Happy Quasi-Religious but Mostly-Secular Holiday with Pagan Origins, everybody! We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled hardnosed blogging — and a numerological milestone! — come Boxing Day.
31 thoughts on “Merry”
Comments are closed.
Happy Quasi-Religious but Mostly-Secular Holiday with Pagan Origins, everybody! We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled hardnosed blogging — and a numerological milestone! — come Boxing Day.
Comments are closed.
Merry Christmas, Sean.
Same to you, Sean. But I don’t think Christmas has pagan origins. I mean, now I’m not an expert or anything, I think the date coincides with something pagans celebrated, but the orign of Christmas is that it’s a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus. Without Jesus, there would never have been a Christmas.
Happy Consuming, everyone! Don’t forget the big rich companies and to give them lots of your money!
the origin of christmas is in fact pagan. It corresponds to the realization about 2-3 days after the winter solstice that the days have stopped growing shorter and in fact are beginning to get longer averting what was looking like a gradual plunge into perpetual darkness.
anyway whatever you want to celebrate enjoy it and be safe.
Elliot
Merry Christmas to all from Denver!
It took me 3.5 days to get here since the time of my originally scheduled flight, but persistence and luck paid off (I grabbed the next-to-last seat out of the Bay Area on a Southwest flight to Albuquerque and drove up I-25 just after it opened). For those not in the know – Denver had a major blizzard (Estes Park had 52 inches of snow!), airport was closed for 2.5 days, all roads in Eastern Colorado were closed, and literally thousands of travelers were stranded, including me. Ever try to rebook a flight during the holdiay season? Looks pretty here though…
Yah, we want posts to read again. Feed us! We’re so hungry.
Elliot,
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. So the early Christian church came up with Christmas because they wanted to celebrate the fact that the days were getting longer? I think the idea of a Christmas tree has pagan origins, but I’m pretty sure Christmas was invented to celebrate the birth of Jesus. From my understanding, the church decided to celebrate Jesus’ birth at this time precisely because of the fact that the days were getting longer, symbolizing the “light of Christ” entering the world.
Also, I know everybody says that Christmas has become a mostly secular holiday, but is there any quantitative evidence to back this up? Were there any surveys taken of people who claimed to celebrate Christmas and were they asked if they celebrated Christmas in any way close to the way Christianity celebrates it?
Maybe we’re made to think that it’s secular for most people because all of us were taught to buy gifts for everybody remotely close to us at this time of year. Stores and companies know this, so they bombard us with tons of television, radio, internet, and newspaper ads with Christmas decorations, telling us to get this and that for that person on their shopping list. And the whole thing feeds back on itself. The more ads, the more this concept gets inside our heads, the more companies take advantage, and so on.
Do most non-Christians celebrate Christmas at all? I have no idea about the statistics.
Merry Christmas to you all!
The christians “acquired” the pagan holidays celebrating the end of the solstice. Easter also coincides with the agricultural beginning of spring. Put something/someone in the ground and it rises three days later. The “miracle” of life. The christian mythology (and I use that term without disrepect) has simply been wrapped around existing celebrations based on seasonal changes.
Elliot
The name Easter, derived from the month of April, Eostremonat so called because the goddess, Eostre, had formerly been worshipped in that month, has pagan origins. However the Feast of the Resurrection falls on the first Sunday after the earliest fourteenth day of a lunar month that occurred on or after March 21 close to the Jewish feast of Passover when the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth took place. So the feast originates from a Jewish feast but the popular name has a pagan origin. Some churches reject the name for that reason.
Note Elliot it normally takes a little longer than three days for seeds to germinate!
The birth of Jesus “while shepherds watched their flocks by night” probably took place in the spring time – when the sheep would be on the hillsides, about the same time as Easter. In order not to have two major festivals close to each other, the early church moved the lesser feast to coincide with the pagan celebration of the coming of light following the Winter Solstice. The concept of the coming of Messiah being ‘a great light shinning in darkness (Isaiah 9:2) associates naturally with this time of the year and has ancient Hebrew roots. Traditionally Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas on January 7th. Many churches, particularly the Reformers, reject the Saturnalia thereby associated with it.
A very Happy Christmas to you all!
Garth
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There you go, Christmas and Easter have Christian origins, each holiday celebrating something that happened to Jesus. Just because they coincide with pagan holidays, doesn’t mean they have pagan origins. If parents decide to conceive a kid at a particular time in hopes that the kid is born on the same day as Jim Morrison’s birthday (they are huge fans of The Doors), and the kid IS born on Jim’s birthday, this doesn’t mean that future birthday celebrations has Jim Morrison origins, as though the celebration was just copied from Jim Morrison or the story of the birth of this kid is made up, and we should really be celebrating Jim Morrison’s birthday if we want to stick to reality.
I have a theory that belief in God doesn’t have any effect at all on how moral and virtuous you are, but does tend to make you humorless and annoying.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Vince leave your Christian apologetics at home and enjoy a Pagan holiday with the rest of us. By the way your Jim Morrison analogy is irrelevent to the argument unless you want to take up the worship or the late (we are still waiting for the resurrection) Jim Morrison http://www.thedoors.com/
Look at it this way. The major Pagan festivals were at midwinter and spring. The early church tried to incorporate them so christmas and easter have pagan origins an contain pagan elements. As for the birthday of Jesus their is no reliable historical evidence that he even existed let alone for a birth date.
Merry Christmas! or Happy Holidays!
I’ve respect for everyone’s faith, but being brought up in a Hindu family I’ve never quite understood why belief in more than one God is seen somehow to be less “respectable” than belief in multiple Gods. If I were to have religious beliefs they would probably involve more than one God: the Earth (not to mention the rest of the universe) is a complicated place and I don’t think one God can handle all the variety :-).
Oh boy, a thread filled with Christmas spirit!
In honor of which, I have composed a light-hearted Christmas essay on that contentious subject: quantum gravity. If your post ain’t filled with the Christmas spirit, don’t reply!
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Part – I: Alice’s Christmas Adventures in Quantum Gravity
As a Christmas shakedown test of her quantum model order reduction codes, engineer Alice Michanikos (her family name) is running a simulation of the IBM single-spin MRFM experiment.
‘”How very interesting!” thinks Alice. “The mass of the cantilever is 92 picograms, the decorrelation time scale is 100 msec, and the separation of its trajectory for spin-up versus spin-down measurements on this time scale is 280 picometers. Since the IBM team experimentally observed a mean-square spin polarization of unity (versus classical mean-square polarization of 1/3), it must be the case that quantum theories of gravity—once we finish constructing them—will support macroscopic polarizations for Schroedinger cats of this mass, this timescale, and this spatial separation.”
“Hmmm … ” thinks Alice. “If only the gravitational theorists would be so good as provide me with a well-posed mathematical recipe, it would be quite easy for me to include the cantilever’s gravitational metric in my engineering functional emulations. The good news is, that Bob Wald’s recent preprint tells me in great detail how quantum fields accommodate to metrics. Now, as a quantum system engineer, what I mainly need to know is how metrics accommodate to quantum fields. How hard can it be?”
Merry Xmas, scientists.
Sorry, typo in #15: line 3 should actually be “why belief in more than one God is seen somehow to be less “respectable” than belief in one God.” Although CV is mostly secular it is somehow the only place where I end up talking about God(s) :-).
“I have a theory that belief in God doesn’t have any effect at all on how moral and virtuous you are, but does tend to make you humorless and annoying.”
I wasn’t trying to be funny. Though I can be, as you’ll learn if you were to ask some of my friends. Neither was I trying to be annoying, but I was trying to argue for something. Clearly, my analogy wasn’t convincing. But I’m not sure why you find me annoying. I was just trying to argue my point. What’s wrong with that?
Chemicalscum, I don’t think there is no evidence that Jesus existed, and even if he didn’t exist, Christians believe he existed and so they celebrate the event of his birth on a particular date. Christians believe that Jesus was a really cool guy and so every year, on December 25th, they celebrate his birth. This celebration is called Christmas. Sure, aspects of the celebration contain pagan elements, and even the date was chosen because of a pagan celebration, but the celebration itself is for the birth of a particular man Christians believe once walked on this earth.
Chinmaya Sheth, I don’t mean to be annoying or anything, but I don’t think anybody thinks belief in more than one God is less respectable. However, there were some early Christian theologians (like Thomas Aquinas) who basically tried to argue not only for God’s existence (according to a certain definition of what is mean by ‘God’), but also what sort of “properties” can be attributed to this God, and blah blah blah basically came up with the conclusion that that God must be one. Anyway, I’m not too sure by what you mean by “the Earth (not to mention the rest of the universe) is a complicated place and I don’t think one God can handle all the variety.” I mean, how do the earth and the rest of the universe need to be “handled” by the single or multiple Gods. You know?
Going back to the non-reliable evidence, tell that to, for example, the guys named Peter and Paul, who were crucified for delivering the message of this other guy named Jesus, who may have been a figment of their imaginations.
Vince, This topics is not of much interest to me beyond assuring equality for everyone’s faith. I am glad that you think that Hinduism is as respectable as Christianity or Islam (I’ve heard/read many opinions otherwise). I’ve not given much thought on the role of possible God(s) in the world etc., but I do think multiple personalities would need to be involved ;-).
The theologically ignorant shouldn’t advocate for the theologies in which they profess faith (Aquinas was certainly not “early” by any sense of the use of the term); but that said, maybe a different way to view this secular celebration of massive consumption in order to continue to facilitate the functioning of the economic infrastructure can be viewed something like this:
The rest of this quite good essay found here: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/4176
spyder, I never “professed” faith in anything; I myself am “mostly secular”. Nice article though.
spyder, where you talking to Vince? This has happened before, it would be easier if people made clear who they were talking to.
“The theologically ignorant shouldn’t advocate for the theologies in which they profess faith (Aquinas was certainly not “early” by any sense of the use of the term);”
If that was aimed at me, then I’m very sorry I grouped Aquinas into the “early” camp. You’re totally right, he’s not really “early”. But this slight blunder doesn’t make me theologically ignorant, although I have much to learn about Christian theology and its history. But I don’t have time, since I need to learn physics. 😉
One way to love Osama is to pray for him if you’re religious, and also not to kill him if he is ever captured. But that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be caught and imprisoned, since he’s a danger to many other humans, who also need our love. Loving your enemies also means to forgive them, but that also doesn’t mean we should let all criminals or fugitives go free. I’m just speaking in general terms here.
Okay, I’m going to shut up now. Sorry…
Blogs are too addictive. But also, CV is a good blog, and I do appreciate Sean’s efforts to make this blog entertaining and informative. Congratulations on your engagement, by the way. 🙂
I also think CV is a great place. A final comment on my part: Although I’ve respect for all faiths, just wanted to say that I’ve always felt that literal beliefs in all faiths have brought about a lot of injustice in different forms.
Oh and John Sidles’s (#16) essay was a good read!