kain_kusanagi said:
blackstarr said:
Mr Khan said:
kain_kusanagi said:
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christmas was a "re-branding" of a pagan holiday
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That's a twisting of history. The truth is that the church moved Christmas and adopted a smidgen of the pagan holiday's traditions to subvert the pagan holiday to more easily convert the pagans. The church did not rebrand it, they replaced it.
A rebrand would be to take the original, change the name, and sell it as something else. But what Church really did was compete for the minds of the potential converts with an alternative holiday and make it as easy for them to accept as possible.
What we ended up with today is a Christmas with a little extra flavor. What your suggesting is we have a pagan holiday with a Christian title.
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Depending on how you look at it, Jesus may have been against political participation altogether, being a distraction from life with and for others.
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To add to the conversation... I am Christian and most Christians I know (although this may be my specific demographic in northeastern US, I have no idea about other areas) are well aware that Jesus was not born on December 25th or on the year 0, but celebrate Jesus' birthday on that day symbolicaly. Most people I know have no qualms about this, but I know many atheists who bring up these facts as if it should change our celebration.
Also, if you look at church history (which I am not the most proud of), when Christianity began to mix politics with religion (in the Roman empire, around 4th century AD with Constantine declaring Christianity the state religion), there were many instances of replacing pagan ideas and traditions with Christian ones... This wasn't just holidays, but places of worship, the type of art that was created, etc. I don't know.. I began doing some readings on this topic and I think it's pretty damn complicated. I don't think it's really as simple as "christian rebranded the pagan holiday!" but I guess it's one way to simplify what happened. But it does have to be viewed in the greater context of that time period.
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I've been saying it over and over, but they have their mind made up. They think that Christmas is a rebranded pagan winter solstace and no amount of truth is going to convince them otherwise. I've spelled it out over and over that Christmas's date was moved. But they think the Church just grabed a random pagan holiday and decided to make up a brithday for it. I've given up. Some people won't listen to reason.
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The earliest recollection of christians celebrating the birth of christ is from Rome about a few hundred years after Jesus' death. By then it did not have the characteristics that it has today. Among germanic peoples, they celebrated Yule as an holiday before chistmas. This changed to celebrating the birth of christ at the date of the Yule celebrations, and it was still called Yule for a long time, but the church didn't like the pagan name so they changed it to Crīstesmæsse or Christ's mass which became christmass. In Scandinavia and Finland, the old germanic term of "Yule" or "Jul" is still used. It's complicated, sure, but since Christmas is the relevant term here, I don't think rebranding is that inaccurate. And as many people have said, all the popular christmas traditions have pagan roots. It's easy to celebrate the pagan parts of the holiday, just celebrate like you used to but wihout the nativity scenes and mentioning Jesus.
Good Yule! :D
