Pagan Holy Days

[TomK]

Christmas is not in the bible.

Umm, that would be because the Evangilists (falsely) assumed that people would be getting smarter instead of dumber, obviously.

I seem to recall a passage of scripture that says “It is a wicked and slothful servant that needs be commanded in all things.” I think it was pretty obvious that people would WANT to celebrate the Saviour’s birth, not be looking for an escape clause.

 

[vern_humphrey]

We sometimes forget that Christianity wasn’t here from the beginning. The first Christians were born Jews or Pagans, and had to spread Christ’s message in the world they lived in.

They did it well – by using the customs and practices of their time. For example, to this day we use iconography, using stylized statues to tell or remind people of the message. This was a pagan practice – when you see a statue of a man with a club and a lion skin, you think “Oh, that’s Hercules” and it recalls the story of Hercules. It was a very good method of keeping people aware of religion and heritage in an age when few people could read or write. We Christians adopted it.

We adopted the use of water for ritual cleansing – holy water. We adopted or re-purposed many pagan holidays – Christianity is not a glum religion, and we don’t want to deprive people of their customary celebrations, as long as they are no longer aimed at worshiping false gods.

To this day in Latin America and other parts of the world, you can see ancient, pre-christian rituals which have been adopted by the Church locally. Blessing the llama flocks in Peru is a good example.

 

[mercygate]

deb1:

If you want to see something scary do a yahoo search with the words Christmas Pagan. There are apparently a small number of extreme fundamentalist-apparently not JW-who are adamently against Christmas. I certainly hope these people don’t grow in number! ONe of the nutty reasons given for not celebrating Christmas was that it wasn’t found in the bible.

Ya gotta hand it to 'em; this certainly squares with *sola Scriptura, *doesn’t it?