The date Christmas is celebrated on was originally a "pagan holiday" that the Roman Catholic Church essentially took over. There is a difference. No biblical scholar will tell you that Christ was born on December 25th. From what I have read, there are two lines of thought on his actual birthday, sometime in early spring or the early fall. December 25th is merely the day that Christians choose to celebrate his birth, which at one time (and maybe still today) other religions choose to hold their own celebrations. Christmas itself was never a pagan holiday.
I should have been more clear. I meant december 25th. The word Christmas was never a pagan holiday you are correct, my bad.
First of all, if you don’t believe, why do you care where they tell you are going. My POINT was that they don’t ACTIVELY tell you. In other words they don’t stand in the streets yelling at you, telling you you’re going to hell. Catholics, at least the ones I know, don't go door to door telling you to repent your heathen ways. I believe that is clearly stated in my above post…perhaps my attempt at being funny muddied up the post though. Anyway, I like to believe that you will have a second chance in purgatory if you "knew" of the lord, but choose to refer to him as the magic man in the sky. Catholics be all about the second chances.
good point. I think I have said on here before, it's not that I don't want to believe. I would love to sit here and be a full fledged Christian. But there is a little thing that gets in the way called logic.
Logic … lack of faith … whatever. We are all free to believe or not to believe. After all we all have a 50% chance of being right.
Christmas adopted a pagan holiday. Yule was a Nordic pagan winter festival long preceding Christmas. When the Romans brought Christianity to the region, the locals just made Yule into a Christian holiday.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I know you will) but did Christians have a holiday where they celebrated the birth of Jesus before they "adopted" the holiday? As far as I know, they didn't, so Christmas didn't adopt anything. Christians adopted a celebration (holiday) by what they call pagans and put a different reason behind it making the holiday celebrated on that day for them the Christian holiday now know as Christmas.
The Christ's Mass was celebrated in Rome long before the Christmas Holiday but not specifically to celebrate the birth of Christ. That appears to have come along when the pagan winter festivals were adopted by Christians as a religious holiday. The bible gives us no clue as to Christ's birth date. I think that's what I said.
