LA Times: Taking the Christmas Out of Christ

It was just a few nights before Christmas as Pastor Santos Carrasco, smiling broadly, sat in his small storefront church in Echo Park strumming his guitar and singing of God's goodness.

"How good God is. How good he is," Santos sang out in Spanish. "He forgives my sin. How good he is."

But whatever else the pastor would sing that night — or any other time this week including Saturday or Sunday — it wouldn't be Christmas carols. Neither Christmas trees nor presents are thought appropriate.

Carrasco and his Christian congregation of 60 mainly Central American immigrants at the Iglesia de Dios La Nueva Jerusalem (Church of God the New Jerusalem) believe in Jesus as Lord. But they don't keep Christmas.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-xmas21dec21,0,2907655.story?coll=la-home-headlines&track=morenews

All the streets are filled with laughter and light
And the music of the season
And the merchants’ windows are all bright
With the faces of the children
And the families hurrying to their homes
As the sky darkens and freezes
We’ll be gathering around the hearths and tales
Giving thanks for all God’s graces
And the birth of the rebel Jesus

Well they call him by the prince of peace
And they call him by the savior
And they pray to him upon the seas
And in every bold endeavor
As they fill his churches with their pride and gold
And their faith in him increases
But they’ve turned the nature that I worship in
From a temple to a robber’s den
In the words of the rebel Jesus

We guard our world with locks and guns
And we guard our fine possessions
And once a year when Christmas comes
We give to our relations
And perhaps we give a little to the poor
If the generosity should seize us
But if any one of us should interfere
In the business of why they are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus

But please forgive me if I seem
To take the tone of judgement
For I’ve no wish to come between
This day and your enjoyment
In this life of hardship and of earthly toil
We have need for anything that frees us
So I bid you pleasure
And I bid you cheer
From a heathen and a pagan
On the side of the rebel Jesus

merry christmas :)

if he were alive today.

Welcome to DU, YourBrother.

it's nice to be here

having had a brief read through some of the posts i decided to join

theres some smart cookies here, hope i dont drag down the average ;)

One of my favorites, too. Welcome to DU! :hi:

"You won't drag the average down quoting Jackson Browne"

You're a poet ... and you didn't know it! :yourock:

I doubt Jesus Christ would want anyone to worship him ... period.

If that's true, then you have to ask if he would want everyone to freak out and spend endless amounts of $$$ in celebration of his birth?

Why can't more Christians focus on the words accredited to the man dubbed Jesus?

If you take away all the deity stuff, the moving of the rock, etc., then I guess many feel his words mean nothing, but I digress.

His words are everything!

That is what Christianity should be about. The statues, the beads, the holy water, the sacrements, the fear ... hell w/ all that.

Just read and learn from the red words. The rest is folly.

Even if there never was a Jesus. If the whole thing was a story that gained popularity like the story the mad scientist that made the Frankenstein monster, sooooo what.

The words have merit. Words that nay a Republican Christian Reich member knows not.

I get it. The Roman Empire was bad. They beat the Christians to the punch by hundreds of years when it came to torture, death and suffering. To end that suffering the downtrodden had to give weight to the stories, teachings, and words accredited to Jesus.

The had to have a means to and end. The means ... the resurrection of Jesus. Without that the stories of Jesus would have just floated away. With the resurrection Jesus was proven to be a deity and could be held up as high as any of the Roman Pagan gods.

But you see ... that's no what the words of Jesus are about. That's not what the stories are about.

But instead of the Roman Empire we have the Corporate Empire viaing to control us all. Religion is a great tool of manipulation and control. Through hundreds of years of interpretation and intertwining w/ myths of other folklore, the bible and Christianity has twisted the words accredited to the man we historically call Jesus.

The interpretations, the myths, the endless fog of "faith", it all serves as a ruse and a costume that people wear and use as a tool to meet a political end. It demeans the very meaning and power that the words accredited to the man historically called Jesus ever had.

The power those words gave to the poor, to the meek, to the powerless ... now watered down and turned into fear.

Not only that, but it has the very poor people that are being manipulated ... it has them following them like sheeple. Like the pied piper leading the rats out of the city and to their deaths, endless amounts of blind faith sheeple of cinching up their American flag embroidered blindfolds and marching off to their demise.

The biggest problem ... they're taking us with them.

apparently the oldest recorded transcripts from biblical times are those of the dead sea scrolls

when discovered they caused so much controversy they were ridiculed

the real message of jesus had been bastardized into what we see today and of course that didn't sit well with those who used it to suppress free thought at the time

4 legs good, 2 legs better?

now who was it that destroyed the great libraries in alexandria?

we are only now discovering wisdoms that were freely available thousands of years ago by a civilisation that embraced truth, science and all that was good

they were replaced by a marauding mob of savages who knew not what they did or the consequences for the future either

lesson not learnt

your right, jesus wouldn't want anyone to celebrate it in this carniverous way, poor families feel terrible if they somehow cannot afford the toys their children so badly want .... but therein lies the real problem i believe ... our culture of want want want

no amount of money or material possesions can provide the true happiness and spiritual fulfilment that comes from actually helping other people

god i sound like a communist, do you think jesus was a communist? lol

The Christmas Hoax:
Jesus is NOT the "Reason for the Season"

The December 25th birthday of the sun god is a common motif globally, dating back at least 12,000 years as reflected in winter solstices artfully recorded in caves. "Nearly all nations," says Doane, commemorated the birth of the god Sol to the "Queen of Heaven" and "Celestial Virgin." The winter solstice was celebrated in countless places, including China and Persia, the latter regarding the solar Lord and Savior Mithra's birth. In Rome, a great festival called "Saturnalia" was celebrated from December 1st to the 23rd. The winter solstice festival in Egypt included the babe in a manger brought out of the sanctuary.

Regarding the date of the "Christmas Feast," the Catholic Encyclopedia ("Christmas") remarks:

The well-known solar feast...of Natalis Invicti, celebrated on 25 December, has a strong claim on the responsibility for our December date....

The earliest rapprochement of the births of Christ and the sun is in Cypr., "De pasch. Comp.", xix, "...O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born...Christ should be born." In the fourth century, Chrysostom, "del Solst. Et Æquin." (II, p. 118, ed. 1588), says: "...But Our Lord, too, is born in the month of December...the eight before the calends of January <25 December>... But they call it the 'Birthday of the Unconquered'. Who indeed is so unconquered as Our Lord...? Or, if they say that it is the birthday of the Sun, He is the Sun of Justice." Already Tertullian (Apol., 16; cf. Ad. Nat., I, 13; Orig. c. Cels., VIII, 67, etc) had to assert that Sol was not the Christians' God; Augustine (Tract xxxiv, in Joan. In P. L., XXXV, 1652) denounces the heretical indentification of Christ with Sol. Pope Leo I (Serm. xxxvii in nat. dom., VII, 4; xxii, II, 6 in P. L., LIV, 218 and 198) bitterly reproves solar survivals--Christians, on the very doorstep of the Apostles' basilica, turn to adore the rising sun.

Ancient Greeks celebrated the birthday of Hercules and Dionysus on this date, as the ancient authority Macrobius (c. 400 AD/CE) maintained. Even the Greek father god, Zeus, was supposedly born at the winter solstice. The "Christmas" festival was celebrated at Athens and was called "the Lenaea," during which time, apparently, "the death and rebirth of the harvest infant Dionysus were similarly dramatized." This Lenaea festival is depicted in an Aurignacian cave-painting in Spain, with a "young Dionysus with huge genitals," standing naked in the middle of "nine dancing women." The Aurignacian period extended from 34,000 to 23,000 years ago. In The White Goddess (399), mythologist Robert Graves states:

The most ancient surviving record of European religious practices is an Aurignacian cave-painting at Cogul in North-Eastern Spain of the Old Stone Age Lenaea. A young Dionysus with huge genitals stands un-armed, alone and exhausted in the middle of a crescent of nine dancing women, who face him. He is naked, except for what appear to be a pair of close-fitting boots laced at the knee; they are fully clothed and wear small cone-shaped hats. These wild women, differentiated by their figures and details of their dress, grow progressively older as one looks clock-wise around the crescent...

By using the term "Dionysus," Graves is not stating that it was written on the walls of the cave. He is using it to describe an archetype that is very ancient.

The Greco-Syrian sun god Adonis--the "Adonai" of the Bible--was also born on December 25th, a festival "spoken of by Tertullian, Jerome, and other Fathers of the Church, who inform us that the ceremonies took place in a cave, and that the cave in which they celebrated his mysteries in Bethlehem, was that in which Christ Jesus was born."

Nor is the winter solstice celebration a purely "Pagan" concept, as the Jews also observed it in reference to the birth of their god, Yahweh. The "Feast of Illumination," "Feast of Lights" or "feast of the Dedication," occurred in winter (John 10:22-23; Josephus's Antiquities XIII, 7.7) and represented the "ancient Hebrew Winter Solstice Feast." Regarding this Hannukah feast, in The White Goddess (469), Graves also says:

The rabbinical account is that this eight-day festival which begins on the twenty-fifth day of the month Kislev, was instituted by Judas Maccabeus and that it celebrates a miracle: at the Maccabean consecration of the Temple a small cruse of sacred oil was found, hidden by a former High Priest, which lasted for eight days. By this legend the authors of the Talmud hoped to conceal the antiquity of the feast, which was originally Jehovah's birthday as the Sun-god and had been celebrated at least as early as the time of Nehemiah (Maccabees, I, 18).

From the account in Ezekiel of the Temple priests holding secret rites--sacrilegious in Ezekiel's opinion--we know that there is an esoteric tradition within Judaism that is not made known to the masses. Graves is apparently suggesting that this esoteric tradition included the knowledge of Jehovah/Yahweh as a sun god--as asserted and demonstrated by numerous authorities and researchers--and that, as a sun god, he too was typically considered as born on the winter's solstice. These inferences make for further studies by interested parties.

Indians for millennia have celebrated the winter solstice, as a cardinal point, the new year and, presumably, the birth of the sun god. In the Indian solstice celebration--a "great religious festival"--there is "rejoicing everywhere." As in the West, the Indians "decorate their houses with garlands, and make presents to friends and relatives," a "custom of very great antiquity." One way the Brahman priests of Orissa have celebrated the solstice is by carrying images of "the youthful Krishna to the houses of their disciples and their patrons, to whom they present some of the red powder and tar of roses, and receive presents of money and cloth in return." Thus, in India the winter solstice has been as much a major holiday as it was anywhere, which is to be expected in a land permeated with sun worship for millennia.

Regarding the Persian sun god Mithra and his sacrifice, in the 19th century respected Christian author Rev. J.P. Lundy remarked:

"For let it be borne in mind that it was precisely at the season of this sacrifice, near the beginning of the new year, that the birth of Mithra was celebrated over all Persia and the world, in temple-caves, on the night of the 24th of December, the night of light. Even the British Druids celebrated it, and called the next day, the 25th of December, Nollagh or Noel, the day of regeneration, celebrating it with great fires on tops of their mountains. In fact, all nations, as if by common consent, at the first moment after midnight of the 24th of December, celebrated the birth of the sun-god, type among the Gentiles of Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, as the Desire of all nations and the Saviour of the world."

Lundy was thus well aware of the sun gods, whom he deemed "types of Christ," indicating Christ's solar nature as well.

Concerning the winter solstice festival in Ireland, the author of Christian Mythology Unveiled relates:

"The Baal-fire feast, or meeting, was a great festival in Ireland, on the 25th of December, and midsummer eve. Baal, or Bel, was a name of the sun all over the east."

It is important to note that the "December 25th" birthdate only applies to the age and hemisphere in which the winter solstice falls on December 21-24. In other ages, the solstice month is different, changing with the precession of the equinoxes every 2150 years.

The December 25th birthdate is that of the sun, not a "real person," revealing its unoriginality within Christianity and the true nature of the Christian godman. "Christmas" was not incorporated into Christianity until 354 AD/CE. In reality, there is no evidence, no primary sources which show that "Jesus is the reason for the season."

Happy Solstice!

Excerpted from "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled"
http://www.truthbeknown.com/sunsofgod.htm

(c) 2006 Acharya S

He can be the reason for the season to who ever wants him to be.

It doesn't matter. Look at the history you listed, things keep changing...

a well researched peice

this date of 12,000 years intrigues me

new dating on the sphynx and surrounding monuments using weathering models places them at around this time in history

past civilisations learnt lessons we could all have learned from, unless those lessons focused the ordinary man towards treating the world we've been given with respect and not exhausting unrenewable resources

who knows?

also, in sumerian tradition, very old stuff, they had rituals where they first drank water ... then brought out the wine, kinda rubbishes the whole miracle business though in translation huh

In that 1500 years Christmas has become more and more Christian in tradition and outlook (With some backsliding in the late Middle Ages and the last 200 years). At the same time efforts have been made to outlaw it as a Pagan holiday (Puritans). Thus it is a mixture of Pagan, Middle Ages Christianity, Modern Christianity and even Secular Traditions. Outside of the English Speaking Christian world the Middle Age Christian Tradition Dominates (For the rest of Christianity) while Modern Christianity and Secular Traditions dominate in the English Speaking World.

Thus to Call Christmas a Non-Christian Holiday is to ignore 1500-1700 years of Tradition (While Saying Christmas is 100% Christian is to ignore our Pagan past and the Secular World). As one old man told me years ago "We Christians Stole the holiday 1700 years ago and it is till our holiday).

ok then, lets ignore 1500 - 1700 years of "tradition" in the pursuit of truth?

or just blindly keep following what we were told as children?

p.s. do you still think santa is real?

great that you can hear this online now!

The Lost Scrolls of Frosty

http://www.deadtroll.com/audio/frosty.html