logic leading to the conclusions but with the underlying assumption of pleasure as the sole determiner of value.

Pleasure and happiness are good things, but they are not the only good things. We should care not only about feeling good on the inside but also about truth and about the impact that our lives have outside of ourselves. As C.S. Lewis put it, if happiness were all he was after, a good bottle of port would do the trick.(4)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – “Whatever Makes You Happy” →