material girl wrote:Maybe we could change religion just before Christmas so we can avoid celebrating it.
Do any of you actually celebrate the birth of Jesus?
I cant say I do. I just see it as a nice time were you get together with loved ones and eat great food.Not a bad thing even tho its not the primary intention.
Changing religions won't save you, material girl. Today everybody gives presents and puts up horribly tasteless trees in their living rooms at about the time of the Winter solstice.
December 25 has absolutely nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. Never really did, despite the insistence of the church fathers. It is Yule, it is Saturnalia, it is the turning of the year back towards light, away from a time of darkness. In the Northern hemisphere it has been thus celebrated for centuries before the time of Jesus. The new Christian church hierarchy couldn't stop the people celebrating this most pagan of holidays, so they decided that this must be when Jesus was born.
There is absolutely no reason to think that this is true. In fact, if a believer takes the Gospels at face value, it's quite clear that Jesus birth could not have occurred in Devember (Kislev in the Jewish calendar). The New Testament states quite clearly that on the night of that birth there were shepherds tending their flocks at night. It is well-known that sheep were customarily not night-herded during the winter months. There's not enough pasturage. The tradition was to keep all animals stabled from Rosh Hoshana to Passover, then let them out to night pasture for the Summer.
Christmas today is the biggest consumer ripoff ever perpetrated on a gullible buying public. The appeal to buy is universal. They appeal to the religious-minded with creches and nativity scenes, to the non-theistic with jolly grinning Santa Clauses and various guises of Father Christmas (another ancient Pagan symbol from the days of Norse raids on GB), They appeal to the shopping addicted with the usual come-ons and they appeals to one's cupidity by appealing to a certain strain of altruism in all of us -- the desire to please, to give.
Don't get me started. I could go on for pages.
Bah, humbug in spades.