The skeptic in religious matters is in some ways an outlier when it comes to Christmas. He or she can feel a tad sheepish in pausing to admire a creatively displayed cr�che or merely humming the tune of a familiar carol.

Being agnostic by nature, the skeptic does not claim to know the unknown or the unknowable. It is with the present time and the welfare of fellow human beings that he is concerned. The skeptic is uneasy about reciting creeds composed by fourth-century bishops and is dismissive of so-called miracles along with claims of divine intervention in the natural order.

Consequently, he is able to countenance such stories as the "birth at Bethlehem" only as myth, however charming, and as metaphorical overreach. A story that might touch him more than anything in the Bible is that of Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge and his almost-too-late enlightenment to the effect that humankind, not the counting house, was his business.

That said, even the most committed skeptic cannot avoid -- and deep down may not wish to avoid -- Christmas as we know it: even those labored-over celebrations aided and abetted by free-flowing booze, catered mostaccioli and meatballs with sides of chicken wings and portions of indefinite vegetables, shoppers frantic to buy this tchotchke and that gizmo for those who already have more than they know what to do with, the calorie-freighted Christmas dinner, the evergreen all bedecked and -- if there is time -- even midnight mass. Crazy as it all is, it is in the end a nice package.

Even old Scrooge, after tending magnanimously to the needs of the Cratchits, went to church and later to his nephew's home to dance and dine.

Now this agnostic secular humanist skeptic dearly loves the fabric and texture of Christmas. He can be brought to tears by even a mediocre rendering of "Silent Night." He knows much of Handel's Messiah by heart and can sing you four of the five stanzas of Phillip Brooks' O little town of Bethlehem without recourse to a hymnal. He would not let the first of December pass without putting up a balsam wreath and weaving the tender branches of the deciduous lilac bush in his front yard with strands of twinkling white lights.

He will pace up and down the Christmas tree lot until the "perfect" fir is spotted, part with most of $40 to take it home and later enjoy it in its decorated splendor. He will wait with anticipation for children and grandchildren to gather on the Day for gift giving and a turkey dinner. He will have gone to church on Christmas Eve and have said and have sung most of the texts proper to the occasion.

What kind of things are those for a skeptic of the agnostic secular humanist sort to do? And why does he do them? Why would he count a December lost if he did not accomplish each?

Sentiment powers his celebration and his annual longing for it. Christmas is the time, is the holiday during and upon which many of his memories of parents long dead and of siblings and children now scattered among widespread longitudes are centered.

The winter solstice, too, plays a part in the largely mindless drive that takes this celebrant to such ends and makes him not so much different from the person who toddles off to church believing that Jesus was born of a virgin so that He could die to forgive the sins of everybody, excepting perhaps jihadists.

The attenuation of daylight and the darkness that falls well before the supper hour conspire with the winter cold to drive him to the warmth of his home. All of it makes him think of Christmas as he knew it when a child and before he came to grips with the impossibility of taking literally the myth of Bethlehem together with the myths that both precede and follow it.

It was so easy in his earlier years to believe it and believe in all it was given to imply. In mature years, though, he came to see that such myth-making constitutes yet another attempt to domesticate the universe by positing at its heart an infinite goodness that will somehow prevail.

But not when the most believable character in the whole of the Christmas story is Herod whom the Evangelist Matthew depicted as ordering the execution of every male child in the vicinity of Bethlehem under the age of 2 to ensure that one of them -- a certain Jesus, said to be a child king -- would be removed as a threat to Herod's own kingship.

That particular case of wholesale murder -- called in tradition the slaying of the Holy Innocents -- probably did not occur as it is reported, however typical it was of Herod's outrageous behavior. It is told of only in one of the gospels, and no mention of it is made in other documents of the period. Yet, wholesale murder has haunted the human epoch from its beginning, and often enough it has been sponsored by religious zeal.

Certainly unintended is the disquieting juxtaposition of the execution of the Holy Innocents in the Gospel according to Matthew with the birth of a child lauded by angelic choristers as the courier of "peace on Earth, good will toward men" in the Gospel according to Luke. The two documents emerged a decade or two apart and largely from different sources. Yet, when Johannes Gutenberg printed the Bible in book form, the yawning gap between evil and good became alarmingly obvious.

Turn a few pages, and you go from massacre to cantata -- both prominent in a text some call "The Word of God." If that doesn't invite skepticism, I don't know what will. It can make "Silent Night" more of a weary lament than an act of devotion.

FOOTNOTE: Speaking of innocents, tomorrow December 14, marks the first anniversary of the dread and unspeakable carnage in Newtown. Those who died that day might live still had not a careless nation failed to summon the social and political courage to curb the spread of its own weapons of mass destruction.

What reviewers said:

"Important and heart-warming ... Cook's keen insights into the most familiar of old-time gospel hymns ... help you do theology like a grownup."
--Robin Meyers, author of Saving Jesus from the Church

"A compelling look at centuries of Christian theology and practice, at how particular hymns have shaped American faith and religious thought."
--Richard Webster, Director of Music and Organist at Trinity Church, Boston

"A call to integrity in worship ... This exciting, penetrating and provocative study explores the theology we sing, which re-enforces the dated and pre-modern theology from which the Christian faith seeks to escape."
--John Shelby Spong, author of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World