Christmas = paganism

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The problem with what you are asking is self evidently impossible since you are asking for documental evidence of what people believed in PRE-history. The very definition of prehistory is that we have so little evidence to indicate for certain what was happening. BUT we can make informed and reasonable speculations based on human nature, subsequent beliefs and plain observable facts about the sun, moon, stars and planets. Do you really believe that prior to civilisation the people living had absolutely no regard for the sun, moon, stars and planets? Do you think that people then were somehow unaware of the most vital and important thing to all life on Earth, not to mention human development and agriculture. Do you still have the falacious belief that prior to civilisation people were numbskulls who clubbed their women over the head and couldn't communicate in any other way than grunting at each other?

Before you ask for evidence of anything consider the fact that we are not having a scientific debate here, we are having a speculative debate about the origins of religion, christmas and whether a man called jesus walked the earth and died for three days before being ressurrected. We are debating on whether jesus was the "light of the world" or whether the SUN was (and still is) the light of the world.

Actually no, It is not true that "Christmas may have pagan origins". It is actually "Christmas has pagan origins". To the point it is historical fact.

You have to understand that by 300 AD Christianity was something Pagans converted to. But as usual , traditions are very strong and many former pagans would still like to celebrate their winter festivals. It caused a lot of conflict.

The church had to options. Ban the pagan festivities and risk losing membership or pull a Microsoft and embrace the pagan holidays.

At the end it is clear to me that many traditions were adopted from the pagans. However, that does not mean that current Christmas is pagan. As the Christians back then eliminated worship of pagan gods from the holidays and replaced it with worship of Jesus.

All in all, it is not really very different to Atheists celebrating Christmas nowadays. Some atheists, they have adopted many of the traditions like gift-giving, hot chocolate, reuniting with family and Baby boomer Christmas decorations. Probably because they are lovely traditions by themselves. But when they use those traditions, it does not make them Christians. Since they are not worshiping Jesus. And not pagans either as they are not worshiping other man-made objects.

If you'd like you can start at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#History . Oh yeah ANYONE CAN EDIT WIKIPEDIAZ. But the article is choke full of citations.

I think you are missing my point. Let me make myself clear, yet again. I am arguing, from a reasonable and logical standpoint, that the fact we have this story of a man who: walked on water, healed the blind, died for three days (on a cross), was ressurrected after 3 days and ascended into heaven, who was born after 3 kings followed the bright star in the east, and is regarded as the saviour of humanity and the light of the world, can really be an older story about the sun.

Only a fool would not be able to see clearly that this story can be said about the sun. And if we can say it now, then I am certain that it could have and no doubt was said by our more primitive ancestors who went to great lengths to chart the cycle of the sun throughout the year, that celebrated the solstice and rejoiced the equinox and summer and invented names for the star constellations and the idea that the sun resides in each sign of the zodiac throughout the suns cycle.

I understand if you are firmly against such notions until you are given documental evidence that you can analyse, but that doesn't mean you have to hang up your speculative reasoning.

Please tell me if you really think that a people who put so much effort into understanding the suns cycle would not have had any stories about it? And furthermore passed these stories onto their children (given the well observed fact that people do and have always passed information in the form of stories onto their children).

Give up astrology. Study astronomy instead. The Sun "dwells" very near the center of mass of the Solar System. The Sun has no idea of what constellations are in the background as view from Earth.

Your conception of the heavens is not only pre-Keplarian, it is pre-Ptolemaic.

ruveyn

I am not into astrology, I am talking about times when people were and back then astronomy and astrology were the same things. I know the sun has no idea what is in its background from a POV of someone on Earth. I am talking about primitve peoples beliefs about the sun, not mine.

You've admitted that there is no evidence for this. So why do you repeat the same old tiring useless argument over and over again?



Wow, what? So if no evidence, speculate all the sh*t you want out of your ass, right? Be like a nutty conspiracy theorist.



Where are they? Oh, that's right. The bad guys conveniently burned them all out of existence so that your silly idea can no longer be falsified by any argument or evidence against it.

And so kxmode doesn't forget what I'm after:

I'm after historical evidence for a connection between Nimrod and the Christmas tree, thanks.

Wow, you made a big deal out of me saying "may"?

And the best you could bring up was Wikipedia? There are much better sources to use to show that Christmas has pagan roots.

Wikipedia points to the sources.

To me, calling wikipedia a bad source is an inherent sign of laughable ignorance of how wikipedia works or how you are supposed to use it.

And yes, your "may" implied that you are in denial.

Since your obviously not content with searching for this information yourself, and you want me to do all the work then here. Sources are bold and underlined

Origin of the Christmas tree

The Christmas tree, now so common among us, was equally common in Pagan Rome and Pagan Egypt. In Egypt that tree was the palm-tree; in Rome it was the fir; the palm-tree denoting the Pagan Messiah, as Baal-Tamar, the fir referring to him as Baal-Berith. The mother of Adonis, the Sun-God and great mediatorial divinity, was mystically said to have been changed into a tree, and when in that state to have brought forth her divine son. If the mother was a tree, the son must have been recognised as the "Man the branch." And this entirely accounts for the putting of the Yule Log into the fire on Christmas-eve, and the appearance of the Christmas-tree the next morning. - The Two Babylons, Chapter III, Festivals, Section I. Christmas and Lady-day

It goes on further to say:

the 25th of December, the day that was observed at Rome as the day when the victorious god reappeared on earth, was held at the Natalis invicti solis, "The birth-day of the unconquered Sun." Now the Yule Log is the dead stock of Nimrod, deified as the sun-god, but cut down by his enemies; the Christmas-tree is Nimrod redivivus--the slain god come to life again.

Origin of Mistletoe

That mistletoe bough in the Druidic superstition, which, as we have seen, was derived from Babylon, was a representation of the Messiah, "The man the branch." The mistletoe was regarded as a divine branch *--a branch that came from heaven, and grew upon a tree that sprung out of the earth. - The Two Babylons, Chapter III, Festivals, Section I. Christmas and Lady-day

In the Scandinavian story of Balder, the mistletoe branch is distinguished from the lamented god. The Druidic and Scandinavian myths somewhat differed; but yet, even in the Scandinavian story, it is evident that some marvellous power was attributed to the mistletoe branch; for it was able to do what nothing else in the compass of creation could accomplish; it slew the divinity on whom the Anglo-Saxons regarded "the empire" of their "heaven" as "depending." Now, all that is neceesary to unravel this apparent inconsistency, is just to understand "the branch" that had such power, as a symbolical expression for the true Messiah. The Bacchus of the Greeks came evidently to be recognised as the "seed of the serpent"; for he is said to have been brought forth by his mother in consequence of intercourse with Jupiter, when that god had appeared in the form of a serpent. If the character of Balder was the same, the story of his death just amounted to this, that the "seed of the serpent" had been slain by the "seed of the woman." This story, of course, must have originated with his enemies. But the idolators took up what they could not altogether deny, evidently with the view of explaining it away. - The Two Babylons, Chapter III, Festivals, Section I. Christmas and Lady-day

Origin of Mother-Child Worship

The Two Babylons, pages 20, 21, says:

The Babylonians, in their popular religion, supremely worshipped a Goddess Mother and a Son, who was represented in pictures and in images as an infant or child in his mother’s arms . . . From Babylon, this worship of the Mother and the Child spread to the ends of the earth. In Egypt, the Mother and the Child were worshipped under the names of Isis and Osiris. In India, even to this day, as Isi and Iswara; in Asia as Cybele and Deōius; in Pagan Rome, as Fortuna and Jupiter-puer, or Jupiter, the boy; in Greece, as Ceres, the Great Mother, with the babe at her breast, or as Irene, the goddess of Peace, with the boy Plutus in her arms; and even in Thibet, in China, and Japan, the Jesuit missionaries were astonished to find the counterpart of Madonna and her child as devoutly worshipped as in Papal Rome itself; Shing Moo, the Holy Mother in China, being represented with a child in her arms, and a glory around her, exactly as if a Roman Catholic artist had been employed to set her up.

The original of that mother, so widely worshipped, there is reason to believe, was Semiramis, already referred to, who, it is well known, was worshipped by the Babylonians, and other eastern nations, and that under the name of Rhea, the great Goddess “Mother.”

Nimrod’s mother, being the wife of Cush, was a granddaughter of Noah’s wife, who survived the great flood, the same as the fishes. Note how the Babylonish pagan religion made use of this fact in deifying Semiramis:

Of this we already have evidence in [the ancient Greek historian] Herodotus, who ascribes to her the banks that confined the Euphrates (i. 184) and knows her name as borne by a gate of Babylon (iii. 155). . . . according to the legends, in her birth as well as in her disappearance from earth, Semiramis appears as a goddess, the daughter of the fish-goddess Atargatis, and herself connected with the doves of Ishtar or Astarte. — The Encyclopœdia Britannica, Volume 24, edition of 1911, page 617.

Examples of Mother-Child Worship throughout history:


Semiramis and baby Nimrod


Isis and baby Horrus


Indrani and baby Indra


1. Ankh Nes Meryre and Son Pepi
2. Cyprus
3. Madonna Guanyin, Goddess of mercy
4. Matrika from Tanesara of India
5. Yasoda and Krishna
6. Mother and son 2000-1850 B.C.
7. Mexico, Jalisco 200 B.C.- 500 A.D.
8. Maya
9. Mexico, Colima 200 B.C.- 500A.D.
10. Mykene, Greece
11. Sun Goddess, Arinna
12. Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus

Origin of triad of gods and polytheism

Regarding the religion of Babylon and its triadic worship we read: “In the late Babylonian period the worship seems chiefly devoted to Marduk, Nabu [Nebo, meaning Speaker or Announcer], Sin, Shamash and Ishtar. . . . The Babylonians, with all their wonderful gifts, were never able to conceive of one god, of one god alone, of one god whose very existence makes logically impossible the existence of any other deity. Monotheism transcends the spiritual grasp of the Babylonian mind. . . . neither the Babylonians nor the Assyrians arose to any such heights as distinguish the Hebrew book of Psalms.” — The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, edition of 1955, Volume 1, page 370.

"Not merely Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, but also the Hindus, the Buddhists of China and of Thibet, the Goths, Anglo-Saxons, Druids, Mexicans and Peruvians, the Aborigines of Australia, and even the savages of the South Sea Islands, must have all derived their religious ideas from a common source and a common centre. Everywhere we find the most startling coincidences in rites, ceremonies, customs, traditions, and in the names and relations of their respective gods and goddesses." - The Worship of the Dead, London, 1904, page 3, by J. Garnier

How do we connect them with Babylon? Ezekiel tells us: “So he brought me to the entrance of the gate of the house of Jehovah, which is toward the north, and, look! there the women were sitting, weeping* over the god Tammuz.” Here, in Ezekiel 8:13, 14, the Roman Catholic Douay Version calls this god “Adonis,” for that is what the official Latin Vulgate version calls him. Who was he? (*In Hebrew the word for the verb “to weep” is bakhah (בכה), as in Ezekiel 8:14.)

The name Adonis, by which this deity was known to the Greeks, is none other than the Phoenician אדון, ’Adhōn, which is the same in Hebrew. . . .

(1) The name of a Phoenician deity, the Adonis of the Greeks. He was originally a Sumerian or Babylonian sun-god, called Dumuzu, the husband of Ishtar, who corresponds to Aphrodite [Venus] of the Greeks. The worship of these deities was introduced into Syria in very early times under the designation of Tammuz and Astarte, and appears among the Greeks in the myth of Adonis and Aphrodite, who are identified with Osiris and Isis of the Egyptian pantheon, showing how widespread the cult became. The Babylonian myth represents Dumuzu, or Tammuz, as a beautiful shepherd slain by a wild boar, the symbol of winter. Ishtar long mourned for him and descended into the underworld to deliver him from the embrace of death. . . . This mourning for Tammuz was celebrated in Babylonia by women on the 2d day of the 4th month, which thus acquired the name of Tammuz. . . . The women of Gebal [Syria] used to repair to this temple in midsummer to celebrate the death of Adonis or Tammuz, and there arose in connection with this celebration those licentious rites which rendered the cult so infamous that it was suppressed by Constantine the Great. — The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, edition of 1955, Volume 5, page 2908a.

According to The Encyclopedia Americana (Volume 26 of the 1929 edition, page 238), the name Dumuzu in Sumerian means “the sun of life.” But in The Two Babylons, by Hislop, page 245, says:

The name Tammuz, as applied to Nimrod or Osiris, was equivalent to Alorus, or the “god of fire,” and seems to have been given to him as the great purifier by fire. Tammuz is derived from tam, “to make perfect,” and muz, “fire,” and signifies “Fire the perfecter,” or “the perfecting fire.” To this meaning of the name, as well as to the character of Nimrod as the Father of the gods, the Zoroastrian verse alludes when it says: “All things are the progeny of ONE FIRE. The FATHER perfected all things, and delivered them to the second mind, whom all nations of men call the first.” . . . And hence, too, no doubt, the necessity of the fire of Purgatory to “perfect” men’s souls at last, and to purge away all the sins that they have carried with them into the unseen world.

Further, on Tammuz, Hislop adds, on pages 21, 22:

In scripture he is referred to (Ezekiel 8:14) under the name of Tammuz, but he is commonly known among classical writers under the name of Bacchus, that is, “The Lamented One.” To the ordinary reader the name of Bacchus suggests nothing more than revelry and drunkenness, but it is now well known, that amid all the abominations that attended his orgies, their grand design was professedly “the purification of souls,” and that from the guilt and defilement of sin. This lamented one, exhibited and adored as a little child in his mother’s arms, . . .

Origin of the cross

Among the Babylonians an upright cross was a sacred symbol. As in the Hebrew alphabet, such a cross was the original form of their letter T (or Taw), and so it was the initial letter of the name of their god Tammuz, or Bacchus. The cross was worshiped centuries before the so-called Christian era. That this worship spread from Babylon is noted by archaeologist V. Gordon Childe:

A ‘seal’ from Mohenjodaro depicts a horned deity with three faces sitting crosslegged in the attitude of ritual meditation between various wild animals; he is obviously the prototype of Siva, ‘three-faced,’ ‘lord of beasts,’ ‘prince of yogis,’ . . . Several clay tablets depict a male deity; one shows a river gushing out of a goddess’s womb. . . . The swastika and the cross, common on stamps and plaques, were religious or magical symbols as in Babylonia and Elam in the earliest prehistoric period, but preserve that character also in modern India as elsewhere.

Says The Two Babylons (Hislop), on pages 199, 204, 205, regarding the cross:

It was worshipped in Mexico for ages before the Roman Catholic missionaries set foot there, large stone crosses being erected probably to the “god of rain.” The cross thus widely worshipped, or regarded as a sacred emblem, was the unequivocal symbol of Bacchus, the Babylonian Messiah, for he was represented with a head-band covered with crosses . . . This symbol of the Babylonian god is reverenced at this day in all the wide wastes of Tartary [Asian and European location of Tatars], where Buddhism prevails, and the way in which it is represented among them forms a striking commentary on the language applied by Rome to the Cross. “The cross,” says Colonel Wilford, in the Asiatic Researches, “though not an object of worship among the Baud’has or Buddhists, is a favourite emblem and device among them. . . . [in Christendom] the Tau, the sign of the cross, the indisputable sign of Tammuz, the false Messiah, was everywhere substituted in its stead [in the stead of the Greek Letter Chi or X as in Christós]. . . . ”

Doubtless, the cross was sacred as a symbol among those apostate Jewish women who polluted Jehovah’s temple by sitting there and weeping over the Babylonian Bacchus, the god Tammuz. These women were, in effect, bewailing the death of the mighty hunter Nimrod, the founder of Babylon, who no doubt met a violent death because he was guilty of violence toward man and beasts. (Genesis 10:8-10; 9:6) Whereas those Jewish women were indirectly worshiping the sun-god in the same way that Babylonian women did, the prophet Ezekiel saw men performing direct worship of the sun at Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.—Ezekiel 8:16.

Origin of demonism, magic, and other forms of spiritism

What effect does such doctrine have on its worshipers? It weakens their faith in God. It lessens their feeling of responsibility to God to obey him implicitly and give him exclusive devotion. It puts them off balance, confuses their vision, makes them drugged religiously. It puts them in fear and makes it easy for them to begin to accept many gods whom they must appease or please or to whom they must address petitions, for example, so-called “saints.” It is a short step from this to the fear of demons, so that among some people this has led to a miserable existence — a life of fear for followers of that kind of religion. Babylon’s worshipers were poisoned spiritually in this way. Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, in Babylonian Life and History, says:

The demons and devils that made the Babylonian’s life a misery to him were many, but the forms of most of them and their evil powers were well known. Most of all he feared the Seven Evil Spirits, who were the creators of all evil. . . . As there were triads of gods, so there were triads of devils, for example, Labartu, Labasu and Akhkhazu. The first harmed little children, the second caused the quaking sickness, and the third turned the face of a man yellow and black. Another triad comprised Lîlû, Lîlîtu and Ardat Lîlī. . . . The Babylonians . . . went to the priest, who often assumed the character of a god, and who exorcised the devils by reciting incantations, . . . — Pages 146, 147 (1925 edition). See also The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, edition of 1955, Volume 1, page 373.

Magic, sorcery and astrology were developed and indulged in by all, from the king down to his lowest subject. They even believed in a witch who was believed to “possess the power of flying through the air on a stick.” — Ancient History, Part I — P. V. N. Myers, page 72.

Magical arts were invented by the Chaldeans of Babylonia. How strong the hold of magic and sorcery was upon Babylon may be seen when, centuries after Nimrod, King Nebuchadnezzar is reported as turning to it to determine whether to attack Jerusalem. Here is what Jehovah God said to Ezekiel about this:

“The king of Babylon stood still at the crossways, at the head of the two ways, in order to resort to divination. He has shaken the arrows. He has asked by means of the teraphim; he has looked into the liver. In his right hand the divination proved to be for Jerusalem, to set battering-rams, to open one’s mouth for a slaying, to raise the sound in an alarm signal, to set battering-rams against gates, to throw up a siege rampart, to build a siege wall.” — Ezekiel 21:20-22.

Origin of Religious Towers

Babylon’s false religion, which first revealed itself historically in her original Tower of Babel, doomed her from the start for eventual destruction. In the days of her most glorious king, Nebuchadnezzar II, she had her tower of religion, built doubtless on the foundations of the very tower where Jehovah God confused the language of the builders. It was situated in the southern part of the city, not far from the eastern or right bank of the Euphrates River. By King Nebuchadnezzar and his royal father it was called Ziqqurat Bâbîli, that is, “The Tower of Babylon.” It was dedicated to Babylon’s chief god, Merodach, and his wife Zēr-panîtum.

The tower had a great foundation upon which as a platform were built six square stages and it had a sanctuary at the top, this being dedicated to the god Bel-Merodach, whom the evidence indicates to have been the mighty hunter Nimrod deified. Around the base of the tower were small temples or chapels dedicated to various other gods of the Babylonians.

When Jehovah confused the languages they took their training in building great pyramid like structures world wide. This is why pyramids appear in Egypt and half-way around world with the Mayans. Two cultures who had never met one another but they both took with them a form of Nimrod worship that eventually evolved into a regional religion.

Origin of the immortality of the human soul

An outstanding feature about the religion of Babylon is that it taught the immortality of the human soul. Of course, when Babylon deified the first king, Nimrod, at his death, which is not described in the Bible, it had to attribute immortality of soul to Nimrod, or Merodach. In the Babylonian myth about Gilgamesh, whom some investigators try to identify with Nimrod, this half-man and half-god Gilgamesh sought immortality of his human body, in other words, indestructible life on earth. In the twelfth book of the epic of Gilgamesh he is granted an interview with his dead one-time companion, who “describes the gloomy abode of the afterworld, and tells of the various futures that await the dead, according to the manner of their ends.” — The Encyclopedia Americana, edition of 1929, Volume 12, page 654.

In the Babylonian religion Nergal was the god of the underworld and his wife Eresh-kigal was the sovereign lady thereof. Showing that the Babylonians did not believe in the immortality of the human body but did believe in the immortality of what the Greeks called a psykhé or “soul,” we read the following concerning “the last things” as understood by the Babylonians:

After death the souls of men were supposed to continue in existence. It can hardly be called life. The place to which they have gone is called the “land of no return. There they lived in dark rooms amid the dust and the bats covered with a garment of feathers, and under the dominion of Nergal and Eresh-kigal. When the soul arrived among the dead he had to pass judgment before the judges of the dead, the Annunaki, but little has been preserved for us concerning the manner of this judgment. There seems to have been at times an idea that it might be possible for the dead to return again to life, for in this underworld there was the water of life, which was used when the god Tammuz returned again to earth [as vegetation]. The Babylonians . . . placed often with the dead articles which might be used in his future existence. . . . In the future world there seem to have been distinctions made among the dead. Those who fell in battle seem to have had special favor. They received fresh water to drink, while those who had no posterity to put offerings at their graves suffered sore and many deprivations. . . . The Babylonian doctrine was that man, though of Divine origin, did not share in the Divine attribute of immortality [that is, immortality of his body]. — The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, page 373.

Origin of Nation building, a king, and patriot nationalism

In man’s original garden of Eden God made a promise. This promise is found at Genesis 3:15, where God sentenced to death the Great Serpent, Satan the Devil, for inducing the perfect human couple, Adam and Eve, to join him in rebellion against their Creator. He said: “I shall put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He will bruise you in the head and you will bruise him in the heel.” Unlike men of today who claim that the garden of Eden account is only a myth, men back there in the days of Nimrod were well acquainted with this event of history and knew full well that God did make that promise. Therefore, rather than saying that no such promise was ever made, they had to twist the meaning of the promise and apply it to themselves wrongfully. When Nimrod became “a mighty one in the earth,” displaying himself as a mighty hunter and setting himself up as the first king of Babylon, it became easy for the Babylonians to seize upon this circumstance to run ahead of the Edenic prophecy’s actual fulfillment. In harmony with their selfish desire to make a name for themselves, it became patriotic, yes, nationalistic, for them to apply the prophecy concerning the woman’s seed to Nimrod. Such a view would naturally be encouraged by Nimrod, because it would bind the people more firmly to him and his successors in office.

As such Nimrod remained the first king of Babylon. He would be held in high regard as the great hunter and king in opposition to Jehovah and organizer of the old original Babylonian Empire. Having refused to recognize Jehovah as the true God, the Babylonians would be inclined to worship Nimrod. When he died, they would deify him, making him a god, the guardian god of the city of Babylon. — Genesis 10:9.

More than 1500 years later, when Babylon reached its greatest glory in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar II, who is mentioned in the Holy Bible, the chief god of the imperial city was Marduk. His temple there was called E-sagila (meaning “Lofty House”), the tower of which was called E-teme-nanki (meaning “House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”). In connection with the god Marduk, who is called Merodach in the Bible (Jer. 50:1, 2), it is interesting to read the following comments:

Nimrod has been identified with Merodach, the god of Babylon . . . He has been identified with Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic which contains the Babylonian Deluge story . . . with various historical kings of Babylonia, . . . The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 19, edition of 1911, page 703.

Two theories are now held in regard to Nimrod’s identity: . . . Those who identify Nimrod with Marduk, however, [say] that . . . the [cuneiform] signs which constitute the name of Marduk, who also is represented as a hunter, are read phonetically “Amar Ud”; and ideographically they may be read “Namr Ud” — in Hebrew “Nimrod.” — The Jewish Encyclopedia, Volume 9, page 309.

Alexander Hislop, author of The Two Babylons, although deriving the name Nimrod from Nimr, a “leopard,” and rada or rad, “to subdue,” does identify Nimrod as the god Merodach. “There is no doubt,” says he, “that Nimrod was a rebel, and that his rebellion was celebrated in ancient myths; but his name in that character was not Nimrod, but Merodach, or, as among the Romans, Mars, ‘the rebel;’ or among the Oscans of Italy, Mamers . . . , ‘The causer of rebellion.’”—Page 44, footnote, of The Two Babylons.

Following the pattern of Nimrod, the rulers of the world powers did not worship Jehovah, a fact reflected in their cruel, violent deeds.

Conclusion

As you can see from the exhaustive list of resources along with astrology, fear of demons, and the trinity are teachings that originated in Babylon and propagated among the peoples of earth. This propagation led to the foundation of unscriptural doctrines like hellfire, purgatory, reincarnation, transmigration of souls and spiritism, which all nations and most of their religionists are being spiritually sickened to death. If any religion holds any of these doctrines then it's a sure sign they have been contaminated by Babylonian teachings. In effect they represent one of the false religious strongholds springing from the rebellious Babylonish source. Basically such a religion would be pagan by design.

These are only a few of the deceptions founded by ancient demon-dominated Babylon. But as a foundation this is where the invisible deceiver and ruler of the world, Satan the Devil, built a religious structure for world deception. (1 John 5:19; 2 Corinthians 4:3,4)

Are these enough resources or do you desire more?

Last edited by kxmode on 12 Dec 2011, 8:35 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Yes, Wikipedia pages have references to sources much better than Wikipedia. Why not go to one of these sources and post what the source itself says if you want to convince someone that Christmas has pagan roots?

By the way, I don't need you to convince me. I accept the pagan roots of Christmas.



Show me where I said Wikipedia is a bad source. But so you know, conspiracy theorists also use Wikipedia to insert their own nutty theories into it.



Don't be ridiculous. What you think my "may" implied is against the context of my argument in which I was implying acceptance of Christmas having pagan roots.

That's like me saying Alexander the Great may have existed, but he wasn't an actual supernatural sun god.

Doesn't mean I'm denying his existence. It's part of rhetorical speech.

Redacted

Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 5:14 am, edited 3 times in total.

You made a claim, and so the burden is on you not on me to find evidence for your own claim. Learn to own up to what you say.



The Two Babylons is not a source from antiquity that reliably reflects the beliefs of the ancients at the time (or before) Christmas originated. It was written in the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, it is a book with a clear agenda against Catholicism. Note the title.

Post something directly from a source from antiquity that reliably reflects the ancient people's beliefs concerning Nimrod. And then we can examine what the source says about him.

You made many more claims in that long post that also need to be questioned and challenged, but step by step. Let's see first if you actually got this particular claim right.

Do you know how much time it took me to put all that together? And NO not all of it is from one source! I mean really. Now you're just grasping for straws. You complained that I wasn't delivering resources and then when I did provide multiple resources you now complain that too many of them are from one resource.

If I was a person looking from the outside-in I would take note. I like the truth in EVERYTHING I do, and I most especially like it in the religion I follow. I want to know I'm not wasting my time devoting my life to a fake religion, or celebrating holidays whose origins conflict with God's word.

As far as I'm concerned I gave you what you wanted and it is still not good enough. So with that said I'll simply say you can believe whatever you want - if you want to believe the sky is red and made from crayon love more power to you - I'm done.

Last edited by kxmode on 12 Dec 2011, 9:20 pm, edited 3 times in total.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T8Y1-VLjGQ[/youtube]

Challenge your faith every once in a while. Don't just be intellectually lazy and post mindlessly.

I made one clear precise challenge for you to overcome. You failed to follow the conditions of the challenge and instead opted for a long haul of red herrings.

Provide a source from antiquity (meaning at the time or before Christmas was originated for Christians) that shows evidence for ancient belief concerning Nimrod that supports what you claim (namely that the Christmas tree is Nimrod symbolized).

I'm not asking for long texts ... just a citation of just one relevant source from antiquity.