It would be interesting to see how an Imam on Ramadan would react to everybody saying “Season’s Greetings.” “Season’s Greetings” would be an interesting thing for all Christians to say to Jews on High Holy Days.
Hell, we could even use it on Martin Luther King Day.
Calvinism outlawed Christmas. What really offended them about it was not its pagan origins. In fact the Mithraists were not pagan, which referred to the wild country side, but very much a religion of the cities and of civilization, and December 25 was chosen for Christmas by Constantine because it was the birthday of Mithras.
EVERY pagan religion had its equivalent of Yule on December 21 or 22, Winter Solstice. Constantine was a Mithraian before he became a Christian, so there is no other explanation for that particular date.
To me, things were not as simple as historians, Constantine’s apologists, made it. My field of expertise is not religion, but politics, and this sounds familiar to me. Just as the Church gave the pagans their statues, as backbaygrouch points out, since withdrawn, it gave things to the huge Mithraian constituent.
The real politics of adopting the NAME Christianity to the expanded Helenist Jewish population which had so little Israeli blood in it, used ONLY Greek, and numbered about a tenth of the entire Roman Empire at the time of Christ, is over three hundred years long. The entire Helenic Jewish population disappeared from the historical record, without the slightest note from historians, as Christianity grew.
“The Greeks” appear regularly in the New Testament.
Peter and Paul, both strict Jews, went at it as to whether to baptize “gentiles.” Who were these “gentiles?” Did they include the Helenized Jews who might have been regarded by the relatively few Hebrew Jews as gentiles? For some other reason, presumably, Jesus was condemned as being from “Nazareth of the Gentiles” and the Samaritans did not regard others as real Jews, and Jesus told the Samaritan at the well that she was wrong and salvations was with the Jews.
But any evidence relating to this has been burned out and suppressed for many, many centuries, so historians don’t bother with it. Had the Moslems not burned every shred of Persian literature, there would be whole schools of history dedicated to Persia’s obvious influence on all out institutions. But it was burned so it is ignored.
Like every other faith, Political Correctness says it reveres knowledge and condemns book-burning. But history never questions the decisions of the book-burners.
Historically there was a constantly renewed alliance between the Hebrew Jews and the zealots in Israel which went on for some five hundred years. The last such alliance exploded against the Roman Empire in the century before Islam conquered Persia. According to both Testaments, the Persians were the only other religion the Jews considered Godly. “Cyrus” the only non-Jew who ”did the work of God” in the Old and the Magi recognized Christ thirty years before the Jews crucified him.
In one book of the Old Testament, after the Resurrection, someone asked, “Has he gone to the Greeks?”
Along with the date of Mithras’s birth, these are VERY heavy hints.
The Roman Church allowed a smoother transition with the statues in the West and the joy we peasants were allowed on December 25. The Calvinists outlawed celebration on that day.
The constant attacks on this particular day are a result of the fact that Wordism of any kind HATES joy. Even CS Lewis explains in “Surprised by Joy” that Joy, in HIS sense, “is NOT a pleasant sensation.”
It is Screwtape who accuses God of liking human pleasure.
Wordism, be it Calvinism or any other, exists in institutions and the food of religious institutions is guilt and sacrifice. During life, you only GIVE. That is not what the religious leaders THINK of, Lewis certainly praised some pleasures, but it is what institutions LIVE off of.
Guilt, from global warming to racism to having sex, is what powerful institutions are BUILT on.
Our idea of Christmas, from the old Yule celebration, turns the stomach of our present established religion on a level they are not aware of.
It is interesting, though, that the New Testament put the birth of Christ in the winter, as the Zoroastrians did. And, with their discussion of the Magi, they certainly knew. For some reason it was important that the MAGI recognize Christ. Considering how the Persian Empire loomed over all powers outside Rome at that time, this is not surprising to someone who knows history.
But historians of our new established, no less than those of our previous established faiths, also ignore all this.
Yule is the day the sun begins to come back. At the Solstice the Northern Hemisphere is tipped at its maximum angle away from the sun. The Yule may have often been a time of despair. The dead of winter. When the sun threatens to go away completely and, in very northerly climates, it does.
Some time long ago it was realized that the sun would return. Men who had lived long knew this. But then the wise men, those who carried knowledge from generation to generation and kept records of such things, found the day when the sun was furthest away but began to come back to us. Untold thousands of years ago, this became a day of celebration.
Then came the Wordists.
When we rid ourselves of the Wordists, every day will indeed be Christmas.
#1 by shari on 12/26/2009 - 9:42 am
It really is amazing that we have held, all this time! Wordism has been countered and contained, here and there, but NEVER defeated. It makes me think,that since it has been like that, the time of it’s defeat is at hand.