Let me put out what I understand about Christmas and Sunday, so anyone who wishes can straighten me out.

It is the theologians who actually say “Humbug!” about December 25. The Puritans outlawed it. Experts say Humbug because Christmas is not Christ’s Birthday. Christmas is the day we CELEBRATE the birth of Christ.

Yes, in that sense it is a “pagan” holiday. Not only do we not know the DAY of Christ’s birth, all indications are that we don’t know the YEAR of his birth. So we use the birthday of the Birth of Mithras, the day that Constantine celebrated each year.

It happens that Mithraism HAD a Birthday for Mithras, so Constantine adopted it as the date on which we would CELEBRATE the Birth of Christ. It also falls in nicely with the Winter Solstice, when the sun began to come back to us and another promise was made that each year light would be victorious.

This is no more pagan than believing that the rainbow was created after the Flood of Noah.

We also celebrate the Sabbath as SUN Day. This may relate to the words on Mithraian altars, Sol Invictus, which is translated in a number of ways. Those of us who took freshman Latin in high school assume that Sol refers to the sun, but not as “sun worship.”

Sol Invictus could mean “The Light is Victorious.”

The Jewish Sabbath is based on a premise that even most Creationists would find hard to swallow. It is the exact date, some four and a half millennia ago, when God rested from his six days’ labor creating the world. Unless you think this date is really that specific, the Jewish Sabbath is the day Jews CELEBRATE the creation of the world.

The political question is, why did Constantine impose his own SUNday and his date for the Birth of the Savior? My expertise is political, not theological. There was lot going on in Constantine’s adoption of Christianity than just his seeing a sign in the sky.

When the winning side writes a history you must deal with the politics of it. There seems to have been a major effort to adopt a Christianity which followed St. Paul’s dictum that rather than lose souls, one should be “all things to all men.”

St. Paul said that in dealing with the fact that different Christians had already adopted different forms of worship, like High and Low Church in the Anglican Communion. Paul stated flatly that a good Christian would freely adopt the OTHER Christian’s variation. That statement is in wild contradiction to two thousand years of fighting to the death over which way a person crossed himself.

Yes, Christian Christmas was developed and ADOPTED.

December 25 was adopted in order to include Mithraian. The other traditions of that day, like a Christmas Tree, was adopted so that those who had celebrated the Winter Solstice would not lose their annual day of celebration.

In other words, Christmas represents the Paulist Tradition to INCLUDE people. Puritans outlawed it for that very reason, that it was an INCUSIVE measure.

Our new established religion bans such Nazi words as “Merry Christmas” exactly the way the Puritans did. But our new established religion says Christmas is AGAINST inclusion.

Two bans, two types of Puritans.

Screw them all.

Merry Christmas!

Wordism cannot adjust to reality. It is not based on truth, it is based on Truth. To paraphrase Heidelberg, every time a scientist looks down into a microscope or up into a telescope truth changes. When the Medicogenetical Institute of Moscow did a huge study of identical twins and concluded, as all such studies do, that heredity was overwhelmingly important, the head of the Institute “confessed his ideological error and was shot.” (Garrett Hardin, Nature and Man’s Fate).

An old geneticist, actually a Fellow of the Royal Society, whom I knew later watched his Russian colleagues disappear. Lysenko took over Soviet genetics.

Marxism requires that man be totally changeable by Social progress into a peaceful, universal, classless being. Fundamentalism is at war with evolution here and in the Islamic World.

The one time I simply gave up arguing with commenters here was when I quoted St. Paul as advising that all unmarried women remain sterile for life and a group of Christians here said that that was just Good Old Families Values. After all, they said, Paul conceded that some women could not abstain, so they should “marry or burn,” with the fires of Hell or the flames of lust, which he did not specify.

How, exactly do you explain that that is not Good Old Family Values? Don’t marry unless you are too horny not to is not what Mommy tells her daughters.

Jesus defined Christianity, specifically and totally, as being the Golden Rule and loving God. You do your best and you depend on the Name of Jesus. In the course of history, the Church developed a lot of ways it felt would help people do that. Saint Paul added on the Zoroastrian ideas that were all the rage in his time, just as the Dialectic was the intellectual Forever in Marx’s youth.

For the Wordist, these extras constitute Christianity. In his sequel to The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, Screwtape bitched about the QUALITY of the Modern Souls being served at the Tempters’ Banquet.

But at the end, Screwtape admitted the wine was excellent. It consisted of a mixture of those who had spent their entire lives persecuting others who did not have the Biblical Faith and others who were all hunger and vigils and ceremony. Their constant unending hatred of each other gave the mix a wonderful tang to the tongue of a Demon of Hell, and it would go on forever.

For these Religious Wordists, the Golden Rule was nothing. Their entire faith consisted of building huge altars or tearing down huge altars.

My natural tendency is toward traditionalism. I think ”adjusting” is too often to substitute one fad for another without any consideration for the faithful. That’s why I left what was once my family’s church and is no longer a church at all.

What is never noted is that it is Marxism, not the Christian Faith, that has died because it cannot deal with new truths. It is the Progressives who cannot live with progress.

New facts will always be coming at us. But the way of dealing with reality, of asking the right questions and being fully aware there is a lot we do not know, no matter what Magic Year we may live in, does not change.

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The Catholic Church has long used the term “Orthodox” as the title of the Eastern Church. At the same time it insisted that only Rome was Orthodox. The Catholic Church uses the term the Episcopal Church to describe the established faith in England.

But the term “Episcopal” has only one meaning: a church ruled by bishops. Rome does not recognize Anglican bishops as bishops: “all the surplices on earth cannot make an Episcopal minister into a priest.”

Rome refers to Jews as Jews. Yet they also declare that they, not the Jews, are the real inheritors of the Old Testament. One of the two horns on every bishop’s hat represents the Old Testament, that HE is true inheritor of Moses.

It seems obvious that the six million people in the Roman Empire who called themselves “Jews” were overwhelmingly Hellenic Jews. Before Jesus, a group of seventy-something scholars wrote THEIR Old Testament, but it was NOT a translation. It was declared THE CANON.

The Hellenic Jewish historian Josephus of whom a lot of us have heard would have gone ballistic if he heard Luther declare that only writings in Hebrew were the real Old Testament. That would be like telling a religious Catholic that only the Episcopal Church has real bishops.

As Christianity grew, the Hellenic Jews disappeared from history. There are two possible explanations of this. Either the giant Hellenic Jewish community accepted Christ, the Greek word for Messiah, as THEIR Messiah, or the Roman Empire killed six million Jews.

Either the Hellenic Jews became Christian or, for once, the Holocaust Deniers were successful.

That latter is worth thinking about. Looking at the tens of billions of dollars the last Holocaust brought in, this newly discovered Roman one could be a bonanza.

But, like Orthodox and Episcopalian, “Jews” is just a convenient title. The Jews are no more THE Jews than the Pope using the term Orthodox makes HIS orthodoxy invalid.

This is no quibble. Remember that the State of Israel and all the tens of billions of dollars and American blood shed for it rests on the undisputed claim that Israel belongs to JEWS, and that what we call Jews are actually the only Chosen People.

No, this is definitely NOT a quibble.

This “quibble” would have been of terrific importance to Luther and Calvin. In their time the people who called themselves “Jews” were the ones historically used Hebrew. In fact, the Early Church would have specifically denied that the group which did NOT accept Jesus — the GREEK version of Joshua — as their Messiah, were still Jews at all.

There were a number of attempts to remove the entire Old Testament from Holy Scriptures in the new church. But the new church hung solidly to its claim to be the ONLY inheritors of what was once called Judaism.

By the time of Luther “Jews” were called Jews. So Luther removed the entire middle of Bible from his canon because of this mistake in terminology. The Fundamentalist branch of Christianity insists that America fight and die for Israel because they do not know about this “quibble.”

Because of their ovine ignorance of history, our so-called “Christians” do not know that, in the eyes of early Christians, Judaism was a religion waiting for the coming of the Messiah. In the eyes of the early church, Jews CEASED to EXIST — Paul says that specifically.

If this is a quibble Krakatoa was a light tremor.