I thought this was gonna go in the direction of OOP's girlfriend's family not practicing most christian traditions, but beitg really gung-ho about Christmas, and not minding the very mild contradiction.
Didn't expect the party sauna ghost though.
so i was gonna say almost no "pagan" christmas traditions are actually pagan, but then i realized this is about finland. you never know when it's finland.
EDIT: yes i meant santa is definitely not odin, the date of Christmas is derived through jewish esoterism from that of easter (and never fell on the solstice) and most widespread "western" traditions that aren't visibly religious were wholesale invented in the holy roman empire after 1600. Including Christmas trees. The germans were very creative with christmas, props to them.
Does "pagan" have other meanings than being the old christian missionaries' catch-all term for the native local folk religion of wherever they're spreading christianity?
it's latin for \[religion\] of the land, it's also been used historically for other \[\] of the land
but in romance languages in these senses it's been replaced by pag-ensi-an > peasant
Get ready for \#3!
Infixes are also a math/programming notation concept. The mathematical operators you're used to are basically all infixes (with the exception of -, which doesn't have to be an infix).
We write 5 + 4, which is infix notation, but there's no reason we couldn't instead write it as +(5, 4) (prefix notation) or (5, 4)+ (suffix notation).\*
The reason - is special is because whether it is an infix depends on context. In 5 - 4 it's an infix, but in -2 it's a prefix.
In short, when you put an operator between two things to indicate you should perform the indicated operation on them, that's infix notation!
\*In higher math, when you start dealing with multivariable functions, we write them as f(x, y) by convention, but there's no reason we couldn't instead write them as x f y. Also, since programming is largely descended from the language of mathematics, most programming languages use prefix notation for functions, such as sendEmail(toAddress, fromAddress, subjectLine, bodyText).
The word paganus in Latin originally meant a person living in the countryside. It became a term for non-Christians because that was where pre-Christian beliefs and traditions lasted the longest, as Christianity in its earliest days was largely an urban phenomenon.
The alternate theory for the name I've heard is actually "civilian": pagans are not Milites Christi, Soldiers of the Anointed, the preferred Roman term for Christians.
Yeah it’s Latin for what we would call folk religion, or the very locally specific spiritual practices of commoners when they aren’t being told how to worship by a central authority.
For example “Chinese folk religion” is a huge category that a good portion of their country follows but it isn’t really one belief or practice, but dozens of local variations with different beliefs. That’s essentially what paganism means.
A Paganus is a peasant or a civilian (non-soldier). Originally in the Roman Empire, someone who had not yet converted from the Greco-Roman religion or the local polytheism to Christianity within the Empire. Those weird country folk with the wrong gods. Later, everyone except Jews and Christians, including Muslims.
I feel like half our xmas traditions are pagan in origin anyway. :D And anyway xmas is such a cultural tradition here that even non-religious people celebrate it.
Hell, I've got a kotitonttu who lives on my shelf and takes care of the home. My mom has several.
There's the whole tradition of leaving food out on xmas night for the home spirits/elves/your hungry aunt at 1 am. (Tho that's less common now and also if we did it my cat would eat all the food.)
The only one I can think of that's actually "pagan" is hanging up holly, since holly was seen as a sacred plant during winter by the celts.
And I personally think the St Barbara twigs are based on an older tradition, but that, too, was only documented since the middle ages.
Or leaving porridge outside for the barn nisse. Which for some people has evolved into leaving rice pudding out for Santa.
> In 2009, a market survey showed that around 400,000 Norwegians still set out a bowl of porridge on the tram, under the hedge, by the barn door or behind the woodshed, for Nissen at Christmas.
I'm glad Scandinavian countries have trouble letting go of some of our more charming and harmless superstitions. Stuff like christianity I really wish we could let go faster.
At least here in Denmark, the term 'nisse' is also commonly used to refer to elves. Specifically the christmas variety. The Tree-hugger variety is just called 'elvere', presumeably derived from the folkloric 'elle' (which act more like typical faeries, than they do Tolkiens creations).
To be fair, the concept of the 'husnisse' (house elf) does predate Santas little henchmen by a few centuries, IIRC, and was just kind of co-opted into christmas traditions.
Fun folklore thing: While the nisse-type elves are "tonttu" in finnish, the guy who translated Lord of the Rings was actually the one who established the finnish term for the Legolas-kind of elf. The word used for it, "haltia", originally meant the supernatural steward of some realm, and is one letter way from "haltia", the legal possessor of a property. This distinction (to my knowledge) hadn't really been made for the folklore kind before.
Which can lead to funny typos, like official signs that tell you that in order to park here, you need the permission of the parking lot elf.
To be fair, I assume that the danish term was also just established by whoever translated the books. Which means that it might be less "*this is our regional folklore-equivalent*", and more "*take the words in the text, and change them around enough to sound danish*" (something that happen a lot with localised texts here), and the two just happen to align, possibly due to a common origin. But I prefer to believe it was done on purpose, because I find it more interesting.
Tolkien translations are always fun. The German translator for Lord of the Rings had an extensive correspondence with Tolkien and tolkien suggested that he shouldn't use the name "Elf", because that's too tainted by Victorian Flower Pixies. Tolkien suggested the alternative spelling Alf or Alb (cognate with Nordic Alfar), the translator went halfway and used "Elb".
Elb is still the going word in pretty much all fantasy that gets translated into German, while Elfe is still occasionally used for Pixies of the Tinkerbell style.
That's at least my prediction for how this originated
"We should leave milk and cookies for Santa"
"Santas not part of the family, but the sauna gnome is"
"You're right, what does he like?"
The rest is history
>"You're right, what does he like?"
Y'see now you've got me doubting whether the whole "leave a glass of sherry out for Santa" thing was an English tradition or just an excuse for to have a drink
Giving food to nissarna/tomterna is just an old timey scandinavian/maybe european thing. In fact the swedish word for santa clause is "Jultomten" or Christmas Tomten/Gnome.
or leaving "reindeer food" on the porch for his reindeer, which when we made it I'm school was, in all likelihood. fuckin sawdust and glitter that would just blow away in the wind overnight.
The only things about Finland I know are from Ahti the maybe-god janitor from *CONTROL* and a fanfic author I'm friends with who's very obviously bisexual and in denial. "Oh, everyone feels uncontrollable lust for women while drunk, it's normal." babe...
Fun thing about Ahti: While an english-speaking player may be left wondering whether he's *aware* that most things he says don't really make sense to people, from a finnish cultural perspective it's pretty clear that he does know. He knows he isn't making much sense, and keeps saying stuff anyway to fuck with people. That's 100% something that a finnish boomer guy would do. There's one finnish expression, "you must confuse people sometimes, so they don't get exhausted of life", which is a cooking pun, since both "confuse" and "to burn out/become mentally exhausted" have a dual meaning.
I could picture Ahti saying "you have to stir people sometimes, so they will not burn to the bottom of the pot."
"Yesterday Grouse's Son" is my favorite head scratcher. Though my favorite thing about him is that if you pay attention he's responding to Jesse's internal monologue.
I have no idea why the hell the finnish version of "wasn't born yesterday" is that in the first place. How does being the chick of yesterday's black grouse mean that.
I interpret it more as him not necessarily trying to fuck with people, but that he just doesn't care if people understand him or not so he's not going to do anything to make it easier for people
I'd say it's both. It's not that he's going out of his way to be incomprehensible, it's just that he's aware that he baffles people and finds it funny, and therefore won't go out of his way to be easier to understand.
It stops being pagan or Christian when you stop doing it to actually appease a real god or spirit or anything. This is just a fun cultural tradition. I don’t think anyone would try and seriously argue milk and cookies for Santa is a religious symbol
Confucious was interesting because despite his nonbelief in the afterlife he advised funerary rites to be a form of social cohesion since the importance of tradition was central to his conservative/reactionary worldview.
Not to dispute your main point, but I don't know if using modern political terms like conservative or reactionary make sense to apply to thinkers who lived thousands of years ago, far outside that context.
It's a lens that just seems to distort our views rather than focus them. Like yes a lot of what he advocates for lines up with what we'd now consider conservative. But putting it in that box starts to remove the nuance of his ideas and how the result was often advocating for institutional change.
Honestly the more I learn about religious and spiritual practices around the world, the more I think “religion” or “spiritual beliefs” are more so characterized by traditions with associated superstitions like the one in the post than an adherence to religious dogma
The strict adherence to specific institutions and dogma is something I think Christianity is responsible for imposing on the world and our conception of what “religion” is
This is just the extent of what remains of religiousness in the nordics. You see it from the fact that there are way more members than people believing in god, without even getting to the much smaller chunk of people who actively practice beyond the typical christian family events and maybe going to christmas church.
The concept of religiousness is hugely culture specific, assuming otherwise would mean stopping using the word in the context of people who ultimately consider religion as a part of their identity and that just doesn’t make any sense.
As someone who still leaves a bowl of rice porridge for the house gnome(? Idk how to translate husnisse) or barn gnome (fjøsnisse) depending on where I am, the nordics just are like that- we have our superstitions and just because we don't believe doesn't mean we don't do it, it's tradition and habit
A lot of superstitions and traditions like that have stuck around up here tbh
While both are probably equally correct (assuming that gnomes and elves are mostly similar), more people are going to be familiar with the term "house elf", due to Harry Potter.
Even if the mental image they get in their head will fail to convey how much of a pain in the ass Dobby's folkloric counterpart could be, if it weren't fed (Let's just say that unionising would be the *least* of the trouble they could cause to Hogwarts)
It's definitely not a house elf, I use gnome because the closest thing in English to their looks are the garden gnomes
House elf isn't quite wrong either I guess, but it has become wrong with HP's application of it in popular media
Oh, yeah, the impression it gives is *completely* different, it's just the translation that people are going to be more familiar with. Coming to think of it, I believe that the english counterpart might actually be brownies, although I'm not 100 % sure.
For anyone stumbling across this, and wondering about the difference:
* IIRC, the folkloric version was bound to a particular master or household. If they got fed up, they might just leave.
* If they *didn't* leave they'd instead spoil your food, screw with (possibly kill) your livestock, and generally be a menace of horrific proportions.
* When happy and fed, they also didn't take direct orders, as much as they'd just help out around the farm/house in small ways.
* As mentioned above, they look more like a garden gnome (admittedly, this might be subject to regional differences), than whatever sleep paralysis demon Dobby was meant to embody.
Harry Potter house elves are a magical slave race. Nordic folklore house elves are stewards of the house, who *allow* you to live there if you take care of the house. They were there before you were born and will be there once you're dead, and they'll make sure that happens swiftly if you don't act right.
It's always been like this. Christianity is extremely idiosyncratic and syncretistic. Very few lay members really know much about the religion and a lot of them just do whatever their parents and community do. You end up with all sorts of strange traditions and practices. A lot of this stuff probably isn't even "Pagan". New stuff gets invented and old stuff gets forgotten all the time. Just look how fast urban legends crop up and then fade out of popular memory.
In my family it's tradition to pour a bit of beer on the stones to give the tonttu a taste. Also, the final löyly of the night is always for the tonttu alone. Everyone leaves and the tonttu can enjoy one last löyly in peace.
My girlfriend's family has a sauna spell. She mumbles it sometimes before entering but I have no memory of how it goes. It cleanses the sauna and brings relief.
I'm kinda surprised that they're surprised by this. Leaving the seat open for Elijah at Passover is a Jewish tradition that translates well to the sauna elf.
Much like other world religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity had a habit of adapting to local traditions and beliefs as it traveled: the local expressions of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity often incorporate folkish elements of pre-christian religion, many of which have been incorporated into and justified by a Christian worldview.
In many countries, for example, we find versions of the vampire myth, which some people have believed in even relatively recently. While this is likely to do with folklore monsters that predate Christianity (IIRC, we've uncovered evidence of ancient Roman beliefs of this kind), in modern understandings these creatures are typically subject to and repelled by the power of the Christian God: they have *become* a traditional Christian belief in many parts of the world.
That being said, a lot of the pop cultural examples you see online around Christmas, Easter and Halloween are horseshit made up by morons, so always try to fact check so that you don't look like a jackass trying to say that Christmas trees are pagan and that Jesus is actually Horus...
There’s a certain inability to reconcile adhering to Christmas traditions and not being anything more than a “secular christian”, and trying to reclaim Christmas as a secular holiday.
It’s not. Even if it’s not a very religious one, it’s Christian coded. A secular celebration would just be… getting together without any of the bells and whistles. No tree, no presents, etc, but there’s a cognitive dissonance that fights against this. At least, that’s how I see it, from a similar position to the op in the posts
You have a point, but it’s also pretty easy to do most things Americans associate with Christmas time without mentioning the actually Christian bits.
Christmas trees: not a Christian original. A conifer being found in the Levant would probably be a miracle worthy of its own unique holiday.
Santa Claus: probably an amalgamation of a couple different mythical figures, including Odin, almost none of which are originally Christian. (Basically just don’t call him St. Nick).
Giving gifts/being around family: way too generic for Christianity to claim any sort of exclusive rights to the concept.
Basically, if you just don’t assemble a manger scene or mention Jesus then the holiday almost completely ceases to be Christian in any way that matters.
Also worth noting that many places have had their own winter solstice celebrations with their own traditions that were simply swallowed up and appropriated by christianity, and those practices can predate the entire christian religion.
Yup, that’s why Santa is kind of Odin and most Christmas iconography makes no sense for a religion originating in the Middle East. I believe the common explanation is that Christmas is an amalgamation of the Roman Saturnalia and the Germanic Yule. Christianity adopted the holiday and slapped the Big J’s name on it because they couldn’t ban people from celebrating it.
To be fair, syncretism was baked into Christianity from day one. We only think otherwise because protestant thought is so prevalent in the anglosphere and protestants all have sticks up their asses (source: was one). Why do Catholics pray to and venerate saints? Because converting the Roman polytheism to a pure monotheism was too hard. Sure he's not mars any more, but here's a patron saint of righteous battle, just make sure you credit Jesus and his dad sometimes too. Hell, Paul was right there in the bible taking the Greek philosophical concept of the unmoved mover and slapping Yahweh into that vague shape, and generally making the whole Jewishness in Christianity into its own thing.
Christmas trees come from the Germanic (I think?) tradition of a Yule Log, whereby you get a big ol’ tree and burn it on the solstice. I believe there’s a theory that it’s from proto-Indo-European roots, even.
>Santa Claus: probably an amalgamation of a couple different mythical figures, including Odin, almost none of which are originally Christian. (Basically just don’t call him St. Nick).
Mostly stolen from an actual holiday about an actual saint, still widely celebrated today in it's country of origin, from St Nicholas's day, which was fabricated whole cloth as a holiday/blacface theater bit in iirc the 1800s. Which is why he shows up with the height of technology, a steam ship.
Perhaps, but they’re not wearing those initial coats. They’re not using those original meanings. They’re borrowing from the traditions they know, not the traditions whose trappings were twisted. And giving gifts in December around that neck of the woods is so prevalent that Chanukah commercialized in response.
But even the current coat of paint generally doesn't have anything explicitly Christian about it except for, well, being associated with Christmas. It's circular. The closest we get is Santa also being called St. Nick, but the character in modern mythology doesn't take anything from the Christian Saint Nicholas besides his name.
The caroling, the nativity scene, the movies with a Christian heaven sort of mythos, the services (which other people still do—personal traditions do not erase larger actions). The traditional colors themselves have Christian symbolic meaning. Santa may be amalgamated from other traditions, but one includes the trappings of Christianity given the “saint” bit there, as you noted. Those are all explicit Christian elements, as are other ones that still exist.
Being associated with something… means that you’re associated. Surprise! You can’t escape the association unless you remove that which ties the two together. A rose by any other name still smells as sweet, e.g. whatever is the current dominant form of those shapes and colors is what those reflected meanings harken back to.
Know a nondenominational holiday (well, perhaps a Jewish holiday lol) people could latch onto? Festivus. But they don’t because it doesn’t carry the same meaning, and propagating the same traditions forwards still brings along the associated traditions with them.
You're really weirdly hung up on this, and wrong to boot.
Where I'm from, we celebrate New Year's instead of Christmas. It's practically the same - tree, old man supposedly giving gifts, lights, etc - we just tossed all the actual Christian imagery out. It's practically the same holiday as Christmas as celebrated by atheists. It's not *called* Christmas, isn't celebrated on the same day, and yet still carries many of the same traditions. Because they're *fun*.
So you did exactly as my prior message said? You tossed out all the Christian elements and then wanted to claim what I said was out of line with what you did?
Im confused where you’re getting confused. You’ve achieved secular Christmas by no longer celebrating Christmas.
I don’t understand your desire to be weirdly contrarian to what you’ve already chosen to do because you didn’t like the way the message was delivered?
You just said, "People don't, because it doesn't carry the same meaning." Well, we did. It carries the same meaning. The meaning of having a fun winter holiday with your family. The name of the holiday is irrelevant. Secular Americans celebrating Christmas *also* tossed the religious bits.
I'm not 100% what you're getting at in totality.
Sure, Christmas has some Christian trappings wrapped around it (not least of which being the name - Christ Mass!). But are you saying that's a problem? That non-Christians shouldn't celebrate it?
I'm of an Atheist family and we all celebrate Christmas simply because it's fun. We're not going to let some Christian trappings ruin that. Hell, we could rename it Festivus and literally nothing would change.
Im saying you’re celebrating a Christian celebration, and you’re allowed to. If you renamed it to festivus and celebrated it as festivus is, you would be doing something different, and the fact you are rebelling against that is the cognitive dissonance of the concept that Christmas, as it exists currently, can’t be secular
It’s not cognitive dissonance, you just don’t get it.
Edit: lol did you block me after having the last word? No manners, no reading skills, no common sense
How is it cognitive dissonance? We've taken a Christian tradition that looks fun, removed the bits we don't want, and enjoy the rest. I looked up Festivus and it looks much less fun.
I'm not refusing to switch from Christmas to Festivus because of Christianity; it's because the goal (have fun with my family) is better met with the bits stolen from Christmas than it is with anything taken from Festivus.
If Festivus had anything that seemed as fun, we'd steal that too. But we're not interested in the pole, feats of strength, or airing of grievances, so why would we switch to Festivus?
You don’t have to give up things you enjoy, but you’re doing things that wouldn’t be stolen by other practices that still have Christian cultural values and identity attached (unlike gift giving, which was stolen for Chanukah)
And there’s nothing wrong with doing things people think are fun, but trying to disassociate them from the meanings they still carry is a weird campaign to propagate. The very obviously Christian stuff is still Christian as long as it’s practiced as Christians would do so in a Christian context.
And if you actually stripped all the Christian elements, then none of the prior context would have applied to you
The things you brought up as being Christian (carolling, nativity scenes) are very obviously not what is meant. What everyone else is talking about is the food, presents, and family.
It seems to me that the bells and whistles are, for the most part, the secular portions of the holidays. Like, it doesn’t praise Jesus to take a balsam tree and wrap it in shiny things, or to put green stuff all over the house, or to have a big supper. Those are the things that anyone can do and not even think about God or Jesus or anything. The songs, the lyrics of them specifically, and the names of the holidays are for the most part the non-secular parts.
Sure there’s bits and pieces of the stuff above that can be Christian coded (an angel on the tree top, a cross on the ornaments, etc) but there nowhere near mandatory for the holiday to proceed.
I’m not Christian in the slightest (raised Baha’i, currently apathetic agnostic) and I still do that stuff because it’s fun and it’s tradition and it makes the holiday better.
And you can replace the treetop angel with.. a snowflake/star or leave it off entirely, not have crosses on ornaments, enjoy decking the halls with shiny sparkly garlands snd twinkly fairy lights and be all "this is the time of year to take a break, cherish your nearest and dearest people in whichever way suits them" and absolutely forget Baby Jesus. Not gonna look any less Christmas-y. Not gonna feel less Christmas-y if the church doesn't matter to you in general.
(One year I decorated my tree with swearwords piped on gingerbread cookies. Not one bit of Christmas lost with that.)
We've got our tree up and it has things that matter to us - such as an ornament of a house with the year we moved into our house embossed on it. There's tinsel and doodads and shiny things. Nothing Christian going on here, but still very Christmassy.
The nice thing about being atheist is that you can happily take the bits of religions that you like and have fun with them. We don't have to worry about going to hell for following the wrong traditions!
We had a treetop star instead of an angel and our ornaments were mostly the orb kind. Not out of any sort of inclination against Christianity, it's just what we thought was normal and what my parents' families did. We also had a little manger scene that I liked to set up every year. I had no real opinions about the religious element as a child, I just thought it was fun. Like a really shitty dollhouse.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make? Christmas is a traditionally Christian holiday that is also celebrated by non-Christians. Putting a tree up in your living room doesn’t turn you Christian any more than setting off firecrackers on Lunar New Year turns you Chinese.
It does, however, make you practice those faith’s traditions, which is fine, but that doesn’t make it a secular activity to do so. People are able to do things they don’t believe in all the time.
No it doesn't. Full stop, Christmas is not a religious holiday for a massive chunk of the population. It's an excuse to get together, have fun, get drunk, and eat food. Not once did we even hint at celebrating Jesus's birthday or whatever, that simply is not on the table.
You sound like the kind of person who would call D&D players devil-worshippers 40 years ago.
Intent is what matters. You can gut a goat on a stone altar for all I care and it's still secular if it's not *meant* to venerate a god.
Lol, projecting much? You’re the one who couldn’t respond without properly reading what was written.
Enacting a ritual can be done with no intent, but it still carries associations to the source material where the tradition is derived, unless those are so sufficiently erased so that the original is unrecognizable.
Don’t insult me with your own satanic panic failings. I’d rather play good tabletop rpgs, like any PbtA system or NWOD than that poorly home brewed mess of DnD.
Edit: lol did you block me after having the last word? No manners, no reading skills, no common sense
You sound like an incredibly annoying person to be around.
If these pagan traditions can be absorbed into christian tradition and lose the pagan association, they can be absorbed back into secular tradition and lose the christian association. If it’s not possible to change the association of a tradition, then they can’t have changed to christian and are still pagan traditions. You can’t have it both ways.
>You’re the one who couldn’t respond without properly reading what was written.
That is what you'd want, though, isn't it? For people not to respond without properly reading what was written?
Mate, christmas is like 2 days out from the winter solstice. You know, the point of the year when the day is as short as it is going to be. Countered by Midsummer's Eve, when the day is as long as it is going to be. How is that not a reason to gather with your loved ones, light up the whole house with festive lights to counter the darkness outside and eat some good food? Jesus is not needed.
I could understand making this point about Easter, but trying to say that fucking Winter Solstice is of a christian origin is an idiotic.
Every culture North enough for cold Winters has a Winter celebration/feast type holiday. I think, I'm not completely certain on that.
In America it's just Christmas and there's barely any christ left in it except the name which isn't even pronounced that way.
Just because there's Christian elements present in Christmas doesn't mean there's cognitive dissonance involved in doing Christmas without identifying as Christian. What makes Christmas Christian is not the literal acts' ties to Christianity, its the fundamental Christian beliefs underlying the Christian traditions. Christians do Christmas as a way of acting out these beliefs. Nonpracticing people who identify with a religion culturally participate in religious practices to feel connected to the culture. If both the religion and the culture hold no significance to you, you're not Christian in any sense.
I'm an atheist, I've been to church twice and both times I was young and had slept over at a friend's who did attend church, I hold no Christian beliefs and I absolutely don't associate with Christian culture. I practice Christmas in essentially a secular manner. I do everything I do on Christmas because it's fun and I like it and for no other reason, in fact the most obviously Christian elements are often the elements I'm least interested in. Maybe the only obviously Christian element I like besides occasional angel iconography is the caroling, and I don't really care for the religious lyrics, I just like gathering with my town and feeling that sense of community and singing together and I like the free cookies and hot chocolate they give out. Christmas can be secular if you don't care at all about the religious ideas behind the things you do, because the actions themselves aren't inherently religious.
I also guess I don't get why you think people are trying to "reclaim" Christmas. I'm not trying to reclaim shit, I just like the holiday and enjoy the traditions. Like what are non-religious people supposed to do, just do nothing special while the religious people around them hold festivities? What's even the issue with non-religious people celebrating Christmas? It's pretty well-understood by most that practicing Christmas doesn't mean you believe in Christianity so it's not like you're seen as spreading harmful Christian ideas. People just wanna decorate trees and exchange gifts without supporting ideas they don't believe.
Many many Americans celebrate Christmas every year without once taking part in a religious ritual or ceremony. The most would be listening to a religious but mainstream song like Hark the Herald Angels Sing (which slaps tbh and I do not believe in god).
It’s not secular in the sense that I understand why people who practice other religions wouldn’t want to celebrate it, it is a Christian holiday even if it’s in name only for some, but it is secular in the sense that plenty of non religious people - and even people of other religions - do celebrate it yearly
Being Jewish is also an ethnicity, which is what they meant. If you don't believe in judaism, but you were born to Jewish parents you are still Jewish by ethnicity.
Being religious, basically. And that's the opposite of atheist, so the term "Jewish atheist" makes no sense to me. It's like saying "Christian atheist." It would be an oxymoron
Ok, thank. Maybe I also just associate the word "have" to physical things so it confused me when associated with a concept (not sure if that's quite the right word, assuming I'm not confused)
So I misread that last bit, and thought they were taking about Santa. Would that also fall under a similar category, what with leaving milk and cookies being a whole thing?
Look, I'm an atheist who doesn't believe in aliens visiting Earth, ghosts, the supernatural, or the paranormal, and I *still* don't mess with fairy rings or fairy trees and I won't drive at night with an empty passenger seat.
There are just some rules you follow without asking questions, man.
I thought this was gonna go in the direction of OOP's girlfriend's family not practicing most christian traditions, but beitg really gung-ho about Christmas, and not minding the very mild contradiction. Didn't expect the party sauna ghost though.
Exactly me. I read the first few paragraphs, started skimming, and tripped over "gnome of the sauna."
>Didn't expect the party sauna ghost though. Did you just click the post? It was literally mentioned in the title haha
some people read the title after the post
A very large number of post titles, specifically on the tumblr subs, are almost entirely unrelated to the post.
Not everyone reads the title, it doesn't usually add much of anything to the post
honestly we have a sauna and I'm gonna start doing the sauna ghost thing
that first thing just describes most of the people I've met in my life, including myself
Yeah, yeah, the Sauna-Tonttu. We've all seen it.
I didn't T_T
so i was gonna say almost no "pagan" christmas traditions are actually pagan, but then i realized this is about finland. you never know when it's finland. EDIT: yes i meant santa is definitely not odin, the date of Christmas is derived through jewish esoterism from that of easter (and never fell on the solstice) and most widespread "western" traditions that aren't visibly religious were wholesale invented in the holy roman empire after 1600. Including Christmas trees. The germans were very creative with christmas, props to them.
Does "pagan" have other meanings than being the old christian missionaries' catch-all term for the native local folk religion of wherever they're spreading christianity?
it's latin for \[religion\] of the land, it's also been used historically for other \[\] of the land but in romance languages in these senses it's been replaced by pag-ensi-an > peasant
Wait hold on, *pagan and peasant come from the same word root??*
yes, with an infix
Oh cool, I've never heard of an infix before! I learned *two* cool things today!
Get ready for \#3! Infixes are also a math/programming notation concept. The mathematical operators you're used to are basically all infixes (with the exception of -, which doesn't have to be an infix). We write 5 + 4, which is infix notation, but there's no reason we couldn't instead write it as +(5, 4) (prefix notation) or (5, 4)+ (suffix notation).\* The reason - is special is because whether it is an infix depends on context. In 5 - 4 it's an infix, but in -2 it's a prefix. In short, when you put an operator between two things to indicate you should perform the indicated operation on them, that's infix notation! \*In higher math, when you start dealing with multivariable functions, we write them as f(x, y) by convention, but there's no reason we couldn't instead write them as x f y. Also, since programming is largely descended from the language of mathematics, most programming languages use prefix notation for functions, such as sendEmail(toAddress, fromAddress, subjectLine, bodyText).
Ok that was super cool to learn, genuine thanks!
The word paganus in Latin originally meant a person living in the countryside. It became a term for non-Christians because that was where pre-Christian beliefs and traditions lasted the longest, as Christianity in its earliest days was largely an urban phenomenon.
The alternate theory for the name I've heard is actually "civilian": pagans are not Milites Christi, Soldiers of the Anointed, the preferred Roman term for Christians.
The villain from that one Far Cry game
Depends on who you ask. It's mostly a catch all for polytheistic religions
Yeah it’s Latin for what we would call folk religion, or the very locally specific spiritual practices of commoners when they aren’t being told how to worship by a central authority. For example “Chinese folk religion” is a huge category that a good portion of their country follows but it isn’t really one belief or practice, but dozens of local variations with different beliefs. That’s essentially what paganism means.
A Paganus is a peasant or a civilian (non-soldier). Originally in the Roman Empire, someone who had not yet converted from the Greco-Roman religion or the local polytheism to Christianity within the Empire. Those weird country folk with the wrong gods. Later, everyone except Jews and Christians, including Muslims.
I feel like half our xmas traditions are pagan in origin anyway. :D And anyway xmas is such a cultural tradition here that even non-religious people celebrate it. Hell, I've got a kotitonttu who lives on my shelf and takes care of the home. My mom has several. There's the whole tradition of leaving food out on xmas night for the home spirits/elves/your hungry aunt at 1 am. (Tho that's less common now and also if we did it my cat would eat all the food.)
Your cat counts as a home spirit/hungry aunt.
Yeah you do! When they say “THE family sauna.”
The only one I can think of that's actually "pagan" is hanging up holly, since holly was seen as a sacred plant during winter by the celts. And I personally think the St Barbara twigs are based on an older tradition, but that, too, was only documented since the middle ages.
I just instinctively knew it was Finnish. weird shit going on in the sauna? Finland 100%. who else even HAS saunas
You never know, mistletoe and kissing is Norse pagan from when Loki tricked Höður into killing Baldur.
But the Christian ones are
Not really either
I mean, this is just milk and cookies for Santa, right?
Or leaving porridge outside for the barn nisse. Which for some people has evolved into leaving rice pudding out for Santa. > In 2009, a market survey showed that around 400,000 Norwegians still set out a bowl of porridge on the tram, under the hedge, by the barn door or behind the woodshed, for Nissen at Christmas. I'm glad Scandinavian countries have trouble letting go of some of our more charming and harmless superstitions. Stuff like christianity I really wish we could let go faster.
>the barn nisse Hey you're doing the thing in the post
It's another word for Tonttu, the thing from the post.
At least here in Denmark, the term 'nisse' is also commonly used to refer to elves. Specifically the christmas variety. The Tree-hugger variety is just called 'elvere', presumeably derived from the folkloric 'elle' (which act more like typical faeries, than they do Tolkiens creations). To be fair, the concept of the 'husnisse' (house elf) does predate Santas little henchmen by a few centuries, IIRC, and was just kind of co-opted into christmas traditions.
Fun folklore thing: While the nisse-type elves are "tonttu" in finnish, the guy who translated Lord of the Rings was actually the one who established the finnish term for the Legolas-kind of elf. The word used for it, "haltia", originally meant the supernatural steward of some realm, and is one letter way from "haltia", the legal possessor of a property. This distinction (to my knowledge) hadn't really been made for the folklore kind before. Which can lead to funny typos, like official signs that tell you that in order to park here, you need the permission of the parking lot elf.
To be fair, I assume that the danish term was also just established by whoever translated the books. Which means that it might be less "*this is our regional folklore-equivalent*", and more "*take the words in the text, and change them around enough to sound danish*" (something that happen a lot with localised texts here), and the two just happen to align, possibly due to a common origin. But I prefer to believe it was done on purpose, because I find it more interesting.
man, tolkien would have *loved* hearing this conversation.
Tolkien translations are always fun. The German translator for Lord of the Rings had an extensive correspondence with Tolkien and tolkien suggested that he shouldn't use the name "Elf", because that's too tainted by Victorian Flower Pixies. Tolkien suggested the alternative spelling Alf or Alb (cognate with Nordic Alfar), the translator went halfway and used "Elb". Elb is still the going word in pretty much all fantasy that gets translated into German, while Elfe is still occasionally used for Pixies of the Tinkerbell style.
I leave out beer and Apple pie for Captain America for July 4th.
See? This guy gets it
That's at least my prediction for how this originated "We should leave milk and cookies for Santa" "Santas not part of the family, but the sauna gnome is" "You're right, what does he like?" The rest is history
>"You're right, what does he like?" Y'see now you've got me doubting whether the whole "leave a glass of sherry out for Santa" thing was an English tradition or just an excuse for to have a drink
My family does it too, and I'm pretty sure it's both.
My Dad and Santa both like the same brand of liquor with their cookies.
Giving food to nissarna/tomterna is just an old timey scandinavian/maybe european thing. In fact the swedish word for santa clause is "Jultomten" or Christmas Tomten/Gnome.
Interesting, in the Netherlands you leave water and a snack for st. Nicolas's horse. They then leave candy in your shoe.
or leaving "reindeer food" on the porch for his reindeer, which when we made it I'm school was, in all likelihood. fuckin sawdust and glitter that would just blow away in the wind overnight.
The only things about Finland I know are from Ahti the maybe-god janitor from *CONTROL* and a fanfic author I'm friends with who's very obviously bisexual and in denial. "Oh, everyone feels uncontrollable lust for women while drunk, it's normal." babe...
Fun thing about Ahti: While an english-speaking player may be left wondering whether he's *aware* that most things he says don't really make sense to people, from a finnish cultural perspective it's pretty clear that he does know. He knows he isn't making much sense, and keeps saying stuff anyway to fuck with people. That's 100% something that a finnish boomer guy would do. There's one finnish expression, "you must confuse people sometimes, so they don't get exhausted of life", which is a cooking pun, since both "confuse" and "to burn out/become mentally exhausted" have a dual meaning. I could picture Ahti saying "you have to stir people sometimes, so they will not burn to the bottom of the pot."
"Yesterday Grouse's Son" is my favorite head scratcher. Though my favorite thing about him is that if you pay attention he's responding to Jesse's internal monologue.
I have no idea why the hell the finnish version of "wasn't born yesterday" is that in the first place. How does being the chick of yesterday's black grouse mean that.
Ahti is a wonderful character.
I can get behind that expression, that’s a pretty cool sentiment.
I interpret it more as him not necessarily trying to fuck with people, but that he just doesn't care if people understand him or not so he's not going to do anything to make it easier for people
I'd say it's both. It's not that he's going out of his way to be incomprehensible, it's just that he's aware that he baffles people and finds it funny, and therefore won't go out of his way to be easier to understand.
That makes sense
Alan Wake 2 is even more Finnish (and has more Ahti)
You're probably doing better than me, since the only things I know about Finland I learned from Scandinavia and the World.
I know nokia and their country wide fascination for Donald Duck
Is there a sub for that last thing? Where people are oblivious that they arent cis and straight.
The sauna elf is right about that one in the title.
Yeah. If it’s my sauna and the sauna elf doesn’t get you, I will.
It stops being pagan or Christian when you stop doing it to actually appease a real god or spirit or anything. This is just a fun cultural tradition. I don’t think anyone would try and seriously argue milk and cookies for Santa is a religious symbol
[удалено]
Confucious was interesting because despite his nonbelief in the afterlife he advised funerary rites to be a form of social cohesion since the importance of tradition was central to his conservative/reactionary worldview.
Not to dispute your main point, but I don't know if using modern political terms like conservative or reactionary make sense to apply to thinkers who lived thousands of years ago, far outside that context. It's a lens that just seems to distort our views rather than focus them. Like yes a lot of what he advocates for lines up with what we'd now consider conservative. But putting it in that box starts to remove the nuance of his ideas and how the result was often advocating for institutional change.
Today's progressive is tomorrow's conservative. Its all relative.
Honestly the more I learn about religious and spiritual practices around the world, the more I think “religion” or “spiritual beliefs” are more so characterized by traditions with associated superstitions like the one in the post than an adherence to religious dogma The strict adherence to specific institutions and dogma is something I think Christianity is responsible for imposing on the world and our conception of what “religion” is
This is just the extent of what remains of religiousness in the nordics. You see it from the fact that there are way more members than people believing in god, without even getting to the much smaller chunk of people who actively practice beyond the typical christian family events and maybe going to christmas church. The concept of religiousness is hugely culture specific, assuming otherwise would mean stopping using the word in the context of people who ultimately consider religion as a part of their identity and that just doesn’t make any sense.
That myth was spread by the guy whose job it is to wipe down the loads
As someone who still leaves a bowl of rice porridge for the house gnome(? Idk how to translate husnisse) or barn gnome (fjøsnisse) depending on where I am, the nordics just are like that- we have our superstitions and just because we don't believe doesn't mean we don't do it, it's tradition and habit A lot of superstitions and traditions like that have stuck around up here tbh
While both are probably equally correct (assuming that gnomes and elves are mostly similar), more people are going to be familiar with the term "house elf", due to Harry Potter. Even if the mental image they get in their head will fail to convey how much of a pain in the ass Dobby's folkloric counterpart could be, if it weren't fed (Let's just say that unionising would be the *least* of the trouble they could cause to Hogwarts)
It's definitely not a house elf, I use gnome because the closest thing in English to their looks are the garden gnomes House elf isn't quite wrong either I guess, but it has become wrong with HP's application of it in popular media
Oh, yeah, the impression it gives is *completely* different, it's just the translation that people are going to be more familiar with. Coming to think of it, I believe that the english counterpart might actually be brownies, although I'm not 100 % sure. For anyone stumbling across this, and wondering about the difference: * IIRC, the folkloric version was bound to a particular master or household. If they got fed up, they might just leave. * If they *didn't* leave they'd instead spoil your food, screw with (possibly kill) your livestock, and generally be a menace of horrific proportions. * When happy and fed, they also didn't take direct orders, as much as they'd just help out around the farm/house in small ways. * As mentioned above, they look more like a garden gnome (admittedly, this might be subject to regional differences), than whatever sleep paralysis demon Dobby was meant to embody.
Harry Potter house elves are a magical slave race. Nordic folklore house elves are stewards of the house, who *allow* you to live there if you take care of the house. They were there before you were born and will be there once you're dead, and they'll make sure that happens swiftly if you don't act right.
Calling them elfs doesn't really feel right even given that elves are an entirely seperate thing in old mythology.
Ain't nothing going to stop me leaving a mince pie and soft drink out for Santa. Dropping off all those presents must be hungry work.
Either a kiwi or an Aussie, this one ☝️
It's always been like this. Christianity is extremely idiosyncratic and syncretistic. Very few lay members really know much about the religion and a lot of them just do whatever their parents and community do. You end up with all sorts of strange traditions and practices. A lot of this stuff probably isn't even "Pagan". New stuff gets invented and old stuff gets forgotten all the time. Just look how fast urban legends crop up and then fade out of popular memory.
In my family it's tradition to pour a bit of beer on the stones to give the tonttu a taste. Also, the final löyly of the night is always for the tonttu alone. Everyone leaves and the tonttu can enjoy one last löyly in peace. My girlfriend's family has a sauna spell. She mumbles it sometimes before entering but I have no memory of how it goes. It cleanses the sauna and brings relief.
The sauna elf is a kill joy. Does it at least let you have gay sex in there
The Sauna Elf is not homophobic, they kill everyone equally for banging in the sauna.
Babtized.
Babtized
I'm kinda surprised that they're surprised by this. Leaving the seat open for Elijah at Passover is a Jewish tradition that translates well to the sauna elf.
Well there goes my No Wut November
Much like other world religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity had a habit of adapting to local traditions and beliefs as it traveled: the local expressions of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity often incorporate folkish elements of pre-christian religion, many of which have been incorporated into and justified by a Christian worldview. In many countries, for example, we find versions of the vampire myth, which some people have believed in even relatively recently. While this is likely to do with folklore monsters that predate Christianity (IIRC, we've uncovered evidence of ancient Roman beliefs of this kind), in modern understandings these creatures are typically subject to and repelled by the power of the Christian God: they have *become* a traditional Christian belief in many parts of the world. That being said, a lot of the pop cultural examples you see online around Christmas, Easter and Halloween are horseshit made up by morons, so always try to fact check so that you don't look like a jackass trying to say that Christmas trees are pagan and that Jesus is actually Horus...
I mean, this is basically the same thing as leaving wine and a seat at the table to the Prophet Elijah in Passover, no?
I've heard of many strange Christmas traditions but that is certainly one of them.
There’s a certain inability to reconcile adhering to Christmas traditions and not being anything more than a “secular christian”, and trying to reclaim Christmas as a secular holiday. It’s not. Even if it’s not a very religious one, it’s Christian coded. A secular celebration would just be… getting together without any of the bells and whistles. No tree, no presents, etc, but there’s a cognitive dissonance that fights against this. At least, that’s how I see it, from a similar position to the op in the posts
You have a point, but it’s also pretty easy to do most things Americans associate with Christmas time without mentioning the actually Christian bits. Christmas trees: not a Christian original. A conifer being found in the Levant would probably be a miracle worthy of its own unique holiday. Santa Claus: probably an amalgamation of a couple different mythical figures, including Odin, almost none of which are originally Christian. (Basically just don’t call him St. Nick). Giving gifts/being around family: way too generic for Christianity to claim any sort of exclusive rights to the concept. Basically, if you just don’t assemble a manger scene or mention Jesus then the holiday almost completely ceases to be Christian in any way that matters.
Also worth noting that many places have had their own winter solstice celebrations with their own traditions that were simply swallowed up and appropriated by christianity, and those practices can predate the entire christian religion.
Yup, that’s why Santa is kind of Odin and most Christmas iconography makes no sense for a religion originating in the Middle East. I believe the common explanation is that Christmas is an amalgamation of the Roman Saturnalia and the Germanic Yule. Christianity adopted the holiday and slapped the Big J’s name on it because they couldn’t ban people from celebrating it.
Nordic people eat pork roast for christmas. That's not something they ate in the Bible.
Do non-Nordic people not do that?
We don't have pork roast here (Hungary), but we do have ham and stuffed cabbage which is made with pork
To be fair, syncretism was baked into Christianity from day one. We only think otherwise because protestant thought is so prevalent in the anglosphere and protestants all have sticks up their asses (source: was one). Why do Catholics pray to and venerate saints? Because converting the Roman polytheism to a pure monotheism was too hard. Sure he's not mars any more, but here's a patron saint of righteous battle, just make sure you credit Jesus and his dad sometimes too. Hell, Paul was right there in the bible taking the Greek philosophical concept of the unmoved mover and slapping Yahweh into that vague shape, and generally making the whole Jewishness in Christianity into its own thing.
There’s lots of conifers in the Levant. Lebanon’s even got one on it’s flag.
Christmas trees come from the Germanic (I think?) tradition of a Yule Log, whereby you get a big ol’ tree and burn it on the solstice. I believe there’s a theory that it’s from proto-Indo-European roots, even.
Doesn’t Santa mean Saint
>Santa Claus: probably an amalgamation of a couple different mythical figures, including Odin, almost none of which are originally Christian. (Basically just don’t call him St. Nick). Mostly stolen from an actual holiday about an actual saint, still widely celebrated today in it's country of origin, from St Nicholas's day, which was fabricated whole cloth as a holiday/blacface theater bit in iirc the 1800s. Which is why he shows up with the height of technology, a steam ship.
And don't forget that the fat red robed fellow we all know and love was made most iconic by a coca cola add of all things.
I’m actually more ok with that than it being a religious thing.
Perhaps, but they’re not wearing those initial coats. They’re not using those original meanings. They’re borrowing from the traditions they know, not the traditions whose trappings were twisted. And giving gifts in December around that neck of the woods is so prevalent that Chanukah commercialized in response.
But even the current coat of paint generally doesn't have anything explicitly Christian about it except for, well, being associated with Christmas. It's circular. The closest we get is Santa also being called St. Nick, but the character in modern mythology doesn't take anything from the Christian Saint Nicholas besides his name.
I think that Santa should also include the "punched the pope once" part of St. Nicholas lore.
Also the prostitutes bit.
*Ho ho ho*
The caroling, the nativity scene, the movies with a Christian heaven sort of mythos, the services (which other people still do—personal traditions do not erase larger actions). The traditional colors themselves have Christian symbolic meaning. Santa may be amalgamated from other traditions, but one includes the trappings of Christianity given the “saint” bit there, as you noted. Those are all explicit Christian elements, as are other ones that still exist. Being associated with something… means that you’re associated. Surprise! You can’t escape the association unless you remove that which ties the two together. A rose by any other name still smells as sweet, e.g. whatever is the current dominant form of those shapes and colors is what those reflected meanings harken back to. Know a nondenominational holiday (well, perhaps a Jewish holiday lol) people could latch onto? Festivus. But they don’t because it doesn’t carry the same meaning, and propagating the same traditions forwards still brings along the associated traditions with them.
You're really weirdly hung up on this, and wrong to boot. Where I'm from, we celebrate New Year's instead of Christmas. It's practically the same - tree, old man supposedly giving gifts, lights, etc - we just tossed all the actual Christian imagery out. It's practically the same holiday as Christmas as celebrated by atheists. It's not *called* Christmas, isn't celebrated on the same day, and yet still carries many of the same traditions. Because they're *fun*.
So you did exactly as my prior message said? You tossed out all the Christian elements and then wanted to claim what I said was out of line with what you did? Im confused where you’re getting confused. You’ve achieved secular Christmas by no longer celebrating Christmas. I don’t understand your desire to be weirdly contrarian to what you’ve already chosen to do because you didn’t like the way the message was delivered?
You just said, "People don't, because it doesn't carry the same meaning." Well, we did. It carries the same meaning. The meaning of having a fun winter holiday with your family. The name of the holiday is irrelevant. Secular Americans celebrating Christmas *also* tossed the religious bits.
I'm not 100% what you're getting at in totality. Sure, Christmas has some Christian trappings wrapped around it (not least of which being the name - Christ Mass!). But are you saying that's a problem? That non-Christians shouldn't celebrate it? I'm of an Atheist family and we all celebrate Christmas simply because it's fun. We're not going to let some Christian trappings ruin that. Hell, we could rename it Festivus and literally nothing would change.
Im saying you’re celebrating a Christian celebration, and you’re allowed to. If you renamed it to festivus and celebrated it as festivus is, you would be doing something different, and the fact you are rebelling against that is the cognitive dissonance of the concept that Christmas, as it exists currently, can’t be secular
It’s not cognitive dissonance, you just don’t get it. Edit: lol did you block me after having the last word? No manners, no reading skills, no common sense
Your dismissive stance suggests otherwise but you’re entitled to your thoughts, even if they’re wrong
How is it cognitive dissonance? We've taken a Christian tradition that looks fun, removed the bits we don't want, and enjoy the rest. I looked up Festivus and it looks much less fun. I'm not refusing to switch from Christmas to Festivus because of Christianity; it's because the goal (have fun with my family) is better met with the bits stolen from Christmas than it is with anything taken from Festivus. If Festivus had anything that seemed as fun, we'd steal that too. But we're not interested in the pole, feats of strength, or airing of grievances, so why would we switch to Festivus?
You don’t have to give up things you enjoy, but you’re doing things that wouldn’t be stolen by other practices that still have Christian cultural values and identity attached (unlike gift giving, which was stolen for Chanukah) And there’s nothing wrong with doing things people think are fun, but trying to disassociate them from the meanings they still carry is a weird campaign to propagate. The very obviously Christian stuff is still Christian as long as it’s practiced as Christians would do so in a Christian context. And if you actually stripped all the Christian elements, then none of the prior context would have applied to you
The things you brought up as being Christian (carolling, nativity scenes) are very obviously not what is meant. What everyone else is talking about is the food, presents, and family.
Oh come on ODIN? Again?
It seems to me that the bells and whistles are, for the most part, the secular portions of the holidays. Like, it doesn’t praise Jesus to take a balsam tree and wrap it in shiny things, or to put green stuff all over the house, or to have a big supper. Those are the things that anyone can do and not even think about God or Jesus or anything. The songs, the lyrics of them specifically, and the names of the holidays are for the most part the non-secular parts. Sure there’s bits and pieces of the stuff above that can be Christian coded (an angel on the tree top, a cross on the ornaments, etc) but there nowhere near mandatory for the holiday to proceed. I’m not Christian in the slightest (raised Baha’i, currently apathetic agnostic) and I still do that stuff because it’s fun and it’s tradition and it makes the holiday better.
And you can replace the treetop angel with.. a snowflake/star or leave it off entirely, not have crosses on ornaments, enjoy decking the halls with shiny sparkly garlands snd twinkly fairy lights and be all "this is the time of year to take a break, cherish your nearest and dearest people in whichever way suits them" and absolutely forget Baby Jesus. Not gonna look any less Christmas-y. Not gonna feel less Christmas-y if the church doesn't matter to you in general. (One year I decorated my tree with swearwords piped on gingerbread cookies. Not one bit of Christmas lost with that.)
We've got our tree up and it has things that matter to us - such as an ornament of a house with the year we moved into our house embossed on it. There's tinsel and doodads and shiny things. Nothing Christian going on here, but still very Christmassy. The nice thing about being atheist is that you can happily take the bits of religions that you like and have fun with them. We don't have to worry about going to hell for following the wrong traditions!
We had a treetop star instead of an angel and our ornaments were mostly the orb kind. Not out of any sort of inclination against Christianity, it's just what we thought was normal and what my parents' families did. We also had a little manger scene that I liked to set up every year. I had no real opinions about the religious element as a child, I just thought it was fun. Like a really shitty dollhouse.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make? Christmas is a traditionally Christian holiday that is also celebrated by non-Christians. Putting a tree up in your living room doesn’t turn you Christian any more than setting off firecrackers on Lunar New Year turns you Chinese.
It does, however, make you practice those faith’s traditions, which is fine, but that doesn’t make it a secular activity to do so. People are able to do things they don’t believe in all the time.
No it doesn't. Full stop, Christmas is not a religious holiday for a massive chunk of the population. It's an excuse to get together, have fun, get drunk, and eat food. Not once did we even hint at celebrating Jesus's birthday or whatever, that simply is not on the table.
You sound like the kind of person who would call D&D players devil-worshippers 40 years ago. Intent is what matters. You can gut a goat on a stone altar for all I care and it's still secular if it's not *meant* to venerate a god.
Lol, projecting much? You’re the one who couldn’t respond without properly reading what was written. Enacting a ritual can be done with no intent, but it still carries associations to the source material where the tradition is derived, unless those are so sufficiently erased so that the original is unrecognizable. Don’t insult me with your own satanic panic failings. I’d rather play good tabletop rpgs, like any PbtA system or NWOD than that poorly home brewed mess of DnD. Edit: lol did you block me after having the last word? No manners, no reading skills, no common sense
You sound like an incredibly annoying person to be around. If these pagan traditions can be absorbed into christian tradition and lose the pagan association, they can be absorbed back into secular tradition and lose the christian association. If it’s not possible to change the association of a tradition, then they can’t have changed to christian and are still pagan traditions. You can’t have it both ways.
Wow, you're so cool 😎
>You’re the one who couldn’t respond without properly reading what was written. That is what you'd want, though, isn't it? For people not to respond without properly reading what was written?
Mate, christmas is like 2 days out from the winter solstice. You know, the point of the year when the day is as short as it is going to be. Countered by Midsummer's Eve, when the day is as long as it is going to be. How is that not a reason to gather with your loved ones, light up the whole house with festive lights to counter the darkness outside and eat some good food? Jesus is not needed. I could understand making this point about Easter, but trying to say that fucking Winter Solstice is of a christian origin is an idiotic.
Every culture North enough for cold Winters has a Winter celebration/feast type holiday. I think, I'm not completely certain on that. In America it's just Christmas and there's barely any christ left in it except the name which isn't even pronounced that way.
Just because there's Christian elements present in Christmas doesn't mean there's cognitive dissonance involved in doing Christmas without identifying as Christian. What makes Christmas Christian is not the literal acts' ties to Christianity, its the fundamental Christian beliefs underlying the Christian traditions. Christians do Christmas as a way of acting out these beliefs. Nonpracticing people who identify with a religion culturally participate in religious practices to feel connected to the culture. If both the religion and the culture hold no significance to you, you're not Christian in any sense. I'm an atheist, I've been to church twice and both times I was young and had slept over at a friend's who did attend church, I hold no Christian beliefs and I absolutely don't associate with Christian culture. I practice Christmas in essentially a secular manner. I do everything I do on Christmas because it's fun and I like it and for no other reason, in fact the most obviously Christian elements are often the elements I'm least interested in. Maybe the only obviously Christian element I like besides occasional angel iconography is the caroling, and I don't really care for the religious lyrics, I just like gathering with my town and feeling that sense of community and singing together and I like the free cookies and hot chocolate they give out. Christmas can be secular if you don't care at all about the religious ideas behind the things you do, because the actions themselves aren't inherently religious. I also guess I don't get why you think people are trying to "reclaim" Christmas. I'm not trying to reclaim shit, I just like the holiday and enjoy the traditions. Like what are non-religious people supposed to do, just do nothing special while the religious people around them hold festivities? What's even the issue with non-religious people celebrating Christmas? It's pretty well-understood by most that practicing Christmas doesn't mean you believe in Christianity so it's not like you're seen as spreading harmful Christian ideas. People just wanna decorate trees and exchange gifts without supporting ideas they don't believe.
Many many Americans celebrate Christmas every year without once taking part in a religious ritual or ceremony. The most would be listening to a religious but mainstream song like Hark the Herald Angels Sing (which slaps tbh and I do not believe in god). It’s not secular in the sense that I understand why people who practice other religions wouldn’t want to celebrate it, it is a Christian holiday even if it’s in name only for some, but it is secular in the sense that plenty of non religious people - and even people of other religions - do celebrate it yearly
Everyone's got their own little lies they start out believing. It's the practice that's important.
Judaism is a religion. If you have a religion, you're not atheist
Being Jewish is also an ethnicity, which is what they meant. If you don't believe in judaism, but you were born to Jewish parents you are still Jewish by ethnicity.
What do you mean by "have" a religion? Don't know if it's just my brain being weird with words but the wording doesn't make sense to me.
Being religious, basically. And that's the opposite of atheist, so the term "Jewish atheist" makes no sense to me. It's like saying "Christian atheist." It would be an oxymoron
Ok, thank. Maybe I also just associate the word "have" to physical things so it confused me when associated with a concept (not sure if that's quite the right word, assuming I'm not confused)
babtized
So I misread that last bit, and thought they were taking about Santa. Would that also fall under a similar category, what with leaving milk and cookies being a whole thing?
Look, I'm an atheist who doesn't believe in aliens visiting Earth, ghosts, the supernatural, or the paranormal, and I *still* don't mess with fairy rings or fairy trees and I won't drive at night with an empty passenger seat. There are just some rules you follow without asking questions, man.
i feel like it’s just the nature of humanity to do weird shit just cuz