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Holering

Is Christmas christian?

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Holering said:

Is Christmas a christian holiday?

It may have been at one point but the religious elements are but window dressing if anything at all this day and age.

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Originally? No, the date was chosen to reuse previous festivals. The heart of winter is a time when people need to make pretexts to rejoice, because it's cold and everything is dead outside. When the nights begin ever so slightly to get shorter again, it's a reason to make merry as it's a sign the world will survive another year instead of plunging forever into eternal, frozen darkness.

Traditionally? Yes. For about two millennia now. Who cares that most trappings of it (like the Christmas tree) are pagan in origin? Like every other human invention, religions evolve.

Practically? No. Christmas, like every other holiday, is now a celebration of our one and only God, money. You have to make a sacrifice to Our Lord Money by buying useless trinkets to your friends and relatives. Consumerism is the true meaning of Christmas.


So there you go. One out of three, Christmas is 33% Christian.

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I was about to post something much along the lines of what Gez said so...

What Gez said. :P

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Clonehunter said:

If it was it ain't now. It ain't even Santa no more. It's all about Holiday Bitches and Sex Toys from Wal-Mart.

Christmas should be renamed to Fuck My Parents For Not Getting Me The New iPhone In White day.

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My favourite Christmas movie is Conan the Barbarian. Conan died for being stupid, but he came back from the dead, gave a cool half-time speech, defeated the black president and then all the hippies saw the error of their ways and went home to get a job. That's a story almost as Christian as the Constitution.

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If it is then it shouldn't be. Things are better when they're not Christian.

On the other hand, Boney M is definitely Christian and I'm not complaining.

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It really chaps my ass to see this constant Jesus is the Reason for the Season nonsense. It has nothing to do with Christ or Christianity. If people would just hop online and check out what the story behind Christmas is, then they'd stop saying that. Or maybe they wouldn't - human beings can be remarkably hard-headed sometimes.

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Presents = The true meaning of this beautiful little hijacked pagan holiday.

Merry "insert phrase that doesn't offend anyone due to being whitewashed and politically correct", everyone!

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baronofheck82 said:

It really chaps my ass to see this constant Jesus is the Reason for the Season nonsense. It has nothing to do with Christ or Christianity.

Yes it does. Like Gez pointed out, religion assimilates and adapts to previous customs and traditions. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, they were all embraced by (or forced upon) many peoples who then customized it to cater to their culture. Fuck, I'll bet most of Saturnalia is a hodgepodge of different customs by different European tribes. The EU may have buried the idea, but Europe was once as tribalistic as the Middle East

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Holering said:

Is Christmas a christian holiday?

Down here Christmas is a public holiday, so it's not only practicing Christians who get the day off.

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Technician said:

but Europe was once as tribalistic as the Middle East

Europe isn't so today?

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pritch said:

Yes. The clue is in the name.

Our society retains lots of names for things that have lost their original meaning. For example, Thursday is a reference to the Norse god Thor, and January a reference to the Roman god Janus.

I think it's more useful to look at the full history of these events. There certainly doesn't seem to be much doubt that Christmas was originally pagan in origin; nowadays there is very little religious content left in it. That isn't necessarily a bad thing: it's a very nice festival to be celebrating even if you take all the religious aspects out.

It's quite interesting to go through all of the things that we popularly tend to associate with Christmas and consider what their origins are. For example: Christmas trees and lights/decorations, gift-giving, festive food and (essentially) feasting, meeting up with family, Christmas music, etc. Most of these are not religious at all. Even Santa Claus, supposedly derived from the historical Saint Nicholas, seems to owe most of his modern image to the Coca Cola company.

Interestingly I've been spending this Christmas in still-highly-Catholic Italy where there's a tradition of people putting hand-made miniature nativity scenes ("Presepe") in their houses. You'd think that this would be the most religious tradition possible, but even this seems to have evolved to the point where the religious scene is only a tiny, almost-insignificant part of the overall scene (example).

So I think a good summary would be that Christmas is a pagan festival appropriated and popularised by the Catholic church over centuries, that has now reverted almost entirely to its pagan roots as the influence of religion is gradually falling away.

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Nope, Christmas was created by the Catholic or Christian church in order to Christianize a pagan festival in Rome and to also prevent Norse Paganism from spreading. Many of the Christmas traditions are taken from Pagan winter activities and traditions. Also, the bible never gives a concrete date for the birth of Jesus, but if you take his age during various events and info we have on the seasons they took place in, Jesus was born in the spring or summer.

If you want a detailed breakdown: http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Christmas_TheRealStory.htm

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Technician said:

Oh everything is contradictory if you bring the Irish into it.

Go vote for another Bush, American schweinhund. That's a picture of Scotland's Shame.

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The birth of Jesus Christ is the massively spread meaning behind the holiday. And at least over here there are occasions where they build a small stable with a bed of straw on market events.

In general i do not care about its history or execution, and it has been many years since i last did anything special on that day.

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Gez said:

Practically? No. Christmas, like every other holiday, is now a celebration of our one and only God, money. You have to make a sacrifice to Our Lord Money by buying useless trinkets to your friends and relatives. Consumerism is the true meaning of Christmas.

The Mammon is our new god. Bow down to the dollar and to the euro, the saints who greatly honor the Mammon, and let the money flow out of your wallets, and let your bank accounts show deficit in this time of great consumerism.

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