Christmas a sham?

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That's true, the virgin birth is not original to christanity. Horus was born out of a virgin birth.
Most likely this story got lost in translation and became the nativity story that we know of today. The only clue we have is the bright light on June 17 2000 years ago.

The authors of the bible can't be trusted because these people didn't even know where the sun went at night.

I'm sure there were a couple of people that had a good idea of where the sun went at night. But they were probably killed as soon as they shared their insight.

Says who? Atheists?
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The pope.

No, the Bible does. Do you really think Jesus is supposed to be a fictional character that the NT writers just wanted to tell you about? One of the basic tenants of Christianity is that you must accept Jesus Christ as the LITERAL son of the OT God.

Yeah, him too!

No, it doesn't.

An archetype, a symbol which represents part of a spiritual journey, ( not a real person ), which NT writers wanted to tell us about.

Of the major established Christian churches, yes, but not of gnosticism and certain other religious groups/teachings based on the Bible, including the New Testament.

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I had a very interesting discussion on this topic with a Methodist pastor. He agreed with me that it was originally a pagan festival, the winter solstice. He agreed that the winter solstice is celebrated throughout the world. He told me that the early Christians needed to associate Christianity with the surrouding religions by adopting their festivals and iconography, so as to win converts and ease persecution. A few days back, I attended a Protestant celebration at a church, and again, the pastor their said that Christians were unaware of the date when Jesus was born, hence, they adopted this day of feast as the day to celebrate Christ's birthday. Similarly, they adopted Easter to celebrate his resurrection. There's nothing wrong with it. After all, it's just a day of joy and celebration.

These factors are present even with other religions. Take Islam, for example. Judging by the Qur'an, the calendar described is a luni-solar calendar, and Ramadhan falls either during the winter solstice (a calculation based on the Qur'an's depiction of the birth of Christ and the harvest season of dates), or the summer solstice (Ramadhan literally means "scorching heat"). Also, the word used to describe the number of days translates to "count with fingers", ie, no more than ten. One needs to look at Zoroastrianism & the Arab religions for the answer - the Arabs had no fixed calendar until Umar ibn al-Khattab created one. Prior to that, the Arabs judged everything by the moon, indeed, their Nabataen religion revolved around the moon, their three Goddesses represented a phase of the moon - crescent, full, and new. The 30 day fasting phenomenon is similar to that of the Zoroastrian month of Bahman, where the Zoroastrians abstain from meat for 30 days. I see nothing wrong with it, as the purpose of fasting was achieved, along with an eventual end of Persian revolts.

The main point is, Christmas is a day of joy and celebration.

Peace.

You're simply ignoring the bits of the Bible you don't want to deal with just like everybody else. Jesus was put forth as the son of God and the Messiah, based on prophecies he was said to fulfill from the OT. You are REALLY stretching by just calling that an archetype or a symbol

Not stretching any more than the writer known as Matthew using selected references/quotes, ( some might say "cherry picking" ), from the Old Testament to support/prove the spiritual authority/validity of the (relatively) new myth/spiritual lesson.
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They why follow it? Why believe ANYTHING it says?

Its the man's birthday tommorow. Hush your noise or when he gets back:



JESUS PUNCH.

not really....just the day chosen to celebrate it...the context clues suggest a summer birth, not winter.

Not sure I know what you mean by "follow" here.

Because it is full of spiritual truths. Truths about subjective reality. Which is more than half of our existence.

The Gospel is a parable, which also contains other parables.
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Last edited by ouinon on 24 Dec 2008, 3:01 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Son of a god. He can have his birthday whenever he damn wants.