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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   25711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I get my mother a Santa Claus figurine each year.

I will be shopping for the "IMMORTAL PAGAN GOD" version this year. Thank you.

Don't worry, you have plenty of examples to choose from.

There's actually a lesson there... pagans viewed their gods like we view Santa Claus. We don't "worship" Santa Claus in that we formulate religion around having a personal relationship with Santa Claus, like we need Santa to redeem our fallen souls, and we don't demand that participants in Christmas literally believe in the Santa lore.

The Christian perspective and worship of Jesus is not like the way the Romans worshipped their gods. The Romans had collective civic rituals, lore, superstitions, festivities surrounding their gods, much like we do Santa Claus, but they did not demand a belief in their literal existence and stories like Christians do for Jesus. It was about Civic Ritual.

Christmas is fundamentally pagan precisely because the way that we honor Santa Claus as a benevolent god in lore, myth, family ritual, and civic society mirrors the way the Romans honored their own gods and stands in complete contrast to the Christian worship of Jesus Christ.

but they did not demand a belief in their literal existence and stories like Christians do for Jesus. It was about Civic Ritual.

They demanded civic rituals precisely because they believed in their gods' literal existence. "Ivppitter is going to punish our city for insufficient piety if we don't get our newest conquests to venerate him along with their own god, what was his name, Iehova?"

They did not believe that every popular myth or portrayal of Jupiter was literally real like Christian belief in Jesus. Their belief in their gods was more of a system of organizing archetypes and drawing tribal lines that organized civic behavior, in exactly the way you have suggested. There was actually a basis for associating the decline of civic ritual with civilizational decline as well. That was the functionality of the religious order.

If you don't get a Christmas tree and decorate your house to venerate the coming of Santa, you're a Scrooge, that dynamic is more similar to the pagan system of civic ritual than "pray to Jesus Christ to actually save your personal soul from eternal damnation, because he literally resurrected to absolve you of your sins in the eyes of Yahweh".

around having a personal relationship with Santa Claus, like we need Santa to redeem our fallen souls

You've never written a letter to Santa, or been told to be good or else you'll be on the naughty list?

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