Scrooged

I wanted to comment on Ken Blanchard's excellent post on Ebenezer Scrooge's virtues.  I don't have time to go into details, but there are profound questions raised by the post.
1. Is philosophical liberalism an adequate account of human good?  If not, with what should it be supplemented?  Like Tocqueville, Ken suggests that Christian virtue has leavened some of liberalism's excesses (e.g., radical individualism).  Leo Strauss once wrote (and I paraphrase), "Because we are friends of liberalism we should not be flatterers of liberalism."  People who like liberal democracy (which is pretty much all of us) need to be aware of its shortcomings and compensate accordingly.
2. Why has Christmas superseded Easter as the preeminent Christian holiday?  While Christmas and Easter cannot really be theologically separated (Easter does not happen without Christmas, of course), it would seem that the events of Easter week are of greater Christian significance than Christmas. Let me suggest three explanations (neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive):

A. Marketing: In the name of sales, the business sector long ago effectively played up the importance of Christmas through mass advertising.  Example: Our depiction of Santa Claus is straight from a Coca Cola ad. 

B. It is inherently more materially attractive to get a tangible train set on Christmas than intangible salvation on Easter. In short, a secular materialist people should value Christmas more than Easter.

C. In an age when the popular religious doctrine can be summed up as "it's nice to be nice to the nice" Christmas, with its emphasis on giving, gains more religious currency than Easter.  If our salvation is based solely on doing good deeds, then the preeminence of Christmas as a religious holiday makes sense.  Of course it is good to be charitable.  But those charitable deeds, separated from the Cross and done without Christian love, are empty.  Faith without works is dead, and works without faith are dead.