Pagan practices

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Is it ok that the Catholic Church took some practices and symbolism from pagan religions?

E.g. Halo for saints, God as an old man is Zeus, confession booth was ancient babylonian practices, etc.

Why is it wrong for Churches to do so - but fine for states to do so ?​

• The various state Capitols
• the Statue of Liberty
• the Senate
• statues of the great
  are as pre-Christian in origin as anything that is picked on in the CC.

The national religion of the US can with a great degree of plausibility be described as a revival of the worship of the state - America is the American religion: which is as throughly pre-Christian as the four things listed above; all five things are Roman, & all are found in the USA, & all are accepted as legitimate by Christians - now that, is utterly pagan. Abortion, prostitution, the worship of the almighty dollar - nothing is Christian about them: they are anti-Christian to the core.

Yet apparently the only things of pre-Christian origin that people notice, are those in certain Churches.

This does not make sense. It implies that the state can rightly be “pagan”, while the Church must not be. Are Churches to be subject to the Will of God, & states not to be ? If things of pre-Christian origin are objectionable at all, then they are objectionable in Church - & in state. They can’t be hateful to God in Church, but pleasing to God outside Church use, because Christian faith is not for Sundays only, but for every millisecond we live on earth. So if statues are loathsome in churches, so are statues on street corners & other public places. If hymns to the BVM are damnable, so are hymns to the flag. If images of saints are idolatrous, so are graven images on coins. ##

 

[runandsew]

Is it ok that the Catholic Church took some practices and symbolism from pagan religions?

E.g. Halo for saints, God as an old man is Zeus, confession booth was ancient babylonian practices, etc.

Is it ok that God took circumcision which was the practice of pagan religions, and used it to make a sign of the covenant with Abraham?

 

[KarenNC]

Is it ok that God took circumcision which was the practice of pagan religions, and used it to make a sign of the covenant with Abraham?

In which religion was circumcision a common practice?

 

[runandsew]

In which religion was circumcision a common practice?

Maybe I shouldn’t have written that it came from a pagan religion, but rather that it came from pagan culture since I am not sure of an exact name of a religion. But God did take something that was already practiced by others and gave it his own meaning. Anyways, here is some of the history of circumcision.

Circumcision began as a social ritual among a small number of tribal peoples in north-east Africa and the Arabian peninsular, and it later became the mark of initiation for two major religions. Historically it was performed 15,000 years ago in Egypt and may have developed independently amongst different cultures. Columbus discovered that many New World natives were circumcised. Historically cultures have ascribed benefits to circumcision ( including hygiene, rite of passage to manhood, cultural identity and others).

Chronology of the foreskin and circumcision

10,000 (?) BCE Aboriginal tribes in central and desert regions of Australia introduce circumcision of boys as puberty rite

6000 (?) BCE Circumcision (male and female) practiced as puberty rite by tribes in north-eastern African and Arabian peninsula

3100 BCE Egypt invaded from the south, perhaps by African tribes bringing circumcision with them.

2300 BCE Egyptian bas-relief which may show some form of genital mutilation being performed. The relief is eroded and hard to interpret. More commonly seen as modern reconstruction. One interpretation is that it just shows the pubic hair being shaved. Contrary to some reports, no circumcised mummies have been found, but some statues show what may be a superincision (cutting a slit in the upper side of the foreskin, or dorsal slit).

600 BCE First five books of Hebrew Bible (Torah) compiled, including Genesis with its reference to Yaweh’s command to Abraham to circumcise himself, his sons and his slaves and servants. Circumcision enforced by priests among Jewish people as sign of the Covenant.

450 BCE Greek historians note prevalence of circumcision and other penile mutilations among the Arabs and other Middle Eastern tribes. Herodotus (485-420 BCE) observes and deplores circumcision among the Colchians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, Syrians, and Macrones, as well as the Egyptian priestly caste. He criticizes the fanatical ritual cleanliness of the Egyptian priests: “They [even] practice circumcision for the sake of cleanliness, considering it better to be clean than handsome” - a perverse sacrifice in Greek eyes. (The context is things Egyptians do that are the reverse of what other, more sensible, people do.) He reports that the salutary influence of Greek culture led the Phoenicians to abandon circumcision. (See Frederick Hodges, “The ideal prepuce”, including excellent illustrations from Greek art and sculpture).

170 BCE The Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-165 BCE) consolidates Alexander’s empire, and attempts to impose Greek civilization, including a ban on ritual circumcision. Some Jews seek foreskin restoration.

ANNO DOMINI or Christian Era Jesus born and circumcised in accordance with Jewish practice.

**43 ** St Paul convinces a meeting in Jerusalem that circumcision is not required for Christian converts.

 

[drafdog]

If you read Eliad’s excellent three volume work on the history of religion, you will find that virtually all religions borrowed and incorporated images and practices from religions they suplanted. The images and practices were most frequently similar or parallel to the same things in the “new” religion. It was only natural that Christianity in suplanting the religions of the Mediteranian basin and western Europe would do the same thing. Even the Pope sanctioned the practice when he told Augustine (of Canterbury) not to forbid the Anglo-Saxons their feasts and festivals but to cover them with Christian symbology. This is how Catholicism retains its catholicity: by accepting the existing cultural myths and symbols and illuminating them with the symbols of Christ.

Matthew

 

[KarenNC]

Maybe I shouldn’t have written that it came from a pagan religion, but rather that it came from pagan culture since I am not sure of an exact name of a religion. But God did take something that was already practiced by others and gave it his own meaning. Anyways, here is some of the history of circumcision.

Thanks, I was curious.

Symbols/designs and ritual actions only have meaning within the context of the culture in which they are used or practiced. They do not have an inherent meaning, an unchanging meaning that exists uniquely in and of themselves. Many religions have used the same designs and actions to mean vastly different things.

 

[I_Leatherman]

Possibly all pagan images ultimately came from nature itself, paganism being a nature worshipping system.
Prayer trees.
Rubbing stones.
A natural spring accredited with powers. etc.
Concurrently or subsequently, like children, a stick or stone is dressed up and shaped into the spirit hidden in the forest, tree, stone, water, so on, so on.

But then all of nature *was *created and is significant in that it is contained in, and maintained by, its Creators spirit. The pagans were onto something, definitely, but they could’nt see past the material objects. How could they see by themselves.

When the creator revealed Himself it was through nature, as a burning bush.
But unlike all the pagan natural objects with ascribed powers which did’nt actually work or do anything, the burning bush uniquely did do something unnatural - it did not burn away even though it was on fire.
Here was the true Spirit of Nature - the controller and Creator.

 

[Church_Militant]

Is it ok that the Catholic Church took some practices and symbolism from pagan religions?

E.g. Halo for saints, God as an old man is Zeus, confession booth was ancient babylonian practices, etc.

This stuff is from a-C sources that are not reliable.

I knew I’d heard of Hislop before, so I went looking. I already knew the score on the anti-Catholic fiction writer Lorraine Boettner. Here’s an article written by Ralph Woodrow, the author of Babylon Mystery Religion: Ancient and Modern

As for Hislop:

A certain strand of anti-Catholicism likes to claim that the Catholic faith is essentially a kind of repackaged paganism that supplanted biblical Christianity. In its most absurd form, it claims that Catholicism is the same as the religion of ancient Babylon, which is alleged to be the wellspring from which all paganism came.

That’s the thesis of the book The Two Babylons by an eccentric, nineteenth-century Anglican, Alexander Hislop, whose work has been widely quoted and plagiarized by other anti-Catholics. Hislop’s book seems to have been written partly in answer to the conversion of John Henry Newman and the publication of Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, in which he considered the subject of alleged pagan influences on early Christianity.

Unfortunately, Hislop seems to have known almost nothing about actual pagan religions. His book contains a wild mish-mash of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods. Sometimes individual charges from the book get thrown up in the face of Catholics, who are at a loss to answer them. Often the best way to respond is to look at the text where the charge is made, find the errors in it (even if it means looking in a textbook on mythology), and then use these to demonstrate the unreliability of the source making the paganism charge.

TRACKING THE FIRST PAGANS
Pagan Influence Fallacy

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

This stuff is from a-C sources that are not reliable.

I knew I’d heard of Hislop before, so I went looking. I already knew the score on the anti-Catholic fiction writer Lorraine Boettner. Here’s an article written by Ralph Woodrow, the author of Babylon Mystery Religion: Ancient and Modern

As for Hislop:TRACKING THE FIRST PAGANS
Pagan Influence Fallacy

Boettner’s list of Roman Catholic Heresies and Inventions was not all his own - some of the items are quoted in a book called “Catholic Controversy”, written in 1855, over a century before “Roman Catholicism” was first published in 1962. And the 1855 book was relying on a book by someone called (IIRC) Pouix - French, probably: with no indication of date. The question is how Boettner heard of the things he listed.​

Most of Boettner’s books are better informed than “Roman Catholicism” - it’s a pity he wrote that one

As for TTB, its method for identifying whether something is Babylonian is fairly straightforward:

1. All religions [with the significant exception of that of the Israelites & Jews] are the result of the Babylonian Mystery Religion
2. Therefore, if there is evidence from 1st-century Roman Britain that the Druids practiced some rite or other, this proves that the same rite was part of the BMR in 2181 BC or so

IOW - all religions are variants of the BMR.

How do we know this ?

Because

• Babylonia was ruled by the Assyrians
• the Assyrians were first ruled by a king called Ninus (who = the OT Nimrod)
• Ninus is stated by ancient historians to have ruled a great empire
• and as Babylonia/Assyria is the source of all kinds of culture (sources are quoted for that too) it follows that if there is evidence of (say) the worship of Moloch in 19th century Scotland, its ultimate source is Babylon & the BMR
  This is how a lot of the argument is built up

Except that the foundations for the argument are not sound.

One can’t be too hard on TTB - the book is basically an eighteenth century polemic against Catholicism, written in the nineteenth century, being judged by the scholarly standards of the 20th.

• That doesn’t alter the fact that the reasoning is often very poor - one often finds that an inverted pyramid of reasoning is based on a single argument
• This tendency to invent fantasies is a result of the book’s absence of any tests of plausibility - TTB never asks: “Is this argument plausible ? Might there be other explanations for these data that don’t require this interpretation ?”
• For instance - is it plausible that the Romans used Hebrew in their oaths ? According to TTB, they did. Why is this important ? Because it allows TTB to argue that the Romans believed in a “God the Son” Messiah-figure.
  I’m still wondering what reason - apart from Rev. 17 - there is to think Babylon was mysterious: the script, probably.

A die-hard believer in TTB is not going to be impressed by Eliade. Or by quotations from those who have spent their lives on all things Mesopotamian Theology tends to count for more than scholarship.

One of the attractions of TTB is (one suspects) that it tells a story. Everyone likes stories, but not everyone can follow an argument.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Even a Christmas tree would fall into Scriptures description of a vain custom, so yes its at the very least vanity. In other areas it can be downright blasphemous. Notably when people worship and venerate some other creature and not God.

Jeremiah 10:1 Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
Jeremiah 10:2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
Jeremiah 10:3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
Jeremiah 10:4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

Oh yay! We’re quoting Scripture.

The Bible and statues

Here are several Biblical passages where we see statues that are used as a vehicle through which the faithful worship and honour God.

“Make [a statue of] a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it shall live. So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live” (Num 21: 4-9)

“In the sanctuary were two cherubim, each ten cubits high, [15 feet high!] made of olive wood…” (1 Kgs 6:23-28, 7:23-26)

“Make two cherubim of beaten gold at the two ends of mercy seat, fastening them so that one cherub springs direct from each end” (Ex 25:18)

“The Dwelling itself you shall make out of sheets woven of fine linen twined and of violet, purple and scarlet yarn with cherubim embroidered on them” (Ex 26:1)

I got an email about the quote from Numbers. It said that Judah later destroyed the bronze snake. (2 Kgs 17:4) This actually speaks very loud to the distinction of worshipping Jesus*** through*** art and worshipping the art object as a God itself.

When Moses created the Snake at God’s command he was doing it for the glory of God (Num 21:8). People were healed and brought back to the faith. But later the Israelites started to worship the statue and “made offerings to it.” They named it “Nehushtan.” (2 Kgs 17:4)

Human beings are geniuses at taking something holy and profaning it…

… In Deuteronomy 4:15-18 we read, “Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in any form of any figure …”

The important word here is “Since,” which is a provisional word. God had not yet visually revealed himself to mankind. However, Catholics believe that God did finally reveal himself visually to mankind in the person of Jesus. In Col 1:15 we read: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” In John 14:9 we read: “He who has seen me has seen the Father”…

…Here’s the opening quote on the Vatican’s fine art collection.

… Their dedication to the increase of God’s praise and of his glory is more complete, the more exclusively they are devoted to turning men’s minds devoutly toward God.

(Vatican II, SACROSANCTUM CONCILIUM , 122)

http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/14573-POD/1612799.jpg

 

[Ani_Ibi]

If you read Eliad’s excellent three volume work on the history of religion, you will find that virtually all religions borrowed and incorporated images and practices from religions they suplanted. The images and practices were most frequently similar or parallel to the same things in the “new” religion. It was only natural that Christianity in suplanting the religions of the Mediteranian basin and western Europe would do the same thing. Even the Pope sanctioned the practice when he told Augustine (of Canterbury) not to forbid the Anglo-Saxons their feasts and festivals but to cover them with Christian symbology. This is how Catholicism retains its catholicity: by accepting the existing cultural myths and symbols and illuminating them with the symbols of Christ.

Matthew

If you think of the gifts which the ex-pagans would have wanted to bring to their new-found God in the form of prayer, then this makes sense. Art is a form of prayer. To understand this you either have to be an artist or you have to make the effort to understand an activity to which you are not accustomed. We sometimes call the latter ‘research’.

 

[Gardening_Mommy]

Christianity has a long, long history of incoporating symbols and even some philosophical work from previous religions… in a good sense.

St. Paul in Athens gave a sermon that said (my paraphrase), “Ok, you’re very religious; that’s good. You even have an altar to the Unknown God, just in case. Let me clarify that one for you…”

St. Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle’s philosophies about accidents and substance to explain the Real Presence. He studied pagan philosophers to hone his logic and apologetics gifts in order to become a better theologian.

A form of the Celtic cross (four equal arms within a circle, originally meant to symbolize the sun, I think) was present in Ireland before Christianity. When the Christian missionaries arrived, they said, “Let us tell you about a cross…” Celtic knotwork, which had been carved in stone to honor cheiftans and pagan sites, was used in the service of Christianity, and now we have the glorious illuminations of the Book of Kells and other Gospels like it.

All people yearn for God, even those of other religions or no religion. Whatever is true and good is from God, and therefore not incompatible with Christianity.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

Gardening Mommy:

A form of the Celtic cross (four equal arms within a circle, originally meant to symbolize the sun, I think) was present in Ireland before Christianity.

It was a Coptic symbol.
Gardening Mommy:

Celtic knotwork, which had been carved in stone to honor cheiftans and pagan sites, was used in the service of Christianity

More Coptic influence. Thing is that, during the Dark Ages, the Irish kept the Church going. The monks in Ireland used to communicate with the monks in Egypt and therefore there was a lot of cross inculturation.

 

[Gardening_Mommy]

Actually, both the celtic cross and the knotwork PREDATE Ireland’s contact with Christian missionaries, so how could they be the result of contact between Irish and Egyptian monks?

 

[Gardening_Mommy]

Actually, both the celtic cross and the knotwork PREDATE Ireland’s contact with Christian missionaries, so how could they be the result of contact between Irish and Egyptian monks?

Mea culpa; apparently, I’ve been misinformed on the exact origins of what we now call “celtic knotwork.” I’ve been poking around online, trying to understand how someone could say a style of art famously from Ireland is actually Egyptian, and I’m going to have to retract at least the part about the knotwork.

The general consensus seems to be that the knotwork is traceable to displaced Coptic monks who wound up in France, transmitting artistic traditions to monks who then went to Ireland, incorporated local spirals and interlocking motifs, and produced the illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. So, the knotwork is particularly Coptic, but some of the other elements are specifically Celtic.

I can’t find the book or article I read that had the photo claiming to be pagan stonework knotwork in Ireland.

However, the spiral work and some other interlocking motifs ARE Celtic, and they are also present extensively in the Book of Kells, in addition to the Coptic-influenced knots. My mistake.

Now I can go to sleep; I learned something today!

 

[I_Leatherman]

The Celts, who are still alive and kicking, were like that. They emerged in the middle of lots of different cultures, and the Celt claim to fame was that they could take bits they liked from lots of other artistic cultures and combine them to make a new art form which was uniquely their own.

 

[rocklobster]

If we took everything pagan out of Christianity, we wouldn’t have much left.

 

[Baraq]

Why is it wrong for Churches to do so - but fine for states to do so ?​

• The various state Capitols
• the Statue of Liberty
  . ##

I remember one of the statements used to support the war in Iraq was some thing like ‘Its our duty to the Almighty that we bring Liberty(democracy) to Iraq’

Not ONE Christian I know questioned this statement or even presented a warped Church teaching to support it. The Almightys name was indeed used. …anyways, I bring this up because the name of the statue is actually 'Liberty enlightening the World". She is a revived Colossus of Rhodes that stood for much the same. The Colossus of Rhodes was the pagan god Helios and Helios is synonymous w/the canaainte pagan god Baal

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

I remember one of the statements used to support the war in Iraq was some thing like ‘Its our duty to the Almighty that we bring Liberty(democracy) to Iraq’

That’s the sort of arrogance one should expect from an imperial power - Britain was no different; we too talked about “civilising” the “lower races”, & nonsense like that. That quotation simply uses Christian language - it is still nonsense. Iraq’s civilisation was ancient when Rome had not even been founded - so it’s quite a cheek for Americans to talk about Iraq like that. Empires have difficulty being humble - unsurprisingly.​

Not ONE Christian I know questioned this statement or even presented a warped Church teaching to support it. The Almightys name was indeed used. …anyways, I bring this up because the name of the statue is actually 'Liberty enlightening the World". She is a revived Colossus of Rhodes that stood for much the same. The Colossus of Rhodes was the pagan god Helios and Helios is synonymous w/the canaainte pagan god Baal

Very interesting ​

One detail: the Canaanite (Ugaritic, to be exact) god of the sun was the goddess Shapsh; not the weather-god Baal. No one ever mentions Shap[a]sh on the WWW - it’s always Baal. Why, one can only guess.

 

[Ani_Ibi]

If we took everything pagan out of Christianity, we wouldn’t have much left.

But that begs the question of there being anything pagan in Christianity in the first place.