Little Big Horn was a victory of indigenous people over Europeans. I don't think any of the generals on the Mexican side at the Battle of Puebla were indigenous... but apparently Juan Almonte's mother was purely indigenous, and he fought for the French.
Go back beyond the generals and look at the politicians they're fighting for, I think that's at least part of what's being celebrated. Mexico's first indigenous president defeating a French-imported Hapsburg.
There's a great speech to go with the battle- 'Soldiers of Mexico! You face the finest soldiers in the world. They have come to take your country! Kill them!' or something. Great speeches make great holidays.
While Labor Day is supposed to be about unions, it seems to be pretty light on that lately... It's more like "OK, we're done with summer vacations but let's have another holiday to make it better". Also to go shopping for school year. Doesn't have much to do with unions for most people, I think...
Supposed to be about unions? Grover Cleveland didn't sign the law establishing "Labor's Holiday" as a federal holiday because he suddenly changed his mind about unions after sending out the Army to break the Pullman Strike.
I can't read Cleveland's mind, but I heard many times from people still alive today (and friendly to the idea of organized labour) that this is what it's supposed to be - well, maybe "unions" is too restrictive, about organized labour and achievements by such movements. I suspect Cleveland's idea was "if we can't fight it, let's direct it into more palatable direction - away from the commies" - but it's just my guess.
Yes, many supporters of the organized labor movement in the US want Labor Day to be about the organized labor movement and its achievements, and thus will tell you that's what it's "supposed to be" about. The historical record doesn't lend them much support.
Yeah, in practice Memorial Day and Labor Day seem to have drifted away from their original meanings of honoring those who died in the Civil War and honoring organized labor, respectively, to taking a couple of mondays off in order to grill some burgers and hot dogs in order to bookend the summer season.
I see more observations of Memorial Day (for American war dead generally, not just the Civil War) than Labor Day, though that very likely reflects my bubble.
My dad always posts a memorial of his uncle, who died in the Battle of the Bulge during my dad's infancy. For years he posted a faded magazine photo the family had treasured for decades, showing him sitting in a Paris cafe.
Then the Internet made it practical to order a much higher resolution (and color) copy of the photo. And on closer examination... I discovered that none of the soldiers' insignias actually matched my great-uncle's unit.
(By that point it was too late to ask anyone who'd known what he looked just like how they'd come to the conclusion that he was in the photo. I'm kind of sorry I checked.)
Another friend posts the name of the first known death in the American Revolution, and the then most recent US military loss, "and everyone in between".
My weird British experience of May 1 was the sharp contrast between Berlin (where there is/was essentially an annual riot) for International Workers' Day, and Oxford, where students stay up all night drinking and then gather under one of the college towers to hear madrigals sung at dawn (along with Morris dancers lurking in the streets) for May Day.
But I also found Scott's discomfort surprising there.
The annual Berlin riots had been a Punk Rock/ lunatic fringe thing, probably by now handled like bigger football events or G20 meetings. Weird events for the sensation seekers.
I'd probably be more skeptical of the idea that Pride Month is likely to be around a century from now, and certainly to the idea that it gets vastly more sponsorship and attention than Mother or Father's day. That's not a very sustainable order of social priorities.
The tradition of giving money (Chanukah gelt) to children is of long standing. The custom had its origin in the 17th-century practice of Polish Jewry to give money to their small children for distribution to their teachers. In time, as children demanded their due, money was also given to children to keep for themselves. Teenage boys soon came in for their share. According to Magen Avraham (18th century), it was the custom for poor yeshiva students to visit homes of Jewish benefactors who dispensed Chanukah money (Orach Chaim 670). The rabbis approved of the custom of giving money on Chanukah because it publicized the story of the miracle of the oil.
> Most Jewish children know lots of Hanukkah songs that sound suspiciously like Christmas carols.
The tradition of appropriating secular songs and giving them Jewish retelling goes far beyond Hanukkah. I think Chabad has been especially productive in this regard but may be others too. I have heard remakes of dozens of songs (having nothing to do with Christmas or - in Jewish version - Hanukkah). It doesn't exactly disprove anything about the main point just emphasizes that's not something specifically happening to Christmas songs - any popular song could get this kind of treatment, and often does.
Scott mentions Hanukkah gelt in the piece; I don't think it's unreasonable to say that gifts of money (or chocolate coins, or nuts) are substantially different from gifts of objects like toys or clothing as are associated with Christmas, and which are now often given at Hanukkah. I agree with Scott that it's a pretty clear influence from Christmas.
(For a comparator, there are Chinese traditions of giving money as gifts which haven't morphed into giving objects, so I don't think that 'tradition of giving money' naturally morphs into 'tradition of giving object gifts'.)
How does this work exactly? Is the giving only one way? Giving someone a packet with $40 in it only for them to also give you a packet with $40 seems silly.
Indeed there are rules about who gives to whom that avoid most of those back and forth situations.
As a rule of thumb, it's from elders to youngers. But that's rather imprecise. For Chinese New Year the obligation doesn't come strictly with age, but whether you are married or not plays a role.
I think I have to disagree here. While traditions of course do not morph "automatically", it's only natural that in 17th century Poland there's much less variety of gifts possible than in 21th century America, with department stores and next-day delivery. So if you're a cobbler in 17th century, what you're going to give as a gift - a sole? I think some coin would be more appreciated. Chocolate coins are obviously a modern riff on that tradition and it is pretty obvious, also it would be natural that if money gifts as such if frowned upon culturally where you live, then the traditions brought from other places would adjust - that doesn't mean they didn't exist beforehand.
"I have higher credence that other pagan beliefs made their way into the holiday (for example Santa’s sleigh as remnant of earlier Wild Hunt traditions)." This also seems to be a myth. Santa's sleigh originated in a poem in 19th century New York. There's no connection between it and Scandinavian mythology.
Well that sort of works, or did the poet get the idea from older traditions, and/or did that poem and description catch on due to it slotting into already well known structures.
Sometiems I find some of this "well actually" research that traces things back to the first *extant written* example of something as sort of missing the forest for the trees historically speaking.
Yeah, I wondered that. One problem is that most accounts of the Wild Hunt origin for Santa's sleigh and flying reindeer are like this: "Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir was the source for the legend of the eight reindeer of Santa Claus. Santa himself was the old Holly King/Odin and Saint Nicholas rolled into one." https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/santa-claus-and-the-wild-hunt/
But the initial mention of a sleigh (well, wagon) has it magically flying on its own. Then a poem comes along giving Santa a single flying reindeer. It's a bit after that that he gets 8. So it seems more likely that the legend just was made up in NY, maybe with some Dutch influence, than that writers and poets were influenced by Scandinavian mythology and just took a while to imitate it properly. That plus the fact that an 8-legged creature isn't much like 8 different 4-legged creatures.
Yeah I was talking less about this specific exmaple, and more the phenomenon of articles thatare of the form:
Actually the practice of nicknaming people "Big X" (like Big Tom or Big Jim) isn't as old as you would think. The first written example is from 1820s London (or wherever) and you are a silly ignoramus for thinking it was an old common tradition.
Ignoring that you know, the first extant written example of something is hardly indicative of the first time something happened, and that something might not appear in writing until it was quite common. And morover the general issues with translation and claiming things "started at X time in NY or London" that really have a long and robust tradition in some other cultures/langauges.
It is one of my pet peeves and something I associate with the Vox/Vice era of online wirting and journalism that cares more about having a surprising unexpected explaination for something than the correct explanation. It is often as though the authors are allergic to common sense.
Isn't the whole point about the Eostre thing just that it's fairly silly to look at the Christian celebration of Easter from such an anglocentric context? We know that Christians have commemorated Easter around the time of the Jewish feast of Passover, for obvious and Biblical reasons, from earliest times; it's not like the Christians in Greece and other Mediterranean lands went "Well, ackchually, there's this goddess (possibly?) in the remote islands of Britannia by the name of Eostre, and..."
In Irish it's Cáisc, which comes straight from Church Latin "Pascha". Just as a traditional name for children born around Christmas would be Noel/Noelle (depending on sex), so for male children born around Easter it is Pascal.
For English-speakers, Easter was celebrated in the Easter-month, so it took on that name because it replaced and was more important than whatever celebrations for Eostre/Estre "a Teutonic goddess of the rising light of day and spring" went on. It is not, however, the reason that we celebrate Easter around the time of the Vernal Equinox because when Christian missionaries arrived in England they saw Big Huge Festivals for Eostre and went "Okay, we'll take that over and invent a Christian festival for that date". That would be like saying the Jews decided to celebrate Passover around the Vernal Equinox because of the Big Huge Festivals for Eostre - nobody would believe that for a second, but it's trotted out every year as "Ackshully Easter is pagan".
Could you explain for general curiosity reasons what the Irish tradition for the celebration of Easter was that got squashed at the Council of Whitby? How did it differ and why was it out of synch with Rome which hadn't just recently settled on a way of calculating Easter.
Very roughly, around this time we're talking a north-south divide in England regarding religious influence. The northern half is heavily influenced by the Irish missionaries and their various settlements, from Iona to Lindisfarne, and the native English/Anglo-Saxon clergy and monastics educated at Irish monasteries or brought up under the Irish practices (I dislike the term 'Celtic Church' because there is too much tendency to present this as a totally independent, hippy-dippy, flower crown and free love movement which it wasn't, but that's a rant for another day). The Irish church is more on the Eastern/Orthodox model, where monasticism and the monasteries are the important centres; there are claims that there was influence from the Coptic Church but these can't be substantiated. Other differences ranged from the minor, like how the tonsure was done, to larger disciplinary matters (Irish monks developed the practice of private confession and penances, and were a lot stricter on these matters: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/how-irish-changed-penance)
South of England, we have Canterbury and the missions from Rome, representing the continental church. Rome is trying to establish its authority, for both political and religious reasons, so as to have a universal practice and belief of religion. This of course clashes with some of the Irish practices.
The dating of Easter is one controversy which has been going on for a long time; the Eastern and Western churches have different methods and different doctrines as to when and why to celebrate it, and the big problems are (1) how do you calculate it, anyway (people do know it's around the vernal equinox/Passover, but when do you calculate Passover?) and (2) should a Christian major feast be celebrated in tandem with a Jewish one, since we're not Jews anymore?
The Irish church, being influenced by the older wave of evangelisation, sticks to a more 'Eastern' calculation while the Canterbury church of course goes with Rome. This is not ideal, but people muddle along, although having Christians celebrating Easter on one side while the other side is still undergoing Lent is confusing and awkward.
It gets even more awkward when a royal marriage is involved. Enter King Oswy of Northumbria, who hews to the Irish way of doing things, for reasons, while his wife and one of his sons go by the Romans (the son is involved with St Wilfrid of Northumbria, a monastic who has been educated in Rome and is bitterly opposed to the Irish interference at home, and wants to root it out). To quote the Venerable Bede:
"Equally, 665 would be a year, as Bede writes, "that Easter was kept twice in one year, so that when the King had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday".
How to solve this? Convoke a synod where all the leading church figures of the day (including the abbess St. Hilda of Whitby) can thrash it out: will Northumbria follow the Irish or the Roman tradition?
So it lines up with Bishop Colman for the Irish/Ionan side, and St. Wilfrid for the Romans, with the king as final arbiter. The story goes that the king asks "who holds the authority, St. Columcille of Iona or St. Peter of Rome?"
"Oswiu then asked both sides if they agreed that Peter had been given the keys to the kingdom of heaven by Christ and pronounced to be "the rock" on which the Church would be built (as stated in Matthew 16:18–19), to which they agreed. Oswiu then declared his judgment in favour of the holder of the keys, i.e. the Roman (and Petrine) practice."
So that is the decision that is laid down, and now everyone (Irish and Northumbrian) is (nominally at least) under the authority of Rome.
Thanks and not to complain about the history, but what was the different in the algorithms that gave different dates and (if possible) how did the differences arise?
[I had heard something like this from Jaime at History of Britain podcast.]
Oh, calendars are always a pain to try and get straight. Even leaving aside the gradual slippage of the Julian calendar out of sync with the astronomical one, various large important provinces of the Classical world had their own methods of calculating calendars.
The simple(r) version is from the Catholic Encyclopaedia; basically there were three successive controversies over dating Easter.
First, should it be celebrated on Sunday (the Christian Sabbath) or on a week day? If you calculated, as the Jewish calendar did for Passover, then the date could fall on a weekday. The Asian church took the "14th day of the moon" calculation, the churches elsewhere celebrated it on Sunday.
So the first decision was settled that Easter should always be celebrated on a Sunday.
There's a relevant bit here to quote, which will be important later:
"Further, Irenaeus states that St. Polycarp, who like the other Asiatics, kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon, whatever day of the week that might be, following therein the tradition which he claimed to have derived from St. John the Apostle, came to Rome c. 150 about this very question, but could not be persuaded by Pope Anicetus to relinquish his Quartodeciman observance."
With that out of the way, came the second question: okay, so it is to fall on Sunday, but which Sunday? It seems like this one got kicked up all the way to the Council of Nicaea for a final decision:
"The important Church of Antioch was still dependent upon the Jewish calendar for its Easter. The Syrian Christians always held their Easter festival on the Sunday after the Jews kept their Pasch. On the other hand at Alexandria, and seemingly throughout the rest of the Roman Empire, the Christians calculated the time of Easter for themselves, paying no attention to the Jews. In this way the date of Easter as kept at Alexandria and Antioch did not always agree; for the Jews, upon whom Antioch depended, adopted very arbitrary methods of intercalating embolismic months before they celebrated Nisan, the first spring month, on the fourteenth day of which the paschal lamb was killed. ...The Alexandrians, on the other hand, accepted it as a first principle that the Sunday to be kept as Easter Day must necessarily occur after the vernal equinox, then identified with 21 March of the Julian year. This was the main difficulty which was decided by the Council of Nicaea. "
So the decision laid down was:
- that Easter must be celebrated by all throughout the world on the same Sunday;
- that this Sunday must follow the fourteenth day of the paschal moon;
- that that moon was to be accounted the paschal moon whose fourteenth day followed the spring equinox;
- that some provision should be made, probably by the Church of Alexandria as best skilled in astronomical calculations, for determining the proper date of Easter and communicating it to the rest of the world
Great, now everything is settled, right? Well, no.
Third problem was that because of the different calculations which had been adopted and then rejected, there were a lot of places behind the times, as it were. And here's where the Synod of Whitby comes in at last:
"It was to the divergent cycles which Rome had successively adopted and rejected in its attempt to determine Easter more accurately that the third stage in the paschal controversy was mainly due. The Roman missionaries coming to England in the time of St. Gregory the Great found the British Christians, the representatives of that Christianity which had been introduced into Britain during the period of the Roman occupation, still adhering to an ancient system of Easter-computation which Rome itself had laid aside."
So as I said before, a big quarrel for control and "who is the boss of whom" between the native Irish/British church, and the Roman missionaries arriving in to convert the natives and make sure everyone was following the same path.
And here we come to the record by Bede, who seems to have been strongly on the pro-Roman (or more accurately, anti-Irish) side:
As stated previously, some of the British Christians were celebrating Easter on one date while for others it was still Lent. What system did the Irish use? It doesn't seem to be exactly clear, but it was one of the older, Asiatic-influenced ones, on an eighty-four year cycle (don't ask me to explain the maths or the motions of the sun and moon involved).
"Originally, the early Christians had followed the Jewish calendar and celebrated the resurrection on the Passover, which was the fourteenth day of Nisan, the first month of the new year. In time, Easter was separated from the Jewish festival and came to be celebrated on a Sunday. The two dates could coincide, however, and in AD 325 the Council of Nicaea declared that Easter was to be celebrated on the same Sunday. Still, when Easter fell on the fourteen, the Roman church celebrated it the following week, on the twenty-first; the Celtic church, the week before.
There was another problem. Easter is a moveable feast, its date based on a lunar cycle. To correlate the lunar year with the solar year of the Roman calendar, a certain number of days have to be intercalated into a cycle of so many years. Easter was calculated based on these cycles. But, when Rome adopted the more accurate nineteen-year cycle followed by the church at Alexandria, the Celtic church continued to adhere to one based on an eighty-four year cycle."
Remember what was said earlier about 'this is the system that was taught by St. John the Apostle' claimed by Polycarp and used by the Asian church? That seems to have been the model for the system used by the Irish church, as put forward at Whitby:
"Bishop Colmán defended the Ionan calculation of Easter on the grounds that it was the practice of Columba, founder of their monastic network and a saint of unquestionable holiness, who himself had followed the tradition of St. John the apostle and evangelist."
The eighty-four year cycle does seem to have become more inaccurate over time, and the new nineteen year or Alexandrian cycle to be better, but don't ask me about the celestial mechanics. The new calendar was more in tune with the astronomical year so it won in the end. Calculating the proper date was a pain in the backside for everybody involved:
"Although a process based on the 19-year Metonic cycle was first proposed by Bishop Anatolius of Laodicea around 277, the concept did not fully take hold until the Alexandrian method became authoritative in the late 4th century.
The Alexandrian computus was converted from the Alexandrian calendar into the Julian calendar in Alexandria around 440, which resulted in a Paschal table (attributed to pope Cyril of Alexandria) covering the years 437 to 531. This Paschal table was the source which inspired Dionysius Exiguus, who worked in Rome from about 500 to about 540, to construct a continuation of it in the form of his famous Paschal table covering the years 532 to 616. Dionysius introduced the Christian Era (counting years from the Incarnation of Christ) by publishing this new Easter table in 525.
A modified 84-year cycle was adopted in Rome during the first half of the 4th century. Victorius of Aquitaine tried to adapt the Alexandrian method to Roman rules in 457 in the form of a 532-year table, but he introduced serious errors. These Victorian tables were used in Gaul (now France) and Spain until they were displaced by Dionysian tables at the end of the 8th century.
The tables of Dionysius and Victorius conflicted with those traditionally used in the British Isles. The British tables used an 84-year cycle, but an error made the full moons fall progressively too early. The discrepancy led to a report that Queen Eanfled, on the Dionysian system, fasted on her Palm Sunday while her husband Oswy, king of Northumbria, feasted on his Easter Sunday".
Yes. Scott has snuck in a very limited claim ("Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre.") in a list of examples of appropriated/usurped holidays. The idea that Easter *as a holiday* originates with Eostre is obviously absurd and has been exhaustively debunked, but that's not the claim being made in the original post - that claim just relates to the name. And while there's no real evidence for the motive in renaming the holiday in England, it's not absurd in the same way that the implied claim about its origins would be.
The problem is that the limited claim isn't really sufficient for the argument being made. If you want precedents for creating new holidays to suck the oxygen away from old ones, you need examples of people doing that, not of an old holiday (Christians had been celebrating Easter for 500 years by the time of the first mission to England) which in one part of the world happened to acquire the name of another holiday that occurred around the same time.
Yes, it feels a little falling prey to the correlation = causation fallacy, as if one argued that the date of Memorial Day was chosen to honor the gods of barbecue. People are perfectly capable of freighting a holiday with whatever their favorite method of goofing off might be, without that ancillary activity forming part of the raison d'etre of the holiday.
Sort of. There were a number of relatively spontaneous "Decoration Days" that preceded it in the 1870s, roughly, in May, when people would put flowers and flags on the graves of Civil War dead. So it's connected to going outside in the sense that you wouldn't put flowers on graves in Gettysburg in February, on account of maybe having to clear away the snow and them being blown away by the wind in 20 minutes.
It might be also that people were inclined to remember the war, and those who died in it, around the same time of year that the war ended (April-May).
Either way, it would be a mistake to think that the date of Memorial Day was chosen to co-opt people who were used to having their first outdoor barbecue in late May. If nothing else, people in the 1870-80s, when the date became relatively fixed, were not as enthused as we are about grilling meat outdoors, it presumably not being much of a novelty.
The date of Memorial Day was also specifically chosen *not* to coincide with any of the major American Civil War battles even though its original purpose was to honor those that died in that war. (I guess so it didn't privilege one group of dead soldiers over any other, or something.)
Yes, but it's *such* a minor point. When people have arguments about the origins of Easter, at the deepest level it's a question of whether it originates from Christianity or is a recuperation of some pagan festivity, which in turn goes back to arguments on whether *all* of Christianity is a recuperation of paganism. That's why people have fiery debates about this topic, not some etymological point.
Also, when it comes to hares and eggs, it strikes me that these are parts of modern Easter imagery specifically because there's been a need to secularize Easter for the modern society. When there's people who still wish to celebrate Easter for the religious reason (ie. He is Risen and all that) and also people who don't wish to do so (either because they don't believe He is Risen or, earlier on, because they were Protestants who saw celebrating a certain day as popery).
The compromise solution has been to retain the holiday but focus on the imagery that doesn't have an obvious direct religious root, ie. eggs and hares - they might come from pagan sources, they might come from more obscure (to Westerners) Christian traditions, they might be generic spring imagery, but they're not from the Bible or other sources of well-known Christian tradition, and that's what counts. Thus, when you have a concerted effort in the recent decades to put eggs-and-hares imagery front and center when talking about Easter, it creates an impression that the origin of eggs and hares is somehow very important as far as the meaning of Easter goes, when it's altogether rather subsidiary a question in relation to the main point.
Also, of course, many people seem to operate from a logic where any such imagery just *must* come from pagan traditions, even if no-one has demonstrated that, for instance, eggs and hares have any direct historical link to Eostre, either; of course such claims are easy to assume if you're a Protestant seeing pagan popery everywhere, or a modern pagan eager to rediscover signs of lost paganism wherever they can be found, or just an atheist who loves to get solid dunks on silly Christians who are ignorant of their own supposed history. *That's* the main point of the History for Atheists blog, as far as I can see.
The pity is that there are perfectly good arguments to be made about pagan influences on Easter traditions, but you need to start from pagan traditions concurrent with the development of the Easter tradition, i.e. roughly around 1st century Palestine, 2nd century hellenism and 4th century Rome.
It fascinates me, how the easter issue is still revolving. A few years ago, a boxing coach of armenian origin complained about a fighting venue being hold on, what you call it, Good Friday, it being the highest christian holiday and all. The other representatives were like "What´s the fuss, we have been doing that for 50 years now.". I`m not sure if anybody does venues on Bayram in these parts; probably as well, though many boxers here are muslim. I thought, if one of the christmas days off work here is called boxing day in Britain, it wouldn`t hurt any more to box on Good Friday as well.
I'm adding SAS's retreat to Easter's-name-and-customs-in-northwestern-Europe-are-taken-from-the-name-of-a-pagan-holiday-and-customs-in-northwestern-Europe to my collection of Motte & Bailey examples.
I agree with your point about Christians in Greece and other Mediterranean countries, but I'll note that Easter is called "Ostern" in German, which clearly has the same origin as "Easter", so it's not quite *anglocentric*, but probably “Germanic-centric”.
Sure is. The center of gravity of the Church has never been located anywhere near the Baltic Coast raiders who brought assorted minor deities to the British Isles,and it's asking a lot of credulity to believe that the Church saw some powerful need to co-opt a bit of by then fading Old English culture from a peripheral demographic of hairy northerners in late Antiquity to maintain its establishment in what was then the cosmopolitan heart of Europe, the southern region from Byzantium to Avignon.
If anything, you'd expect an effort to co-opt some Celtic, Frankish, Lombard, or Dacian rituals in that time period, since these were regions of much greater importance to the early Church than the British Isles.
The argument around Arianism seems like a pretty big example of "sneaking in connotations." Somehow we get from "The Son was created by the Father" to "The Son is less divine than the Father," "The Son is less powerful than the Father," "The Son is less special than the Father," "the Son has less moral authority than the father," and "the Son is subordinate to the Father." It does not seem obvious to me at all that saying that the Son was created by the Father somehow "demotes" the Son so that he is more like an angel. When exactly the Son came into existence relative to the Father seems totally orthogonal to all of that.
Rather than say something like "the Son has to have existed eternally with the Father to have the same properties," why not just say "The Father created someone who is just as divine, just as powerful, just as special, and has just as much moral authority as He does, and is His equal in every way." If you believe that the Father is incapable of doing this then this seems like a weird example of the Omnipotence Paradox. Instead of saying "If God can create a stone not even he can lift?" you say "Can God create someone just as omnipotent as he is?"
Also, if you really take the idea of omnipotence seriously, couldn't you just say the Father used some kind of time-manipulation ability to make the Son have always existed? So that the moment of the Son's creation was at around 1 AD, even though the Son was around earlier?
While I understand what you're getting at, Christians see "existing eternally" as one of the fundamental properties of divinity in itself, as is being uncreated. For us, "being created by God" not only implies but necessitates being subordinate to God. Arius himself also believed that Jesus was inherently subordinate to God, so in history the thought experiment you propose just didn't make an appearance.
Christianity is also firmly committed to monotheism, and we believe that saying "Jesus was created by God as a God equal to him" steps across the fine line that divides trinitarianism from polytheism, because it makes the Son a different being from the Father. For us, it's not just that the Son has the same *properties* as God -- we believe he shares the same substance, the same essence, the same "what-ness" as the Father, that he's the same God, yet mysteriously a different person. And a key part of that essence, in our view, is being uncreated. ("For You, O God, are ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, existing forever, forever the same, You and Your only-begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit.")
We believe that saying anything else would commit us to polytheism, which we are utterly unwilling to do. "The Lord is one" is as fundamental a principle to Christians as to Jews, though we of course disagree rather strongly as to what that entails.
"For You, O God, are ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, existing forever, forever the same, You and Your only-begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit."
To quote the Robert Hollander translation of the 'Paradiso':
"In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
there appeared to me three circles
having three colors but the same extent,
and each one seemed reflected by the other
as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,
equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
O how scant is speech, too weak to frame my thoughts.
Compared to what I still recall my words are faint --
>or us, it's not just that the Son has the same *properties* as God -- we believe he shares the same substance, the same essence, the same "what-ness" as the Father, that he's the same God, yet mysteriously a different person.
I wonder if from that you could postulate some kind of view where the substance and essence that the Son is composed of has always existed eternally, but it did not acquire the "mysteriously a different person" quality until circa 1AD? Or does that not work either?
I am aware that Arius himself did not believe anything like this. I remember reading about Arius and getting extremely annoyed with him that he made the unjustified leap from "the Son was created by the Father" to "the Son is subordinate to the Father."
There's the redundancy of it; if God is omnipotent and omnipresent, what point does it serve in creating a second omnipotent omnipresence? Surely there's a meaningful distinction of some kind, if it's worth doing. The most obvious presumption would be that they disagree on some things, which creates bedrock problems in the faith. Especially when you extrapolate to potentially infinite omnipotent Gods, all contradicting each other.
No no no no no, if the Son is a created being, then He is not God, he is like one of the angels (who also are spiritual intelligences etc etc etc). This hinges on the difference between "begetting" and "creating", and this is why the Creeds were hammered out at those ecumenical councils where people may or may not have been slapped:
"We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten not made, one in being with the Father."
Slip away from that, and over time you get to "Jesus was a wonder-working man and/or prophet", as you get with Islam. Arianism developed over the centuries to be "God the Father is God alone, the Son is inferior to him". To quote online Britannica:
"Arius’s basic premise was the uniqueness of God, who is alone self-existent (not dependent for its existence on anything else) and immutable; the Son, who is not self-existent, cannot therefore be the self-existent and immutable God. Because the Godhead is unique, it cannot be shared or communicated. Because the Godhead is immutable, the Son, who is mutable, must, therefore, be deemed a creature who has been called into existence out of nothing and has had a beginning. Moreover, the Son can have no direct knowledge of the Father, since the Son is finite and of a different order of existence."
So that can also slide off into some Gnostic stuff, or Unitarianism, or whatever it is exactly Mormons believe (which I don't know beyond surface, shallow information I have read online, so can't really comment on their beliefs). Calvinism's divine sovereignty is a very much weaker shadow of this, re: the qualities of Godhead which cannot be communicated to another being.
Arianism is *not* "God made someone exactly the same as Him" (though a compromise moderate position on "the Son is like the Father who begot Him" was promulgated to make peace between the Arians and non-Arians). It is "The Son is sempiternal, contingent on the Father, and does not share in the essence of the Father":
I'd like to pull the analogies to Mormon beliefs off the table, since it's not applicable to the discussion and nobody else seems to understand what we believe vis-a-vis the nature of God - partly because it's wrapped up in a lot of other things we believe that diverge from other Christians. The whole thing becomes a non-issue in our theology, but that's because we don't approach other doctrines in the same way as most of Christianity. Saying we're 'sliding toward downgrading Jesus Christ' is to simply misunderstand everything we believe. Trust me that when members of my church invoke, "but it's literally in the name: The Church of *Jesus Christ*, how can you miss that?" it's not because we're trying to slide something past you with a clever naming scheme.
I will admit our beliefs about the nature of God are much different from most of Christianity, but I think it's not a good precedent to deny other people's faith in Jesus Christ. So I try not to judge someone else's doctrine so harshly as to deny their faith. I know many Mormons don't understand Trinitarian language, and consider it extremely extra-Biblical. I appreciate the discussions here, which help me understand why other faiths adhere so strongly to creeds we don't think are scripturally sound. In my experience, usually when I don't understand someone else's theology it's because I'm reading my own interpretations into both scripture and their theology, creating a hybrid conception that the other person would disagree with. It's the hybrid that's absurd and offensive, and seeking to understand the other person's theology is at least enlightening (and drives greater charity for others' beliefs). I'll try to do the same here.
Where to start with our theology on the nature of God? How about ex nihilo creation: it's not a thing in Mormon theology. We believe that the central identity that makes up a person (we call it 'intelligence') isn't created nor indeed can be. Same as matter (ergo no ex nihilo creation). That stuff has always been around, though in a chaotic state. God the Father and you, dear reader, both share an eternal identity. However, the Father has the capacity to organize matter into the 'worlds without number' we observe. He also created spirits - meaning he organized 'intelligences' with greater capacity to have bodies made of spirit, then he trained them, then clothed those spirits with physical bodies. The Father isn't just an intelligence, though. He has both a spiritual and a physical body. That body looks like ours (or rather we look like Him), both spiritually and physically. We're just not as capable as He is.
Okay, that's the Father. Now how about the Son? Let's start with the Plan: Before creating the world, but after creating a bunch of spiritual bodies, the Father presented a plan to those spirits - his children - for advancing us to become something greater. We would obtain physical bodies and be able to make choices in a probationary state (life and death). Everyone thought this was a great idea, except there was a catch: sometimes people would make the wrong choices. In order to grow you have to be able to fail, but if you allow a bunch of evil into heaven it's not really heaven anymore. So the rule is that if you sin you get cast out - which means nearly everyone gets cast out of heaven forever. This isn't a good trade: physical body for eternal damnation. So instead of learning to use our physical bodies in Heaven, we get to come to Earth, outside the presence of the Father.
We need a way to overcome sin, though, so we can return to the Father's presence - this time tested/trusted and with perfect physical bodies like He has. The Plan accounts for that, too, and this is where Jesus comes in. One spirit would be anointed to bear everyone's sins, be resurrected, and act as intercessor after everyone has fallen. This person, once anointed, would become co-equal with the Father, but to do so he would have to be perfect/sinless, and willing to suffer a lot. Jesus offered himself, and God chose him. Satan didn't like the plan and he rebelled, drawing off a third of the Sprits after him, who were cast out of heaven and didn't get physical bodies.
Once he was called up and anointed, Jesus became the 'lamb slain from the foundation of the world' (Rev 13:8) and did all the work of physical creation under the direction of the Father. All the sinners on Earth were cut off from the Father and had to communicate through the Son - who was called Jehovah in the OT, and Jesus Christ in the NT. That's right, we believe Jesus Christ is Jehovah of the Old Testament. From a Trinitarian viewpoint maybe that's both not a significant distinction and also nonsensical. But from a Mormon viewpoint - where the Father and Son can stand next to one another as separate people - that means something different (we read Steven's testimony before his stoning as having literally witnessed the physical bodies of the Father and Son standing together). This was the Plan all along.
"Doesn't that make Jesus less than the Father?" I don't see how it matters. The principle of intercession means everything passes through Christ anyway. You can't downplay Christ without rejecting the Father's plan. Indeed, the fact that the Father chose to do everything through Christ - including the physical creation of all things - means Jesus Christ is trusted as a kind of caretaker of the Father's plan and of all humanity. If the Son's will was different from the Father's, there's no way He could be trusted with that role. So when we talk of the Son and the Father as both being God, we talk of them having different roles in the same function governing the universe in support of the same Plan of Salvation. Kind of like how the US has three different branches of government, but they're all the "government", our understanding of the nature of God has three different parts made of distinct individuals who all have different roles to play (not discussing the Holy Ghost - a person of Spirit who does not yet have a physical body - because this is already too long).
>No no no no no, if the Son is a created being, then He is not God, he is like one of the angels
I think what might be going on is that I've never really seen "existed eternally" as a particularly important part of God's divinity. I suppose if the Son was created he might be like the angels in that one specific way, but in every important way could be as divine as the Father. Why can't the Son just be created with the power to attain the highest order of existence and obtain direct knowledge of the Father?
I don't see how this can lead to eventually disbelieving in the divinity of Christ. It seems more likely that Islam and other views that Christ was a prophet or a human developed from syncretism with other traditions, not from some kind of slippery slope.
What's the counter-Arian / counter-Nestorian take on Matthew 27:46?
Separately, even as someone raised in the (Protestant) Christian tradition, I admit that I've never really "gotten" an understanding of the (non-heretical) nature of the Holy Spirit either as an entity, essence, or as having nature separate (or at least distinguishable) from that of the Father -- it always seemed that the existence of the Holy Spirit was strongly relevant to Pentecost, but there wasn't a lot of other textual exposition to be found specific to that aspect of the Trinity. Might I have the temerity to beg for a brief summary on that topic from one of our most esteemedly theologically educated commenters?
This is difficult to summarize briefly, but the first thing to notice is that the Holy Spirit is already mentioned numerous times in the Hebrew Scriptures, usually by the title "The Spirit of God". Starting in Genesis 1:2, where the Spirit is present at the start of the work of creating the universe (and in later passages, giving life to humans and animals---a meaning which may be partly related to the etymological meaning of spirit as "breath" or "wind"). As the Hebrew Scriptures progress one sees the Spirit involved more specifically in inspiring artists (e.g. Exodus 31:3), heroes (esp. in Judges), kings (e.g. 1 Samuel 16), and prophets (e.g. Numbers 11, Micah 3:18, Isaiah 61:1). As a corollary, later Jewish writings including the New Testament regard the Spirit as the cause of the unique "inspiration" (note the etymology) of the biblical writings.
It is interesting to note how this Spirit-language functions in the context of Jewish monotheism. If you are a pantheist or a deist, then God is equally present (or equally absent) everywhere and you don't really need to talk in this way. But Judaism is a *revealed* religion involving (scandalously to the rest of the world) God choosing to become specially present to specific people, places and things. But how can the unique God who transcends heaven and earth (or as we would say, spacetime) also be present to specific people, in a way that can be "given" or "taken away"? The language of "Spirit" is one (of several different) ways in which the Bible talks about God's presence being manifested. At the same time, because the things the Spirit does (creation, inspiring scripture, doing miracles etc.) are clearly divine acts, the Spirit also cannot be considered in isolation from God as if it were a separate deity (that would be polytheism all over again).
To summarize, in the Hebrew Scriptures we see the Spirit involved not just in creation but also in giving certain individuals a unique relationship with God that equips them to do special tasks. And yet, there are multiple promises in the later prophets that in the future---in the Messianic era---the Spirit will be available more generally, to all of God's people! From this perspective, the significance of Pentecost (and the many other times in Acts that people are filled with the Spirit) is not a unique one time event but rather the inauguration of a new type of relationship with God. St. Paul in particular emphasizes how the Spirit changes our relationship to God: rather than trying to obey externally given laws (interpreted primarily by scholars), the law instead becomes a matter of God dwelling inside us (making us holy) and changing our minds to become responsive to his will. (When people talk about following the "spirit of the law rather than the letter", this language is a sort of fossilization from a more theological proposition where "spirit" actually refers to the Holy Spirit!)
Obviously, to turn this into a full Trinitarian theology one would also need to say how the Spirit relates to the Son, i.e. Jesus. In the Gospels, we see the Spirit overshadows Mary in a unique way so as to initiate the Incarantion (Luke 1:45). The Spirit also manifests on Jesus at his baptism, guides him, and is the power by which he does his miracles. In a passage which is of particular importance to Trinitarian theology, in John 14:15-16:15 Jesus promises that after he ascends to the Father he will send the Spirit to help them. Also important is the baptismal formula "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (note that since "name" is given in the singular, there is an implied reference to the Tetragrammaton, which pious Jews would not even speak out loud).
The Spirit also appears in the New Testament in a more epistemological role as the "Spirit of truth" (and this is perhaps the aspect of Christianity most infuriating to rationalists, although I think it is compatible with evidentialism broadly understood). There is a sense that it is not really possible to perceive or acknowledge (in a non-superficial sense) the truth that Jesus is Lord except by means of the Spirit of God working inside of us.
One way to put this is that in Judaism one has the triadic structure:
God ---- sends Spirit -----> inspired person or word
but Christianity insists that salvation is not possible unless all 3 "persons" of this triad are fully divine, where Jesus now plays the role of the "word of God". When Christians talk about becoming sons and daughters of God, we mean entering into this triadic structure in the role of the Son, which involves dying to our old selves and receiving new life from the Spirit, following the pattern of Jesus' death and resurrection.
In other words, not only the source of the revelation (the Father) but also the thing revealed (the Son) and the thing in us which allows us to receive the revelation (the Spirit) are regarded as fully divine, because only God can save us. But if they are fully divine, then they are eternal which means: 1) that the Son and Spirit also pre-exist in the Father even before creation, and 2) the Trinity is itself our deepest revelation of what God is like in himself.
Firstly, thank you *very* much for the comprehensive response and explanation to my questions. I really appreciate getting such an in-depth response.
Is it fair to characterize the basic thrust of the first half of your comment as indicating that while there might seem to be an implicit notion of omnipresence in the notion of God, that's actually at odds with most of the Old Testament characterizations (consider inter alia the Temple and the Ark as having special significance) and indeed the lack of omnipresence is even reflected in current Judaic practice (AIUI a minyan in a essence a quorum required to establish the Divine Presence), and so the *localized presence* of God is essentially the nature of the Holy Spirit, with Jesus then being understood to localize the Holy Spirit within all believers?
As for Matt 27:46, the simplest orthodox explanation is that Christ had (and still has!) a complete human nature as well as the divine nature. As a human being, he was capable of experiencing the feeling of abandonment by God (which as a pious Jew, he expressed by quoting Psalm 22). It is only by the Incarnation that God could enter into the experience of being abandoned by God.
Attempts to explain this passage as some sort of metaphysical rupture within the Trinity are likely to get heretical pretty fast, but I don't think this is in any way necessary. To me, the significance of this is that God was entering into the worst experiences which it is possible for human beings to have, in order to redeem them, and the feeling of divine abandonment is one such experience.
The terms "creation", "creature", etc., and the entire ontological argument for the existence of God, are all about how only greater things can create only lesser things. There's a similar debate in Islam about whether the Qur'an is created or eternal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quranic_createdness
It's interesting that Christianity came up so much in the comments, but given that it was a big part of the original post, it's not all that surprising. From the Christian perspective, I have a few notes to add.
Pope Spurdo does well to note that Arianism has major implications for Mariology. But I would quibble with his assertion that when you talk with Protestants about Mary that it inevitably gets them to make Arian arguments. While I think Protestants are many things, I agree with Valjean that they are definitively not Arians. The much more common position you see get brought up isn't Arianism but *Nestorianism* -- that Mary gave birth to *Jesus the man*, but did not give birth to *Jesus the God*. I don't think most Protestants are Nestorians either -- If you press them, you can probably get them to admit that they believe Mary's child is God, and therefore that Mary gave birth to God (which is really what the debate over the term "Mother of God" is trying to get at). I think a lot of Protestant misgivings over the term have more to do with their objections to Marian veneration in general, or to a misconception that it means Catholics and Orthodox Christians believe Mary somehow is the cause of Jesus being God, which is not what anyone believes. Jesus did not become God through Mary, but he did become human through her.
As for the main topic of the post, holidays becoming other holidays -- yeah, I think it's pretty straightforward that many aspects of the pagan solstice observations became a part of Christmas, and that many springtime festivals (including that of Eostre) had their celebrations merged into Christian Easter. The use of the term "Easter" for the holiday, though, is an *incredibly* Anglophone phenomenon; in most other languages the term for the holiday is just a translation of Passover. And in general, the Eastern Orthodox prefer to use the term "pascha" for the great feast even in English for this reason, and frankly I wish Western Christians would adopt that naming convention too, though it is for example in major use in Catholic theology (the Paschal mystery, the paschal celebration, etc).
Easter (Paschal?) eggs, while not ultimately of Christian origin, also have a much deeper connection to the symbolism of the holiday than I think many recognize. The central celebration of Easter is the resurrection of Christ -- and the new life and rebirth brought about by that resurrection. This is why Christians have traditionally celebrated baptisms on that day. So, eggs, which are a source of new living animals, symbolize that new life and birth. It's easy for me to see why Christians a long time ago saw eggs as a perfectly fitting tradition to integrate into the Christian holiday, whatever its original source.
For me, it's undeniable that the dating of Christmas has everything to do with the winter solstice, and in fact I think your statement of "perhaps God liked the symbolism" is actually 100% correct. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, with the longest and darkest night, but after that day the light slowly increases. This is perfect symbolism for the emergence of the Messiah into the world: "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." (John 9:5). So I think, in addition to being the celebration of Jesus' birthday, Christmas is definitely a solstice celebration. And I see that as perfectly fitting, and find no reason to be embarrassed by it. The solstice is astronomically significant, just as the birth of Christ is soteriologically significant, and the two go along together quite well.
You offered a throwaway joke about God being mad at Pope Gregory for changing the calendar, but hilariously enough there were, are, and probably always will be some Christians who are actually mad at him for doing that. The Eastern Orthodox have never totally adopted the Gregorian calendar in place of the Julian calendar, in large part because they don't take orders from the Pope and are highly reluctant to do anything that even has the *appearance* of taking orders from the Pope.
The Gregorian calendar is, of course, more astronomically accurate than the Julian calendar, and lines up with the secular calendar in most countries. But those Orthodox churches which have adopted the "new calendar" call it the "Revised Julian calendar," even though it *just so happens* to line up with the Gregorian one. And even then, many countries like Russia steadfastly refuse to use the new calendar. Since the Orthodox judge that sharing the same date for Pascha worldwide is more important than strictly following one calendar, even the churches that use the new calendar celebrate the holiday on the old calendar date. So Orthodox Easter is universally at least a little bit offset from the Catholic and Protestant date, no matter where you are.
Many Protestant countries, for essentially the same reason of "not taking orders from the Pope," also did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until centuries after its promulgation. England (and therefore the English colonies) for example didn't adopt it until 1752. I suppose there could have been an alternative history where British North America never adopted the Gregorian calendar, and therefore the United States could have been a Julian-calendar nation all the way.
Yes, good point: Nestorianism is more consequential than Arianism for Mariology, and Protestants seem more likely to commit the former heresy. I'll send you some SlateStarCodex Gold.
As a Protestant, I'd disagree that it has much to do with Nestorianism or Arianism. I think there's a misunderstanding in all this in how Protestant beliefs are formed. The historical Protestant objections to Catholic Mariology have very little to do with philosophizing about the logical consequences of one Christological understanding or another and a lot to do with the lack of direct Biblical support for Marian veneration (or, for that matter, veneration of the saints). And those ideas were formed within a theological culture that was interested in distinguishing between the original content of the Christian religion and various assorted superstitions and extrabiblical traditions that were understood to have accumulated over the centuries, which made those Marian traditions a prime target for exclusion.
If I understand Calvin correctly, he didn't object to the specific title "Mother of God" in principle, though he objected to it in practice because he thought it led naturally to idolatrous Marian "superstitions".
If you're speaking to a less thoughtful or catechized Protestant today, he might not have thought through all this very much (and he might well carry one or more Christological heresies in his head), but he will immediately understand Marian veneration to be either an alien or a distinctively Catholic practice and therefore his objections will ultimately be rooted in the historical objections of Calvin and others and not to any malformations in his Christology.
I would like to second this comment--a lot of modern Protestants are weirded out by veneration of the saints in general, Mary just being an easy example to point to as "why are we asking a human to intercede for us instead of just praying to God directly as his heirs through baptism?"
I have the impression that there's a strain of Catholic thought that conflates the historical nature of the Catholic / Protestant schism (in which Protestant belief would have been essentially definitionally reactionary and formulated in opposition to Catholic belief, because Catholic belief was the only game in town) and modern Protestantism, in which, for those raised Protestant, Catholic teachings don't form an implicit background against which Protestant beliefs are contrasted, and instead Protestantism represents a from-the-ground-up comprehensive belief system -- one that wholly lacks certain classes of Catholic orthodoxy.
In short, it's an error to treat the contemporary Protestant-on-the-street view of Mariology (or the veneration of saints, or the concept of purgatory, or confession, or any of a million other doctrinal differences) as a principled rejection of an established doctrine. Rather, it's the result of encountering concepts like the veneration of Mary or the notion of the intercession of Saints and being like "Wait...What? Where is *that* in any the Gospels?"
YES. You've said it far better than I could (to my shame, as a Lutheran.)
There's far less in modern Protestantism that's anti-Catholic or a reaction against Catholicism than one might think--for example, a lot of Lutheran worship services have much the same structure as Catholic Mass (can't speak for the Calvinists or the Protestant churches descended from Zwingli) (and also the Anglicans and by extension the Episcopalians are basically just Protestant-flavored Catholicism thanks to Henry VIII establishing the Church of England, but that's a different issue).
The issues a lot of the early Reformers had were specific doctrinal things that were not supported by the Bible. Those specific things were rejected, but a lot of Catholic doctrine has its copies in Protestant doctrine because *that's still in the Bible and didn't come from the Papal Office.*
The Arian heresy never came into it, because the sticking point isn't "is Jesus true God" it's "why do we care so much about Mary again?"
Here's how I think about it: Catholic converts are heavily overrepresented among American devout conservative Christian intellectuals, for various reasons. And even conservative Protestant intellectuals who don't convert to Catholicism at least heavily flirt with the idea at one time. Therefore, it's easy for people in this camp (myself included) to "typical mind fallacy" themselves into thinking other people must have had some of these thoughts.
But most self-identified Christians are nominals and not very thoughtful or devout, and even the vast majority of devout Christians think very differently from the sort of theology and history nerd that feels he needs to investigate and systematically either accept or debunk Rome's claims.
Among these more ordinary Protestants, converting to Catholicism (aside from reasons of marriage) is, in my experience, basically unthinkable. And not in the sense that they have an anti-Catholic apologetic in mind. I mean in the sense that they haven't thought about converting to Catholicism any more than they've thought about converting to Shintoism, and it has zero appeal to them. Whatever doubts they have in their faith, they never spend a second of their lives asking, "Could Rome be the One True Church? Have we erred in splintering from her?"
Way back at the height of the Anglican Wars, I used to have some fun playing "Name That Heresy!" when bold and bright young theologians came up with "Hey, guys, have you ever considered that maybe [new thing/new definition/new angle to approach the divinity and humanity of Christ] might help us update to be a modern faith for a modern era?" and nine times out of ten, the Novel New Insight turned out to be an old heresy that had been thrashed by ecumenical councils during the first four centuries or so of the Church.
Ah, back around the time the Episcopal Church elected its first female primate (head of the church) there was a lot of progressive movement around gay rights, including consecrating gay bishops, this was around 2004.
So there had already been a split between the traditional/conservative side and the liberal/progressive side, and this just blew it wide open. Some parishes and dioceses tried to leave TEC (The Episcopal Church) and set up on their own, and there were a lot of bitter lawsuits where the national church sued for the property and the protestors counter-sued.
This also spilled over into the global collection of churches which make up the Anglican Communion, and it became racially-tinged as well; what is called the Global South (think Africa etc.) were traditional and anti-gay bishops, and the progressive element kind of snobbishly said that this was all down to colonialization by whites so they weren't able to think for themselves (there was an infamous remark by a female African-American bishop that the African bishops had been bought off by chicken dinners).
The Lambeth Conference, which is the assembly of all Anglican bishops every ten years, tried to come to some kind of compromise between both sides, pleasing nobody. So the Anglican Wars was the sort of jokey name the more traditional online presence of Episcopalians and Anglicans gave to the whole affair.
3. I agree, but wonder: Jews should be very fine with Islam as an Abrahamitic faith then:
"Jews’ top objections to Christianity: it flirts with polytheism (the Trinity)" check
"that it flirts with idolatry (icons + Michelangelo-esque depictions of God)" check,
"that it says you don’t need to follow the Law." check
Oth, who better to ostracize than those similar. See: the despised Samaritans
(Early observers viewed Islam as another Arianic + half crazy Eastern version of Christianity. And M. did consider Isa/Jesus to be the prophet of prophets. Born by a virgin, talking as a baby, making birds alive from clay toys.) https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Parallelism:_Talking_Baby_Jesus (found when googling for a source, nice wiki to include this.)
Read about the Noahide Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah) for Jewish takes on what non-Jews should do. I think there's certainly a long tradition of Judaism considering Muslims to be righteous gentiles, although I don't know enough about it to have a sense of how settled that issue is.
Didn't Mohammed basically write his own version of the law? His take is certainly more in spirit of Judaism than Christianity, except for the most important part, the lack of proper respect to Jewish traditions and authorities.
In mediaeval times, Jews and Muslims generally had better relations with each other than either had with Christians (admittedly not a very high bar to clear), partly for this reason. The Zionist movement and the subsequent backlash among the Islamic world have kind of ruined this, though.
This is pretty much true to the best of my knowledge, stressing the "not a very high bar" though. Jews did suffer legal discrimination, and where even forced to become Muslim on occasions (less often than in Christian lands). In one such occasion, Maimonides (arguably the greatest of middle-ages rabbies, in terms of both theology and Jewish law) told the Jews of Yeman that they are allowed (and therefore obliged) to choose "converting" to Islam over death, because "the Tora told us to give our lives to avoid idolatry, not to avoid calling some crazy guy prophet" (not a quote, but very close in spirit).
I can attest that the basic attitude is still the same, even by the settler rabbis that I heard - something like "Islamic theology is basically fine, it just happened to be that Mohammed was not a prophet. Could in principle be pretty good allies - suck that they are trying to kill us."
Christianity from the other hand is usually considered basically as bad as vanilla polytheism, with some more tolerance to Protestantism than Catholicism for the obvious reasons - and of course with much baggage that have more to do with history than with theology.
After the Christian authorities in Spain and Portugal expelled the Jews in 1492, many fled to… the Ottoman Empire, which was pretty ecumenical. There was no particular hostility to Jews at that time, at least not in Ottoman controlled areas. I have a colleague whose family lived in Istanbul since about 1500. Regarding antisemitism and the Church, there was some effort on the part of the papacy in the Middle Ages to try to protect the Jews, even as they were ghettoized and vilified by locals, but the serious anti-semitism did not begin in earnest arise until about the 1200s (though the first crusade was brutal). From about 1250 on, things got progressively worse.
I see the point of avoiding idolatry. It tends to get confusing and leads many bad ways. It also can help spiritually (if that word is still allowed). I guess I`ll stay with it, seeing it as another entertaining challenge. Reducing input is a noble but still cowardly way.
Oh, so I`m fucked up. Wait a minute. The second commandment , oh shit. What means "make unto thee"? How could I accomplish avoiding that? If I draw a naked mole or a satellite, am I damned? This commandment is incomprehensible to me. I thought it was about making pictures of god and comic strips didn`t count. I saw idolatry as appreciating some image as the real thing. I don`t see how I could go any other way.
The antagonistic part is me calling the second amendment cowardly. I have to stand to that, I guess. Human brains make ideas. Human perception is predominantly optical. So it gets difficult to get a grip on ideas that are not literally imaginable. Some people can do that more ore less, others can`t. For all human beings, it is some challenge to imagine one almighty god. If pictures and statues of Jesus and Mary help some or even many to anchor their faith, what damage us done? Maybe even pictures and statues of Kali and Pan help to further the One Love. I really don`t know. I know barrenness helps and I know it is not a good way of life.
Some references to add in on #1, on the "origins" aspect —
(1) So far as I know, the most compelling research on the date of Jesus' death in relation to Passover is Helen Bond's essay, “Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination,” New Testament Studies 59.4 (2013): 461–75. Unofficial abstract: "Around there somewhere...."
(2) And as for Hanukkah, I'm puzzled that the connection between its origins and comets is not more widely known. (Maybe it is? But I mean, if planetariums can have things on the gospel of Matthew's "star in the east", why not Hanukkah's comets?) So far as I know, this was proposed by Al Wolters, “Halley’s Comet at a Turning Point in Jewish History,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 55.4 (1993): 687–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43721551 (and in another more technical article of his), then modified by Wayne Horowitz, “Halley’s Comet and Judaean Revolts Revisited,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 58.3 (1996): 456–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43722716.
Rather than replace cinco de mayo, I propose that we just add more hispanic elements to columbus day so that I can eat more delicious food. Heck, I'm not above fomenting competition between the pro-columbus faction and the anti-columbus faction. Whoever makes the best food gets naming rights. American BBQ vs tacos show-down?
Día de la Raza is (AFAIK) not much of a thing outside the US and Mexico, and completely unknown in much of Latin America. It actually strikes lots of Latin Americans (e.g., me) as hugely objectionable, for multiple reasons, once they come into contact with it.
My understanding is that the day was first proposed by a Spaniard as a celebration that would unite Spain and Latin-American countries. The name Día de la Raza caught on in Argentina - where there were dissenting voices from the get-go. For those same reasons, the name was soon phased out in Spain. From Wikipedia:
El propio vocablo hispanidad fue propuesto a fines de los años '20 por Mons. Zacarías de Vizcarra (sacerdote español, residente en Buenos Aires) al periodista Ramiro de Maeztu -por entonces embajador de España en Buenos Aires-, ya que consideraba «poco feliz y algo impropia» la denominación Día de la Raza. El nuevo nombre fue paulatinamente reemplazando al antiguo en España, hasta que el 10 de enero de 1958 es oficializado por decreto de la Presidencia del Gobierno.
The name was eventually abandoned in Argentina as well, but only much, much later.
As to why the name Día de la Raza has been kept in México, and (even more so?) by Mexican-American organizations - that is something I have never been able to completely understand. I had thought of something related to Scott's explanation - namely, that there is a bleed-over from the early-20th century notion of *La raza cósmica* (the blending of European, Amerindian, Black African and Asian races to create a blended Latin-American super-race, implied to be better than the others to the point of taking humanity beyond the limiting concept of race). It would be good to know how much reality there is to this. At any rate, this particular use of "raza" is, again, particular to México, where the originator of the phrase "raza cósmica" was from.
Growing up (in México), I remember it being known as "Día del descubrimiento de América." I do remember hearing the term Día de la Raza, but if you had asked me yesterday, I wouldn't have said that it was the same day. Either way, I would not have considered it a major holiday.
Who knows what they do nowadays though. Per Wikipedia, the current president changed the official denomination to "Día de la Nación Pluricultural" a few years ago, which just sounds very stupid to me.
Yeah because la raza = Mexican in the US and Mexico.
José Vasconcelos "La Raza Cósmica," or "The Cosmic Race," (1925)
Consider also, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, José Carlos Mariátegui (1928)
It is no coincidence that the 20s are when Catholic Notre Dame students are battling the Klan in South Bend Indiana and Italian Americans are battling the Klan in Niles Ohio.
WWI was the beginning of the end of colonialism - Ukraine's eventually defeat of Russia will mark the end.
Eugenics and white supremacy and nazi mythology and fascism were the backlash against multi cultural pluralism and competencies made obvious by the formation of newly forming ideas identity and cultural which are persistent evolutionary feature of solidarity and subsidiarity of the human reality.
Contrary to Marx's claims of a historical march to the elimination of ethnicity and contrary to fascist claims of purity of a people bundled together as a "nation", the Colombian exchange and immigration of people to the US revealed an ongoing and persistent creation and recreation of cultural meaning.
Scott made a very limited claim about the English etymology of Easter in a list of larger claims about the *origin* of holidays. People have thus been arguing about the origin of Easter, which wasn't part of the strictly limited claim made.
Seems like the crux is between people talking about Easter, and people talking about "Easter". I don't think anyone disputes that Eostre has nothing to do with Pascha, but the pagan angle is focused on why Pascha is sometimes called "Easter" and involves rabbit iconography.
My personal experience was that the eggs and rabbits stuff was not really connect with the religious holiday very directly. As an American Catholic, I remember getting ash on my forehead, lent, palm procession, etc, no rabbits or eggs for any of that stuff. Then we would also go out to a park somewhere and do an egg hunt, but at least from what I remember it was more like, a wedding and then the wedding reception.
Oh, when some of the rabid Protestant anti-Catholics got going, they dragged in everything. I think the winner is still Alexander Hyslop and "The Two Babylons" which I think is where the "Easter = Ishtar" stuff comes from:
"The Two Babylons heavily relies on Austen Henry Layard's publications of his excavations at Nineveh, which had only been just discovered in 1851. This gave his work an appearance of being well-researched at the time of its publication. For example, Hislop linked the name of Easter with Astarte, the Phoenician fertility goddess by citing Layard's recent discovery of Astarte's Assyrian name, Ishtar, which Hislop took to be "identical" to Easter.
What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name. It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name, as pronounced by the people Nineveh, was evidently identical with that now in common use in this country. That name, as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar.
— Hislop, The Two Babylons, Chapter 3, Section 2, Easter"
Opening the way for Cortez very likely wasn't a bad thing - the Aztecs were just overwhelmingly godawful and having them taken down _even by the Spanish_ was a good thing. Quoting 'Cryptonomicon':
*
"The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves." [...] "You know what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"
Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. "Something unspeakable?"
"I hate that word ‘unspeakable.’ We must speak of it."
"Speak then."
"The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."
"Why?"
"Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don’t know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that’s why."
"Don’t tell me you’re about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."
"As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there."
I go back and forth about this, personally. Some of the descriptions of Aztec mass sacrifice have to have been exaggerated (it wouldn't have been physically possible to kill captives that fast without 20th-century technology), and I recall at least one estimate that overall violence in the aztec/nahua sphere was actually pretty low compared with most bronze-age societies (maybe twice as high as under the roman empire, rather than 10 or 20 times, which would be more typical.)
The Aztec system of slavery was also relatively humane, and their medicine and sanitation was arguably more effective than what was typical among Europeans at the time, despite the latter having more expertise in construction and a long tradition of classical medical sources to draw on. I don't know if all that compensates for infant sacrifices regularly being ritually drowned to appease the God of Rain, but it doesn't count for nothing either.
Ursula K. Le Guin once shared a tidbit of her creative process. The name Omelas was inspired by catching a glimpse of a highway sign for Salem O(regon) in her rear view mirror.
If you want to reject "lesser of two evils" arguments entirely, go ahead, but then you can't make the argument in favour of the Spanish conquest being an improvement either.
Sure I can. I'm not a utilitarian. I believe human self-determination and dignity lie far above mere medicine and sanitation, and a judgment that would tolerate a single child being deliberately sacrificed in exchange for arbitrarily high levels of medicine and sanitation is to me horrific.
That's why I think the vast slaughter at Gettysburg was worth it, because the stain of enslaving even one family is greater than any amount of genteel plantation culture, or dignified and improved political traditions.
If the conquistadors had had a policy of deliberate child sacrifice I might have to think a little bit about which I prefer. As it is, the choice is trivially easy.
Setting aside that the Spanish were A-OK with burning heretics alive- you can debate the scale of this practice relative to Aztec ritual sacrifice, but if EVEN ONE SACRIFICE IS TOO MANY then it doesn't matter- there were also tens of thousands of indigenous Mexicans 'sacrificed' to a higher cause during the Spanish conquests, simply because war has casualties and a lot of the women got raped. That didn't get imposed on them as a function of 'human self-determination and dignity'.
If you're not willing to make some kind of utilitarian argument based on long-term benefits and the needs of the many, how do you even begin to argue this was ultimately for the best?
Burning a heretic is punishment for a crime. It may well be a crime we think is ludicrous or imaginary -- although the behavior of the "cancel" enthusiasts these days makes me wonder a little about that -- but there's zero doubt that the culture of the time thought it was a crime, and a grave one at that. There is no reasonable comparison between judicial punishment and the sacrifice of the innocent, and it's kind of shockingly careless that you would make it.
Similarly, deaths through military conflict are either those of active participants (if they're soldiers), or are at least usually unintended (barring the Russians these days). Again, making the comparison to the deliberate sacrifice of the innocent is to diminish the exercise of ethical judgement to a ludicrously cramped endpoint, where *all* you care about is the mere number of violent deaths, and not a particle for how or why they came about. It's a familiar form of the crassest caricature of utilitarianism, which is one reason the philosophy reeks, but I wouldn't expect someone defending the philosophy to employ it.
I certainly don't have space here to point you towards alternatives in ethics that consist of a smidge more than counting up the negative utils of suffering, but surely you are aware they exist? So hopefully your question of how on Earth one could make ethical judgments in any other way was merely rhetorical.
The Rwandan genocide didn't technically have pre-20th century technology, but they managed to kill a lot of people with simple cutting implements. The Khmer Rouge did as well to save on bullets.
Basically no medicine was effective back then, you were better off avoiding it.
Yeah, but we're talking about reports of hundreds of thousands of people supposedly being killed over a 5-day period at the single location of Tenochtitlan's Huey Teocalli, not over an entire country over a period of weeks.
EDIT: (Sorry- the actually figure is 80,000 people being sacrificed over a 4-day period, but I think the argument still holds.)
Ghengis Khan's armies allegedly did huge numbers quickly by the simple expedient of just assigning each warrior an equivalent allotment of prisoners to kill.
I hate to be pedantic, but again, that's not quite what's described. The Great Temple/Huey Teocalli is (was) a large structure but not city-sized. You'd have space on top for maybe a dozen altars, and the prisoners don't just have to be killed, but brought up the steps, drugged, bent over backwards, have their chest cavity cracked open to remove the heart and the body and blood thrown down the steps for consumption by the masses while the heart was (I think) burned as an offering to Huitzilopochtli.
That's a relatively time-consuming and physically strenuous operation, even if you had a queue going up the steps. To get through 100,000 prisoners in 5 days you'd have to process 1 sacrifice every 4 seconds or so, if I'm getting the math right. Not to mention that the entire population of Tenochtitlan was somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 people, so just *storing* that many captives would put a huge strain on available living space.
It's more plausible that that many prisoners might have been sacrificed across the empire as a whole to commemorate a notable occasion (e.g, the reconsecration of the Huey Teocalli), but almost certainly not at that single location at a single time.
Or a certain number of important captives were sacrified with full ritual, accompanied by tens of thousands of lesser supporting sacrifices at subsidiary altars, holding pens, etc., possibly even ditching the heart-removal bit. There's any number of ways this could have happened and have the casualty count be more or less accurate.
About anti-holidays, it seems to be consensus. It's rather amusing that Christians (presumably) call others midwits. I think this space got rather too tolerant of this nonsense.
> Slavic Paganism was officially abandoned in Poland in 966, when Mieszko I, the first historical Prince of Poland was baptised, and with him, the whole country. It did not disappear overnight, however. In fact, for many years pagans doggedly resisted conversion, even leading to so called Pagan Reaction – a series of pagan uprisings that highly destabilised Poland and was one of the reasons Mieszko II had to flee the country in 1031. It also culminated in a huge peasant uprising in 1038, against both their overlords and the Christian faith.
> It seems the Slavic faithful were not so easily converted to Christianity. As late as the 12th century, most of the peasants on Polish lands were still Native Faith believers. The Slavic faith was rooted out only as late as the 15th century, but that’s still only the official, ceremonial part. Many of the traditions and beliefs are still here today in slightly adapted forms. For example, drowning an effigy of Marzanna – to drive back winter and summon spring – dates back to Slavic faith, while Zaduszki, the Polish All Saints’ Day, supplanted the older Slavic Forefathers’ Eve. It is mainly because these religious practices were so deeply rooted in tradition and rituals that they can be recovered and re-popularised today.
Or from the Wiki:
Christmas Eve is rife with superstitions allegedly possessing extraordinary powers, usually originating in ancient local pagan beliefs.
> Back in the 19th century, it was believed that during the Christmas Eve supper one could see a person who had died in the current year - just go out into the hallway and look into the room through the keyhole, and one would see him sitting together with others.
> Until recently, it was believed that the souls of the dead appeared at the Christmas Eve supper. There is even a free place left at the table for such a "visitor from the afterlife" - a custom that has presumably survived to this day as a free place left for an unexpected visitor.
(I've always wondered if it ever happens; I mean someone homeless trying to take advantage of this custom and someone actually letting them in.)
> It was also superstitiously believed that disrespecting the sacred evening could cause various misfortunes. To this day, people are cautioned not to quarrel on Christmas Eve and to show kindness to one another. One of the superstitions of Christmas Eve states that on Christmas Eve night you can hear animals speaking with a human voice.
Or from the Wiki on Christianisation:
> Christianization - the process of displacement of ethnic religions by the Christian religion. Its greatest intensity occurred during the Middle Ages, and was caused by the dominance of Christianity among the European rulers of the time and the growing influence of the papacy.
> All signs of native faith, were completely replaced by Christian symbols - in the place of sacred groves and temples, churches were erected; on the days when religious festivals were celebrated (such as Celtic Samhain or Slavic Dziady), various kinds of church holidays were established (All Saints). In this way, a gradual process of abandoning earlier beliefs took place, de facto changing only the names and forms of the celebrations. Local deities were replaced by the worship of saints, and images of the gods were usually transformed into icons, so that in the early Middle Ages, most images depicting Jesus were identical to earlier depictions of Zeus and gods from the local pantheon.
> Secular rulers called upon the assistance of, among others, knightly orders to give them military support against non-Christian peoples.
" while Zaduszki, the Polish All Saints’ Day, supplanted the older Slavic Forefathers’ Eve"
There may be slight confusion there - looking it up, Zaduszki is celebrated on 2nd November, All Souls' Day, which aligns with the rest of the church calendar everywhere. There may be an argument for "this replaced a pagan holiday" but I think the stronger argument is "pagan traditions carried on, retrofitted for the new holiday". The same with Hallowe'en in Ireland, which is where we the tiresome "X is really a pagan holiday" arguments from - there was a Christian memorial feast for the departed souls, it was in May, got shifted to November - but not because 'ooh we must copy the pagans'.
I don't like how we are trying to group into anti-holiday both merging/repurposing local traditions/nearby holidays and active opposition to an existing tradition.
Those seem to be very different things and I really don't think the former is what is being done for Columbus Day.
I'm not saying that neither version doesn't exist or that some have aspects of both, but not for the base example.
"loads of 'traditions' which are commonly thought to be Christian, despite being pagan" seems to be an ongoing way of connectingvtraditions with catholic faith, which I accept. In my postgrad studies, there was a Nigerian catholic priest talking about the conciliation of local demon beliefs into christianity. It can be done and it doesn`t have to be a crime. There is a weight to carry and lots of ways to fail.
"When I lived in Ireland I was creeped out by things like the May Bank Holiday. It felt too much like I was living in a dystopia. “Worker #4113, you and the rest of North West City get the May Bank Holiday off from your job at Nutrient Factory 87”. If you tried to pull that in America, we would revolt. "
August Bank Holiday does give us one of the few jokes I remember from The Goodies, a Python-adjacent British comedy from that same era: a trip to August Bank Holiday Island, which is halfway between Easter Island and Christmas Island.
There are complications and stumbling blocks, because while the August Bank Holiday was created in 1871, behind it lurks the shadow of an older, religious festival: Lammastide.
While this is called Anglo-Saxon "Lammas Day (Anglo-Saxon hlaf-mas, "loaf-mass"), also known as Loaf Mass Day...It is a festival in the liturgical calendar to mark the blessing of the First Fruits of harvest, with a loaf of bread being brought to the church for this purpose", there is also an Irish festival of Lughnasadh/Lúnasa, named after the god Lugh, a solar deity:
So May 1st is the inheritor of May Day, and June Bank Holiday of Midsummer/St John's Eve, and August Bank Holiday of Lúnasa/Lammas. American holidays, by contrast, are all fresh-faced and new and bare, with no ancestry, if they're not the traditional ones carried over with the immigrants and established like Christmas and Easter and Hallowe'en. Thanksgiving is one of the new ones that is organic, and I always think that there's the slight hint of the ghost of Harvest Festival hanging around it, even if the Puritans were much more stripped-down with the calendar and had cleared off the old Catholic/Christian festivals from it:
I was surprised by the claim anyway. College students in the United States love "Spring Break", which seems just as bland and flavorless as "May Holiday" if you're not used to it.
(And I write this while I'm away from Texas A&M on "Fall Break", which is a new break they created this year that happens to fall on the second Monday in October, without any obvious mention of the people who inhabited or discovered a continent.)
The astronomical winter solstice was actually a few days before December 25th. And perhaps it had to be? If you see the sun as a deity, perhaps you are not absolutely, 100 percent, sure that it will recover once more from its lowest path, despite its „unbeaten“ record („Sol Invictus“). And if it failed to recover, that would obviously be catastrophic. So perhaps wait to get confirmation before celebrating the solstice.
Yes, I'm not so sure any more. Then again, Carl Pham below now also says "the actual solstice would have fallen on December 22 or 23 of the Julian Calendar". Do you have a source (if you disagree)?
My own source had been "Temples and Priests of Sol in the City of Rome", Steven Hijmans, 2010. On page 390 it says (in footnote 45): "We should also bear in mind that instead of calculating the real winter solstice, imperial practice was simply to identify, incorrectly, December 25th as such". And from page 393: "But what, then, of Julian's claim that the winter solstice festival was as old as Numa? [....] his explanation for the date --- a few days after the astronomical solstice --- is hopelessly convoluted and clearly fabricated, as it would not make any sense in the calendar of Numa's day". So I just thought that in Emperor Julian's own day (4th century) the festival, on December 25th, took place a few days after the astronomical solstice. Admittedly, on closer look it doesn't strictly follow.
On the contrary, the Julian calendar adds (from our POV) 3 surplus days every 4 centuries, so its equinoxes (and solstices) drift earlier. Per Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Transition_history "By the time of the reform in 1582, the date of the vernal equinox had shifted about 10 days, from about March 21 at the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325, to about March 11." So by the 4th century, the equinoxes were where they are now (by design of the new calendar), but at the time the Julian calendar started (and still when Jesus lived and died), they would have been approximately on 25th.
I think the Romans intended the equinoxes to fall on 25th (hence why Hippolytus and others thought they did) and (subject to the implementation problems mentioned below) the Julian calendar gave approximate effect to this. The drift is of course actually continuous rather than occurring specifically on the leap days omitted in the Gregorian system, so there would be some small drift by (say) 33 CE, but less than a whole day.
By the time of Nicea the equinoxes had drifted to 21st, so the Easter date calculation assumes they're there. By 1582 they'd drifted to 11th. At that point the calender would fixed so they would always be on the date assumed by Nicea.
The drift starts the moment the calendar is initialized. But in any event the Julian calendar was not implemented correctly by Roman pontifexes between 46 BC and 8 BC (see the reference I gave below). Augustus fixed things up by omitting all intercalaries for the next 16 years, so that presumably everything was back in approximate astromomical agreement by AD 8.
The (correctly implemented) Julian calendar drifts forward by 1 day every 128 years (which is what eventually prompted the Gregorian reform), and between 8 AD and the earliest known celebration of Christmas (AD 336) there are 328 years, so the calendar would have drifted earlier by 328/128 = 2.6 days. Hence assuming the solstice was correctly on the 25nd in AD 8 it would have fallen on the 22nd or 23rd in AD 336.
The biggest problem with the "I'm glad [event] happened, because that led to . . . me existing" is that it means celebrating pretty much everything, no matter how horrible, that ever happened more than a few weeks before your own conception.
No, seriously. The first thing you have is the Butterfly Effect on weather, and then you have the fact that spermatozoa are highly sensitive to environmental conditions. Between them, pretty much everyone conceived more than a few weeks after an event would have never existed had the event happened differently. In the very short run most of the result is replacement by siblings ("one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed", to quote Lois McMaster Bujold), but then the consequences cascade from there.
The flip side is this also means that any crimes committed against anyone substantially before your conception did not actually hurt you, because without those crimes, you would never have existed. If you think your existence is an injury, the cure is within your own power; if it is not, you clearly were not injured by the but-for cause of your existence.
Sure, the damp-out level is probably a bit higher than butterfly wings qua butterfly wings, based on modern weather model research on thermodynamic thresholds.
But for anything big enough to be a matter of historical debate? The Nagasaki detonation was certainly big enough to beat the threshold on any modern Lorenz model. Further, it directly affected any number of human actions (which cumulatively could easily have affected the weather in turn), and any weather changes affected human behavior (which then affected weather and human actions) and so on. The version of this world where the Nagasaki bombing didn't happen (or it was dropped elsewhere) is filled with the otherwise-unborn siblings and cousins of the people in this one, except for a 3% or so continuity from people conceived before it (assuming they didn't get killed off in a different history).
> if I stopped WWI how that would affect births in Argentina. Europe would be totally different population though.
People read the newspaper less -> move around through physical space at slightly different rates -> different sperm makes its way into the vagina when somebody gets conceived in 1915.
Remember, every time you nut, tens of millions of sperm are in competition to actually be the one that conceives. And sperm are short lived. Virtually anything that adjusts behavior even at a level that humans would not perceive (e.g. you take two seconds longer to reach your destination), will probably have knock-on effects on which sperm wins the conception lottery.
I think that even moving a speck of dust on Mars a few weeks before your conception would totally change "your" genetics. Weather is not required to explain why.
If you change the trajectory of a billiard ball by 1 degree before it hits another, the trajectories after the collision are changed by 2 degrees. This effect escalates exponentially. So a tiny perturbation becomes completely random rather quickly. And everything is coupled very weakly by gravity! So after a speed of light delay and a modest number of interactions, all chaotic thermal systems will be "re-randomized" by any displacement of any mass.
I am pretty sure that the molecular scale operations in the formation of haploid gametes are heavily affected by thermal noise, and I expect that the movement of sperm is to at least some degree.
Quantum effects are significant on this scale, but to my knowledge they don't do anything to "damp" such changes relative to a classical model.
Strangely enough, it's the chaotic behavior of many-particle dynamics (which you're describing with the billiard ball example) that is thought to produce the thermodynamic stability of large systems, which is why tiny events (like the speck of dust on Mars) end up having essentially no effect far away. What happens is that the chaos causes complex dynamical systems to rapidly evolve to a thermodynamic end point (if one exists, and for a few very unusual systems it does not), at which point its behavior is entirely predictable from a surprisingly few thermodynamic variables (e.g. temperature, pressure, total mass), and where the behavior of the system after a perturbation becomes highly stereotyped and predictable (more or less Le Chatelier's Principle).
So what we almost always observe is that complex physical systems are at their thermodynamic endpoints, and are extremely resistant to change, and exhibit "restoring forces" that push them back to that equilibrium in response to any perturbation. And ironically it's the fact that the underlying dynamics are so chaotic that drives them to that endpoint so quickly.
There is also a strange and wonderful theorem, due to Poincare, that says these endpoints are not, in fact, real endpoints, and that any closed finite dynamical system must return to any arbitrary state after some non-infinite time. So the endpoints aren't actually endpoints, they are merely states that occupy some very large fraction of the overall cycle. (The overall cycle time for even very small systems is many, many times greater than the lifetime of the Universe, so this distinction is entirely theoretical.)
Let's say you have a body temperature container of water. As thermodynamically stable as anything can be. Moving a dust speck on Mars won't cause anything visible to happen, but it will still affect every individual water molecule drastically. Their motion is not individually predictable even though the distribution of energies is. A piece of DNA floating in the water is of a scale where the impacts of individual water molecules matter; its position in the container will be sensitive to initial conditions. I feel like the extension to real biochemistry is tedious but clear.
Well, no, it wouldn't. First of all, it's too far away. Inverse square law and all that. But let's make it a dust speck that falls right on top of the water. What happens? Certainly the motions of the first 10,000 water molecules it hits *are* significantly changed. And if this was a very weakly coupled system, so that chaos was mild, then that might persist for a while -- your imagination of the billiard balls caroming around in an unpredictable way.
But it's not, it's a strongly coupled system with a practically infinite (10^23) number of degrees of freedom, like most systems in equilibrium, and what happens is those 10,000 water molecules rapidly and repeatedly collide with the 10^23 water molecules all around them, and the original impulse from the dust particle is extremely rapidly distributed into random heat. Within an extremely short time all 10,000 revert to exactly the same distribution of velocities as they had originally, and you cannot tell that they were disturbed at all. And this happens *because* of the rapid chaotic dynamics, which "decohere" the original impulse, and cause the system to revert to the state of thermal equilibrium it was in. A piece of DNA floating in the water will experience no unusual perturbation at all provided it wasn't actually within nanometers of the impact point.
Indeed, that this is true is the heart of why computer simulation of complex systems (like solvated DNA) are even possible (and the subject was debated fiercely in the 50s when the method was first invented). If the outcome was that sensitive to initial conditions, then computer simulation would be inherently worthless, because the accumulated roundoff error in doing "only" 16 (or later 32 and 64) bit math would mean that the real trajectories would deviate from the calculated trajectories so quickly that the outcome would be absurdly wrong.
But that's not how it works. It turns out almost nothing is affected other than single-particle trajectories, on which not even the outcome of biochemical reactions depends. (There are some exceptions for calculating certain thermodynamic properties I'm eliding here because they don't matter for this issue. Also, chaotic dynamics matter very much when you're looking at weakly coupled few-particle systems, e.g. trying to predict the position of the planets over a billion years is a notoriously difficult problem.)
What you are claiming is that random number generators (like a lottery machine, or say crossover) are predictable not just in their ensemble statistics but in detail, and that is wrong. "Random heat" does impact brownian motion. Simulations can predict (sample and integrate) the *distribution* of outcomes of a system like this, not the exact outcome in any given situation. For some properties of the system (like the distribution of energies of water molecules) the outcome will be insensitive to perturbations (otherwise the world would not be predictable at all). For others (where does a random walk take the bit of dna exactly) it won't be a narrow distribution and the exact sample within that distribution will depend on even the (merely quadratically tiny) gravitational effect of a faraway object.
"celebrating pretty much everything" is a way of life some people I met have tried. It doesn`t work out. You need a base of everyday efforts to enjoy a holiday fully. The time and place of proper celebrations depends on the social circle. To get millions of people together for some celebration can`t easily be fabricated. But if a lot of people, who seem to be no threat to you, celebrate together something you don`t really care about and are ok with you joining in, you can have a good time and learn stuff.
On the importance and reasons for intense conflict over seemingly abstruse points of theological debate, I like the argument which I think I've stolen from Gibbon (though I can't immediately find it in Decline and Fall) - that it's generally the case that these debates are used as shibboleths, to divide people into us and them, and that for the division to separate out everyone you already wanted (for other, non-theological reasons) to persecute/ostracise/attack, while keeping everyone else on your side, it often needs to be quite weird. So if, for example, you were the ruler of France and you wanted to be able to seize the property of every German and Spaniard within France, the easiest way to do it would be to brand them as heretics; but the precise nature of the heresy you chose, which would have to be something that was believed by every German and Spaniard with property in France, but by as few other people as possible, would almost certainly look very strange.
You could argue that this wouldn't work, because the Germans and Spaniards you were targeting would just turn round and say "actually we don't care about this weird point of theology and we'll agree to your interpretation rather than fight over it", and I think Gibbon says (though again, I can't immediately find it) that this did happen - campaigns against heresies would get started and then collapse when it turned out that the people who you wanted to target were prepared to agree with you. Then, despite this supposedly vital theological dispute being sorted out, shortly afterwards another, equally vital theological dispute would restart, which curiously seemed to separate out a similar group of people as potential heretics, even if the actual point of dispute was different.
To be clear, the argument isn't that these abstruse theological debates were invented by machiavellian rulers - but that in a world in which these debates existed, a lot of people genuinely cared about them, and at least a few people united by other characteristics were prepared to die rather than recant a belief that they shared (though not necessarily one that most people united by those characteristics shared - so ten Gothic Arian bishops determined to hold onto their Arian beliefs could be crucial to the persecution of hundreds of thousands of Goths who didn't give a damn about Arianism), then these bizarre disputes became very useful tools for people with power to use in getting what they wanted.
And it could be an iterated process - people struggling for power trying to build coalitions by using complex theology to create and define the identity of their group and of other groups, each power base defining itself in response to the position of other power bases, until you've got multiple systems of belief of byzantine complexity, seemingly of overwhelming importance to those holding them, which then mysteriously disappear a few years later - or are superseded by the same people holding diametrically opposed beliefs with an equal fervour.
I found the Chesterton quote from Deiseach about 'the trinity is a miniaturised holy family and God can't be Love otherwise' to be interesting, albeit effectively polytheistic. But I could see the badge-of-membership explanation being quite plausible as well.
Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican Pizza for this October elides the Hispanic dia del la raza and Italian Americans as well as a full dose of consumeristic holiday cooption.
If the holiday were renamed Mexican Pizza Day would the competing HIPD be a thing? Would there be clamoring for Fry Bread day?
Is the process of the evolution of "holidays" primarily a substitution mechanism (implying a zero sum game - there is a limit to the number of holidays)?
Another point in favor of the Great New Holiday of Mexican Pizza Day must certainly be the overwhelming popularity of the Mexican Pizza among immigrants to the land Columbus discovered from the land Columbus thought he discovered.
"When I lived in Ireland I was creeped out by things like the May Bank Holiday. It felt too much like I was living in a dystopia. “Worker #4113, you and the rest of North West City get the May Bank Holiday off from your job at Nutrient Factory 87”. If you tried to pull that in America, we would revolt."
Well, this is because we are *not* American. The May bank holiday (and the rest of them below, we are getting a new one in February for 2023):
1 Jan Sun New Year's Day
6 Feb Mon St Brigid’s Day (note: St Bridget's Day is 1st February, but they switched this to Monday because they are trying to make every bank holiday fall on Monday for the long weekend, and for convenience - first Monday of the month is the same every year)
17 Mar Fri Saint Patrick's Day
10 Apr Mon Easter Monday
1 May Mon May Day
5 Jun Mon June Bank Holiday
7 Aug Mon August Bank Holiday
30 Oct Mon October Bank Holiday
25 Dec Mon Christmas Day
26 Dec Tue St Stephen's Day
Okay, the May bank holiday comes from May Day, which was being celebrated thousands of years ago, so if this is a dystopia, it's lasted a long time: "Fenian #4113, you and the rest of North West Troupe get the May Bank Holiday off from your job hunting deer, wandering the length and breadth of Ireland, and fighting off the Vikings":
"it really is suspicious that some unrelated method just happened to"
Welcome to the conspiracist fold! Refreshments are over on the long table, there's decaf and leaded over on the side.
Sorry, but that deserves a jab. It is the language, more or less, that we've become accustomed to seeing online. Note that I'm not saying that you are wrong (I'm agnostic on the how's and why's behind Christmas because I just don't give a damn), just that this immediately pinged my radar for tinfoil hats.
It's worth bearing in mind, too, that there were an awful lot of pagan cults throughout the ancient world with an awful lot of festivals between them, so no matter when the Christians decided to celebrate Christmas, you'd be able to find some pagan festival somewhere or other celebrated at around the same time.
"But December 25 was literally the winter solstice on the Roman calendar (today the solstice is December 21st), and it really is suspicious that some unrelated method just happened to land on the most astronomically significant day of the year."
Eh. I don't get the impression the Romans were especially careful about the correspondence between their calendar and actual astronomical events[1,2], and I also don't think the winter solstice is the most astronomically significant day of the year unless you're a primitive and still think the Sun might not come back if you don't sacrifice a goat. (The Romans were not primitive.)
The vernal equinox is probably the most important of the astronomical quarter days, since it marks the start of the planting season. There's a good reason the year tended in most ancient cultures to start near the equinox. The second most important is probably the autumnal equinox, which marks the harvest. Solstices are interesting, but probably of tertiary importance because they don't mark anything important in the agricultural cycle of the Mediterranean year. You can keep track of them if you're a nerd, but they're basically just halfway points between the two most important events of the year, planting and harvest.
[2] Also note by the time of Constantine adopting the chi rho at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, around the time Christmas supposedly began to be celebrated, the actual solstice would have fallen on December 22 or 23 of the Julian Calendar.
Regarding the dating of Christmas, to quote the 1903 Catholic Encyclopaedia (handily online for all your theological conundrum needs!)
"But Lupi has shown (Zaccaria, Dissertazioni ecc. del p. A.M. Lupi, Faenza, 1785, p. 219) that there is no month in the year to which respectable authorities have not assigned Christ's birth. "
There seems to have been a tendency to set it sometime in the spring:
"The first evidence of the feast is from Egypt. About A.D. 200, Clement of Alexandria (Stromata I.21) says that certain Egyptian theologians "over curiously" assign, not the year alone, but the day of Christ's birth, placing it on 25 Pachon (20 May) in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus. [Ideler (Chron., II, 397, n.) thought they did this believing that the ninth month, in which Christ was born, was the ninth of their own calendar.] Others reached the date of 24 or 25 Pharmuthi (19 or 20 April). With Clement's evidence may be mentioned the "De paschæ computus", written in 243 and falsely ascribed to Cyprian (P.L., IV, 963 sqq.), which places Christ's birth on 28 March, because on that day the material sun was created."
But also that around the date of what would become Epiphany was popular:
"Clement, however, also tells us that the Basilidians celebrated the Epiphany, and with it, probably, the Nativity, on 15 or 11 Tybi (10 or 6 January). At any rate this double commemoration became popular, partly because the apparition to the shepherds was considered as one manifestation of Christ's glory, and was added to the greater manifestations celebrated on 6 January".
However:
"In Cappadocia, Gregory of Nyssa's sermons on St. Basil (who died before 1 January, 379) and the two following, preached on St. Stephen's feast (P.G., XLVI, 788; cf, 701, 721), prove that in 380 the 25th December was already celebrated there, unless, following Usener's too ingenious arguments (Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, Bonn, 1889, 247-250), one were to place those sermons in 383. Also, Asterius of Amaseia (fifth century) and Amphilochius of Iconium (contemporary of Basil and Gregory) show that in their dioceses both the feasts of Epiphany and Nativity were separate (P.G., XL, 337 XXXIX, 36)."
The Catholic Encyclopedia is generally a good resource, but its entry for Usury is hopelessly muddled, to the point that I'm reluctant to trust it on other topics that I cannot independently verify.
Of course, this makes me just want to use the CE to look up "usury". That it would be muddled would be entirely expectable to me, because we have lost our way on usury.
It reminds that I've always wanted to investigate further the parable figure who buries loot in land and didn't get a return. Is it a commentary on laziness and not using gifts/talents/wealth to make more or is it really an anti-rent seeking commentary (the hiding of wealth in land) which Georgists and land value taxers should seize upon.
A lot of the comments, and some of the post itself, strike me as having a weirdly mechanistic and linear approach to history, like all these things happen as a result of intentional decisions and are monocausal, and that's it. That's often a useful metaphor, e.g. for evolution as well as history, but we should be careful when it breaks down.
The idea that Easter 'comes from' any of the other holidays doesn't really make sense. I think a better way to think of it is that people in places with the appropriate seasons will generally have some kind of major celebration on the Vernal Equinox and the two Solstices, and these need some kind of religious flavour. When the dominant religious flavour changes, the festivals get rebranded, but some mixture of the old and the new stays. Whether the specific etymology of 'Easter' is correct is kinda irrelevant, probably it had a mix of names until the culture settled on one.
Similarly with Jesus, there seems to be a huge imbalance in the demand for evidence. The common-sense idea (assuming no actual God) that the festivals replaced one another needs to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, while the assumption that the ancient math on Jesus day of birth (if it was recorded!) is otherwise correct by default - why? You have a big festival and a new state religion, you need to reflavour it. Maybe in the case of the Spring fertility festival they were lucky and Jesus really died then, but if he hadn't, maybe we'd be celebrating the feast of Lazarus, he's a fine symbol for rebirth, or something else entirely with a Christian flavour. Doesn't matter, it was gonna be something.
In general, I think trying to trace cultural events like linguistic etymologies has a lot of pitfalls - even in linguistics! - as is obvious in the Santa Claus discussion, where he is kind of a syncretic modern minor deity. And for the record, when I lived in Israel briefly I was told that Hanukkah was an American thing that wasn't considered one of the major holidays, but has gotten steadily more popular due to globalisation.
Yeah but this is a little ahistorical, since if we were educated people any time between AD 400 and 1500 we would be discussing this all in Latin or Greek, and the fact that there was a term for the holy day season in the vulgar floating around in certain barbarian villages, a word that bore a similarity to the vulgar word for "east" and the name of some old pagan goddesses would not cause us to assume some deep connection between Pascha and Gothic forest spirits. We might shrug and wonder briefly why the barbarians chose to translate "paschal season" into that particular word.
I mean, if there *were* such a strong connection, you'd imagine the important name seducing barbarians into the worship of Christ would penetrate right into mainstream Church writing, for the sake of taking real ownership if nothing else, and the *official* name of Easter in the voluminous Church writing on the subject would be however you write the sound "Easter" if you speak medieval Latin. Which it is not.
My point is to remind you that any conclusion that starts from "we speak a Germanic language" has to be confined to either after AD 1500 or to the illiterate class. If either of those conditions do not apply, then the correct starting point is usually "we speak Latin or Greek."
And if Church Latin was rarely influenced by the local language, then it's even harder to credit that Curch *rituals* would be influenced -- even determined by -- local rituals. Conversely, if one wants to imagine that Church rituals were profoundly influenced by local pagan rituals, it seems difficult to imagine that the language of the Church, and only the language, would be unaffected by the importation.
<i>The common-sense idea (assuming no actual God) that the festivals replaced one another needs to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, while the assumption that the ancient math on Jesus day of birth (if it was recorded!) is otherwise correct by default - why?</i>
The original claim was that Christmas (as well as Easter) was deliberately invented, or at least deliberately placed on Dec 25, to supersede an older pagan festival. "Ancient Christians calculated that Jesus was actually born on Dec 25" is a valid piece of counter-evidence, regardless of whether the calculations were correct or not.
It's not a very strong piece of counterevidence; it would be completely normal, then and now, for someone to decide he needed to show that something happened on a particular date and then publish a badly-reasoned paper "showing" that what do you know, it did.
For the specific example here, I would say that far and away the most likely course of events would be, in chronological order:
1. There is a longstanding pagan holiday on the winter solstice.
2. Christians have a holiday there too, because that is holiday time.
3. The Christian holiday gets formalized to the particular calendar date of December 25.
4. Christian scholars attempt to retroactively justify the existing date of Christmas.
There's no evidence of Christians deciding they needed Christmas to fall on December 25. Nor is there strong evidence that the early Church had a particular drive to overlay previous festivals anyway -- at least one Pope tried to excommunicate some other bishops for celebrating Easter on the exact day of the Jewish Passover, for example. Before you claim that calculations of Jesus' birthday were fixed to reach a pre-determined conclusion, you need to show that the conclusion actually was pre-determined.
I'm not sure why one would assume the astronomical quarter days have that much power in the primitive world. I mean, I would guess hunter-gatherer societies would celebrate stuff like the typical day the river unfreezes, or when the game animals return, or depart, or when the fruit of a certain staple tree ripens. I would guess astronomical observations are usually confined to easily noticed things like the phase of the Moon. A more sophisticated agrarian society would probably notice natural events that correspond to the cycle of planting and harvest, e.g. the annual flood of the Nile, or the first frost, and even better if these can be linked to observable astronomical events, like the rising of Sirius in Egypt.
Getting sufficiently sophisticated about long-term timekeeping that you start being able to predict the annual cycle of day length -- with special points that are basically purely mathematical, that have no direct impact on your world at all -- seems pretty abstract and specialized, the kind of thing you start to do when you can afford to have professional astrologers.
No doubt, and if one could point to hundreds, or even dozens, of copies of Stonehenge all across the ancient world, then I could start to believe that the exact timing of the solstice mattered far and wide, instead of meaning as little to the typical peasant farmer as the details of ISO 8601 matter to the person jotting down the date of an appointment today.
Really? Then you should have no difficulty pointing me towards a significant number of references to these many copies of Stonehenge. Being made of stone, they will have survived excellently. Have at it.
Certainly we agree the seasons were essential to Bronze Age man, indeed long before that. Where we disagree is that the date of the solstices would've been much more important to the broad swathe of common men -- you'll note I'm excluding the priests and astrologers, right? -- than the date of the equinoxes, about which I expressed doubt.
The hypothesis that the solstice would be "the most important astronomical event of the year" seems to me to rest on a naive assumption of childish ignorance in the past (which is not untypical of the modern looking backward). I doubt very much that a Bronze Age farmer over the age of 15 would've worried that the day wasn't going to get longer again after the winter solstice, and I doubt he would've been fearfully awaiting proof that it would. "Well, it has every single time for the past 20 years, or 40 years if I believe my Dad, but golly it might not this time!" Don't think so.
He might take note of the solstice with mild interest, as indicating the turning point of winter to some extent, but it wouldn't have been very important to predict the exact date, because there was nothing important to do. (I'm sure the priests might have cared, so they could schedule their celebrations, but once again I am focused on the peasant's concerns.)
By contrast, I think the generic peasant would have been much more interested in having an accurate knowledge of the vernal equinox, which would suggest the time for planting. Of course, he would rely on environmental clues to know exactly when to actually plant, but the virtue of knowing the date of the equinox[1] is that you can compare to environmental clues and be able to know whether you're in an unusually mild or unusually harsh year -- which is very useful indeed to the farmer.
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[1] Or more precisely, since "the date" would not be something he would usually know anyway, knowing whether the equinox was today or in the past or yet to come. He would already know that the cycle of Moon didn't match up sufficiently well to the seasons, so he couldn't use that. And the approiximate date of the equinox is subtle, but not difficult, to deduce from naked eye observation of the skies.
I imagine winter solstice is not about anything happening but about hope. The longest night has been managed, with the rest of our stuff we may all make it to spring.
Technically, many of these holidays aren't timed to the solstice or equinox themselves, but rather to the "cross-quarter days", which are the halfway points between the solstices and equinoxes. (I think Halloween/Samhain and May Day/Beltane are these, but I'm not sure about the ones that would fall in February or August (Wikipedia tells me that these coincide with Candlemas/Groundhog's Day and Lammas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_days)).
> people in places with the appropriate seasons will generally have some kind of major celebration on the Vernal Equinox and the two Solstices
I was interested by the observation that the myth of Persephone is generally felt to have arisen before the Greeks arrived in Greece, on the grounds that, while it is transparently an explanation for the annual pattern of the seasons... Greece doesn't really have the type of seasons depicted in the myth.
In other words, it's not necessary to be in a place with the appropriate seasons in order to have seasonal celebrations.
> Arius had it coming. The practice of punching those supposed church leaders who are his theological descendants should be normalized and celebrated.
Christianity 101: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Unless he disagrees with you about the nature of Jesus, in which case, punch him in the face as Santa Claus hath done.
Did a whole army of Christians descend upon ACX while we weren't looking?
In that case it might be useful to remind them that ha-ha-only-jokes about "punching leaders who lead ... people astray with anti-Biblical nonsense" isn't exactly the best way to get people in the modern free world to look positively on their religion.
Especially when the entire West had to go through the nerve-wracking trauma of half-dumping its own religion of 1000+ years because of how awfully totalitarian it had become.
<i>Especially when the entire West had to go through the nerve-wracking trauma of half-dumping its own religion of 1000+ years because of how awfully totalitarian it had become.</i>
That's propaganda, not reality, as you can tell from the fact that the "enlightened, liberal" secularism which replaced Christianity was far more totalitarian. E.g., the Reign of Terror killed over five times as many people in just under a year than the Spanish Inquisition managed in three and a half centuries.
Ehhh I don't think it's particularly controversial that thinkers in the West had to tread lightly for centuries for fear of being on the wrong side of Christian authorities, and that this was a major causal factor in gradual shift away from religious authority.
Unfortunately, totalitarianism is a big failure mode of human societies, and has surfaced in many other forms too. As far as I am concerned that kind of thing is evil no matter who is in charge. That doesn't make this particular instance of any less evil.
Whether it's controversial or not probably depends on the company you keep. In any event -- which thinkers? Can you name a few? Great minds who suppressed their real thoughts on some issue or other for fear of Church punishment?
I find it pretty surreal to have to give examples, isn't this basically common knowledge? Hasn't at least everybody who even thinks about these things heard of the story of Galileo (17th cent.) and his condemnation by the Church for propagating Copernican heliocentrism?
Just opening a random book of medieval philosophy shows a host of examples. I'm not even talking about later Enlightenment thinkers who were questioning religion altogether - during the long Middle Ages, people routinely got in trouble for espousing intellectual opinions, and most of those were bona fide God-fearing Christians, too. A few random examples of different types and in various centuries:
- Peter Abelard, 12th cent. - condemnation of his teaching, made to burn his own books, sentenced to confinement in a monastery (later revoked)
- Roger Bacon, 13th cent. - forbidden to publish his works for some time, possibly imprisoned
- Thomas Aquinas (!), 13th cent - some theses condemned and banned from teaching by the bishop of Paris
- Boetius of Dacia, 13th cent. - condemned and detained for pushing the "wrong interpretation" of Aristotle
- Marguerite Porete, 13th cent. - condemned and burned at the stake for her spiritual writings
- The entire Cathar movement, 13th cent. - thousands massacred for following a different theology
- William of Ockam, 14th cent. - condemned for some unorthodox ideas, ended up in exile at some point
- Giordano Bruno, 16th cent. - tried for heresy, burned at the stake
- Galileo Galilei, 17th cent. - condemned to house arrest, forced to recant, writings banned
I mean seriously, the point is not to make a long list of grievances, or even less to go into details or argue to and fro about them. This is centuries-old stuff we're talking about. Honestly, at this point I think the Catholic Church herself has produced enough intellectually honest people, better capable of reckoning with the institution's past than your average internet apologist. In any case, people who have had to suppress their real thoughts for fear of Church punishment are not exactly in short supply.
Ah, I see. So you mean *theologians* and particularly those employed by the Church had to consider how the Church would respond to writings *on the Catholic religion*. Yes, that's such a shock, isn't it? Almost as surprising as if the current presidents of the various Federal Reserve branches had to be careful what the Chairman might think about their writings on monetary policy, or whether the President might summarily fire an Executive Branch employee who questioned his mental fitness. (You can certainly argue the 17th century Church took far more vigorous action to dispute theology than the modern world would tolerate, and that is clearly true, but that is hardly unique to the Church as an institution; I daresay if a nobleman in the Court of Louis XIV were to pen a pamphlet suggesting a republic replace the monarchy he might look forward to more than a tut-tut from Versailles.)
Your only representation of a thinker on nonreligious issues appears to be the usual trope of Galileo. So far as I know, Galileo was condemned because he carried his scientfic arguments over to the religious, i.e. he not only said the Earth went around the Sun he went on to assert that the Church could have no useful opinion on matters such as this, and indeed anything outside of faith -- a pretty provocative statement for the time, and probably undertaken because he had a notorious temper and was on the outs with the Pope. That is, my impression was that Galileo was punished by the Church largely because he got in the face of the then Pope and the Church heirarchy for personal reasons. What they did was absurd and wrong, but it represented a lapse of fallible human judgment, not the steady policy of the Church over centuries.
Which is why Galileo remains this unusual example, and why (for example), you won't find the same problem with Newton, Leibniz, Pascal, Davy, Boyle, Hooke, and all the other major thinkers roughly contemporary who explored and wrote on things *other than* religion. If you want to argue the Church made open debate about the principles of Christianity difficult, that's fine, and it may well be true, but to argue it held back human intellectual progress across the board does not follow, and is not accurate.
"Did a whole army of Christians descend upon ACX while we weren't looking?"
Nah, we've been hiding under the beds all this time and only skulked out like the groundhog when the sacred names of Easter and Christmas were invoked.
Another Russian here. Personally, I feel that our New Year celebration is conceptually much better than Christmas celebration in western countries and creates much less troubles.
The clear distinction between secular holiday and religious one helps to avoid both "Christmas loosing its religious meaning" and "Presumably secular state having a clear religious holiday" issues. You are not associating your good childhood memories with religion and you are not either loosing your favourite holiday when you realise that there is no God. Those who want to celebrate Christmas or any other religious holiday can freely do it, but no matter what there is a universal holiday for everyone.
+1, and this is also something that stood out to me reading the original post. I have really quite a lot of warm tradition feelings around New Year's, and I like that it's NOT tied to a religious thing I don't endorse, and at this point if someone tried to get my family to revert to the older Christmas tradition we would revolt out of BOTH the "how dare you mess with our tradition" feeling and the "why would we celebrate a religious thing" feeling. So I guess half a century is enough time to change where people's tradition-feelings point.
(Also, "novy god" just literally means "new year", it isn't specific to any particular way of celebrating, so the characterization of it here feels kind of weird and incorrect.)
Eh, I dropped Christianity decades ago and Christmas is still great, I just consider it a celebration of winter solstice / life prevailing against the winter / hearth and family, much like my pagan ancestors did for millenia.
There's no reason to comply when a foreign culture steals your holidays, just because it happened a long time ago.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'less ideologically diverse'. Russians hold all kind of views, it's just not as politically relevant in the dictatorship compared to propper democracy.
But if you talk to Russian people both those who are really into Christianity and atheists are completely fine with New Year being the main secular holiday and Christmas being a specifically religious one.
I completed my graduate studies in Mariology and the term “mother of god” was granted to Mary by third century writers who co-opted the term from the Egyptian goddess Isis (also a “mother of god”) The Greek term used for both women was “theotokos.” Because the Jewish people believed in only one god, the term theotokos was more problematic than previous mythologies using the same term, hence the Arian debate. More info on all of that if you really want to geek out: http://ellegriffin.com/Mary 🤓
Thanks for such an intellectual discussion and debate. I throughly enjoyed both posts!
I was recently listening to Inkubus Sukkubus' "Wytches Chant" of goddess names (starting with "Isis"), and it occurs to me that adding Mary would have been a good way to piss off both anti-Christian pagans and anti-pagan Christians. H. P. Lovecraft would be disappointed that it didn't include Magna Mater though.
Oh here we go again, Isis = Mary. That's an oldie and a goodie, and while the Alexandrian influence might explain this, as well as the Coptic Church in Egypt adopting iconography, this is just the usual "Christianity was just Paganism given a new coat of paint" stuff. I'm going to leave it up to the Orthodox to fight the Greek speaking corner on this one 😁
I would be very interested where you did your grad studies and who the lecturers were, before we get into any hair-pulling over this one. There's a lot of teaching "well I think this new take and if it sounds kinda Gnostic all the better" as the Real Truth Of How It Happened, and the Isis thing has been going around since at least the 18th century founded in anti-Catholic polemics. That Egyptology was a craze during the 18th century is probably not a coincidence (because nothing is a coincidence).
EDIT: Here's our old friend Alexander Hyslop, who has a lot of closely-printed material on the entire topic:
"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. (see figures 5 and 6) 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 Deoius; 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."
Honestly, the iconographic influence argument seems unimpressive to me. If you want to depict a mother with an infant child, showing her sitting with the child on her lap is one of the most obvious ways of doing so, so it's not surprising that both Mary/Jesus and Isis/Horus pictures should show them in this position.
According to 'The Dawning Moon of the Mind' the virgin (proto- word kind of like Mary but ancient Egyptian hieroglyph) who gives birth without knowing it is the night sky. Dunno what Mariologists think of Susan Brind Morrow.
"Buried in the Egyptian desert some four thousand years ago, the Pyramid Texts are among the world’s oldest poetry. Yet ever since the discovery of these hieroglyphs in 1881, they have been misconstrued by Western Egyptologists as a garbled collection of primitive myths and incantations, relegating to obscurity their radiant fusion of philosophy, scientific inquiry, and religion."
Court de Gébelin rides again? I wish I had a fiver for everyone who rediscovers Lost Mystic Wisdom Of The Ancient East, and that "astonishing parallels to Judeo-Christian culture, Buddhism, and Tantra" are all to be found in the Pyramids. They were doing this in the time of Herodotus, they're still doing it.
"Morrow studied Classics as an undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia University in New York, where she also studied Arabic and worked intensively on hieroglyphic texts for six years as a student of Egyptology."
That does not tell me if she studied Egyptology under a reputable university, or was autodidact in it. A lot of cranks (pardon the term) are and were self-appointed experts in Egyptology. She strikes me as coming more from the arts side than any archaeology training, so this book sounds to me like another "The White Goddess".
She had a puff on the cover from her hieroglyphics teacher, who wrote a standard textbook. 'The Dawning Moon of the Mind' reads like accurate translation with accompanying commentary of damn dirty hippy poetry. When she says the proto-word for 'Mary' started as a word for the night sky, that's translation.
Most girl's names mean 'something pretty'.
'the time of Herodotus' isn't 'the time of Ramses', but Coptics would say Egypt affected them.
Hm, generally etymology of "Mary" is around the element "bitterness", and any Egyptian element seems to be "love", not "night sky" or whatever. Nut is the sky goddess:
"Maryām (מרים). In the New Testament of the Bible, written in Greek, her name is transliterated Mariam (Μαριάμ) or Maria. Several other women in the New Testament, including St. Mary Magdalene, are called by the same name.
In antiquity, it was variously etymologized as "rebellion", "bitter sea", "strong waters", "exalted one", "ruling one", "wished for child", or "beautiful".
St. Jerome (writing c. 390), following Eusebius of Caesarea, translates the name as "drop of the sea" (stilla maris in Latin), from Hebrew מר mar "drop" (cf. Isaias 40:15) and ים yam "sea". This translation was subsequently rendered stella maris ("star of the sea") due to scribal error or as a result of 3rd century vowel shifts, from which comes the Virgin Mary's title Star of the Sea."
Still getting "I am Robert Graves and I know the true unifying principle behind all the world myths" vibes from this one.
No New Testament writers refer to Mary as "mother of god"/theotokos. The title is not attested before the 3rd century (and was formally adopted at the Council of Ephesus in 431).
Ack! You are right about this! The Sub Tuum Praesidium was the first reference to Mary as the mother of god. It was in a Christian hymn found in Egypt and dated to the third century. Editing my comment!
>If we’re celebrating Columbus Day at all, then it has to be because we’re attributing downstream effects to him, in which case he had many downstream effects but these were (hopefully) overwhelmed by the good effects of the US and all other modern New World countries.
Although you also have to apply the Billionaire Replacability logic here; in the counter-factual world, how long would it have taken another country (including the modern American nations made of unconquered natives) to invent vaccines or w/e, and what else of value might we have gotten from those unique cultures surviving to modernity?
Realistically the Columbus-replaceability scenario is that instead of Columbus's voyage in 1492 we get someone else in the decades shortly afterwards, probably Spanish or Portuguese or English.
Then we get the same European powers colonising the Americas on roughly the same timeline. Maybe not in the same geography, so we might get an English-speaking South America and a Spanish-speaking North America separated by a French-speaking Mexico, but history would mostly play out in a similar way.
Maybe, but only decades later is not certain. I think this discussion has overlooked that Columbus was, by all accounts, a brilliant navigator if a very poor governor. His major contribution was expanding Spain’s navigational knowledge.
“ The admiral’s navigational genius showed itself immediately, for they sailed southward to the Canary Islands, off the northwest African mainland, rather than sailing due west to the islands of the Azores. The westerlies prevailing in the Azores had defeated previous attempts to sail to the west, but in the Canaries the three ships could pick up the northeast trade winds; supposedly, they could trust to the westerlies for their return.”
“ Michele de Cuneo, deeply impressed by this unerring return, remarked that “since Genoa was Genoa there was never born a man so well equipped and expert in navigation as the said lord Admiral.”
Though his plan was also based on very bad math. It’s not true that the world being flat was a common belief. Almost the opposite - Columbus estimated the Earth’s circumference was far smaller than commonly believed and therefore a trip across the Atlantic to Asia was possible. If the Americas didn’t exist his crew would have perished in the middle of the ocean. They were already short on supplies by the time they made landfall.
So Columbus was a combination of superb navigational ability and batshit crazy ideology that led him to take a voyage everyone else knew scientifically (Asia being 3x the distance Columbus claimed and the Americas being unknown) didn’t make any sense.
Sure eventually someone else probably would have eventually made the journey. I just wouldn’t sell Columbus short in what is fair to be labeled Europe’s rediscovery of the Americas.
I'm not sure voyages to the north would have plausibly sparked the same level of interest for economic reason, chiefly labor supply.
The typical playbook for colonization practiced at the time was to enter a land, exploit existing power dynamics among the native nobility to gain a foothold in society, and then exploit the local labor. The Spanish would, for example, find an existing population, marry into the non-ruling nobility, incite civil conflict to overthrow the ruling nobility alongside their new allies, and then send the lower class laborers to mine for resources to send back to Spain.
Integrating into and exploiting existing class structure gave the colonizers quick access to local knowledge and allowed them to subjugate the main populous with relatively few men (using their allies to supply the rest needed).
Compare that to North America where settlements were less concentrated and population density was significantly lower. That led to a totally different colonization model eventually being developed (importing slave labor from Africa). Plus the need to build settlements from scratch (not an easy thing to do).
Given an extra 100 years could a similar result have been achieved by starting from modern day Canada? Sure, probably. But I doubt with the same swift eagerness Columbus's voyages ignited.
Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet traveling to India from Portugal the old-fashioned way (well, the eastward way-- it was still pretty new) almost certainly runs into Brazil in 1500 while making a wide turn around Africa, regardless of what Columbus does.
TIL thanks! I’m somewhat surprised ships might end up so far out of their way but it does make sense with the winds pushing them that way. Best argument I’ve seen so far for if it wasn’t Columbus it would have been someone else.
From Wikipedia:
Historians have long argued whether Cabral was Brazil's discoverer, and whether the discovery was accidental or intentional. The first question has been settled by the observation that the few, cursory encounters by explorers before him were barely noticed at the time and contributed nothing to the future development and history of the land which would become Brazil, the sole Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. On the second question, no definite consensus has been formed, and the intentional discovery hypothesis lacks solid proof. Nevertheless, although he was overshadowed by contemporary explorers, historians consider Cabral to be a major figure of the Age of Discovery.
>(including the modern American nations made of unconquered natives) to invent vaccines or w/e
Thousands of years, if not longer (if they remained uncontacted by the outside world). They experienced very little economic development in the thousands of years before colonization and had absolutely none of the intellectual tradition that led to the science that led to vaccines. They would almost certainly have to undergo significant selection for higher IQ before the prospect of an advanced scientific establishment was realistic for uncolonized America.
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they weren't hunter gatherers starting from nothing who used some significant feature of the American environment to suddenly become scientifically advanced. They inherited an European intellectual tradition dating back ultimately thousands of years, and received some of the most competent and intelligent people from Europe to carry out the most important of the work.
Having anything resembling productive scientific practice for the natives (without first undergoing significant selection for intelligence) is an extremely tall order - achieving what European Americans did within this millennium is completely absurd. The only possible way the British not colonizing North America doesn't lead to monumental losses in scientific and technological accomplishments is either if some other advanced European power colonizes North America instead, or if Europeans all went to some other British colony like Australia and that became more or less what the US did (though the enormous the distance Europe and the lack of non-desert land probably significantly limits the extent to which Australia could have developed to be like the US even if they got all the good European immigrants).
When colonization occurred, most of the colonized hunter-gatherer peoples were not experiencing intellectual or economic development. People have this crazy idea that everyone was right on the verge of rapid economic and scientific growth but the colonizing Europeans ruined it all. This has no basis in reality - the most likely long-term outcome for uncontacted hunter-gatherer societies would be to continue on at exactly the same trajectory that had been for thousands of years. The Europeans weren't hunter-gatherers when they started colonizing, they were already people with the intellectual tradition needed for advanced scientific research to develop.
I think you're misreading my quote/the article, the thought experiment was how long would it take the world to get vaccines if an American hadn't invented them first.
The Assyrians empire had been gone for a Millennia when the events of the Maccabees happened. They were fighting the Selucids who were persanised Greeks.
Interestingly Ethiopian Christians have their own version of the books of the Maccabees
The Seleucids are sometimes (especially in old fashioned retellings) called "Syrians", which may be part of the confusion. I'm pretty sure the first children's book I remember reading about the Chanukah story did that.
Possibly because "Seleucid" is a mouthful for a kid and "Greek" or "Macedonian" makes it harder to draw the distinction between them and the Ptolemies, where "Syria" and "Egypt" is clearer. (Though there's no getting around having to write "Antiochus".)
Not endorsing punching, but another issue surrounding Arianism and the doctrine of the Trinity involves the nature of Christian salvation as generally believed back then, and still in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, i.e. theosis. (Drawing heavily on stuff I've read from David Bentley Hart here).
The idea of theosis, that "God became man so that man might become god" involves the idea that when you follow Christ, you can participate in the Divine Nature. So if the Son is created as Arius claimed, the nature you participate in by following Christ is infinitely remote from that of the absolute origin of all good. And if the Holy Spirit by which you participate in the nature of Christ is created, or really anything other than God Himself, it is, again, infinitely remote from the Divine Nature itself and not capable of bridging the gap from humanity to God.
So in order for the thing which Christians thought they meant by salvation (union with God by following Christ) to make any sense, it was necessary that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all be equally divine, and have their essence be identical to that of God. Supposedly that was one of the more important arguments people made for the Trinity in the 4th century theological debates.
Similar considerations required Christ to be "fully God and fully human, two natures without separation or confusion" (the subject of all of those debates about "natures" and "wills" and "energies"), so that the nature which Christ has joined to God really is the same as our nature, and the nature to which he has joined ours really is the Divine Nature, and so those natures really have been joined in Christ without obliterating one or the other. Basically, all of those early theological and christological debates to some extent revolved around the idea of making sure the process of theosis was intelligible.
I could have misstated some of the stuff above, but I think it's in the right general direction.
Something bothers me about the "only tried to find a new route to Asia, so ending up in America instead doesn't count" thing; like, really? it may not fit the exact mission statement but "accidentally finds entirely new rich land" seems like a very successful outcome of an exploration voyage
If some scientist had a crazy theory, and did an experiment that ended up disproving it but also incidentally discovering entirely new physics, I think we would still be pretty impressed.
Agreed. It's notable that Columbus, upon discovering the West Indies, decided to make the rest of his career there. He thought he was a lot closer to China than he was, but he didn't continue sailing around looking for someone who could sell him silk.
His backers in Spain also didn't need to believe it was Asia to start funding dozens of competitors along with his own future journeys. That claim was largely dismissed.
"The Indies", not India. The Indies was a pretty general term in those days. He seems to have thought he'd discovered new islands east of Japan... which was true, he just underestimated how far east of Japan they were.
There's a really interesting 16th century map I recommend you look up entitled "Universale Descrittione di Tutta la Terra Conosciuta Fin Qui". Made after when certain facts about the shape of North and South America had been established, but it shows that for some the question "is America Asia?" hadn't *entirely* disappeared.
It shows Quivira (in reality a Wichita settlement-area in Kansas) as being about the same distance overland from Tibet as Paris is from Portugal.
"Jesus as the Messiah is not one of Jews’ top objections to Christianity"
I don't spend much time debating Jews on Christianity, but the objections that SAS lists strike more as good debating points in a modern Judaism vs. Christianity forensics competition than as explanations for the original antipathy between Christians and Jews.
Claims that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah were the primary source of disagreement within the first few decades after Jesus. Within the lifetimes of the people who knew and interacted with Jesus, The temple (and therefore the priesthood and the sacrifices) were destroyed by the Romans, and the Christians began conducting their own sacrifices with a priesthood that they claimed was in the same lineage. Then within the lifetimes of the children of the people who knew Jesus, the Jews were kicked out of their homeland, and their remaining rituals were suppressed. The Jewish religion went into crisis and changed drastically from a religion centering animal sacrifice to one centering religious debate, all in the shadow of losing everything. Meanwhile the Christians were continually reenacting the sacrifice of the Messiah to God.
Whatever the current status of Christian-Jewish relations might be, I don't blame the first few generations of rabbinic Judaism for being pissed at the Christian weirdos.
I'm getting this from some Jewish laws (can't remember exact specifics) giving more "privileges" to Muslims than Christians (eg Jews may worship at mosques if a synagogue isn't available) with the express reasoning that Muslims are good at monotheism and non-idolatry and Christians aren't.
Islam came along seven centuries later than Christianity, though, and was more palatable in recognising "people of the Book" (being the Scriptures) and going back to pure monotheism with no allegations of divinity of Christ, as well as recognising Jewish prophets like Moses.
So there had been plenty of time for animosity between Jews and Christians to build up before Muslims came along. The Acts of the Apostles, written sometime in the late 1st century, recounts the alleged origins of the church and there is a lot of conflict and confusion between the new preaching and the Jewish religious establishment; St Peter and others go to preach in the Porch of Solomon and are regularly hauled up before the Sanhedrin to be questioned on what they are teaching and why. St. Paul later comes into conflict with what is called the Judaizers:
Those who believed that converts still had to be circumcised and live by the law of Moses, etc.
For outsiders, there was little distinction between the 'Christians' and the Jews, they were considered a Jewish sect, as in the dispute in Philippi when St. Paul exorcised a slave-girl who was a medium/fortune teller and her owners were unhappy about this:
"19 But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. 20 And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, “These men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. 21 They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.” 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods. 23 And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. 24 Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks."
The Athenians were a bit more welcoming, due to the novelty:
"16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new."
There was more trouble in Corinth:
"12 But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, 13 saying, “This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.” 14 But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint. 15 But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I refuse to be a judge of these things.” 16 And he drove them from the tribunal. 17 And they all seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the tribunal. But Gallio paid no attention to any of this."
And finally back in Jerusalem, and the problems of reconciling the treatment of the Jewish converts and the Gentile ones:
"And they said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed. They are all zealous for the law, 21 and they have been told about you that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or walk according to our customs. 22 What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. 23 Do therefore what we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow; 24 take these men and purify yourself along with them and pay their expenses, so that they may shave their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself also live in observance of the law. 25 But as for the Gentiles who have believed, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality.” 26 Then Paul took the men, and the next day he purified himself along with them and went into the temple, giving notice when the days of purification would be fulfilled and the offering presented for each one of them."
So the outside world considered this a squabble amongst Jewish sects, while there was a real tension going on about what direction the early Church would take - conform to the Jewish ritual laws, or appeal to the Gentiles?
In this case you are correct that the earliest Jewish sources unanimously treated Islam as monotheistic, while most medieval Jewish sources did not afford the same status to Christianity. However, it is important to remember that religions aren't Platonic forms - within "Judaism" there have been huge changes over time, and huge amounts of variance between those known as "Jews" even at the same time (where the dogmas of one are the heresies of the other and vice versa). It is important to look at primary texts, or solid secondary ones to understand the perspective of at least those authors and to some extent regnant attitudes in their times. Simply comparing the reception of Jesus to the reception of Schneerson as though both encountered the same Platonic form of "Judaism" is not very helpful, in my opinion.
I agree that the divide probably originated from the question of whether Jesus is the Mashiach. But it is important to specify what is counted as "the divide" and who made it. Christians are often tempted to ask about the Jew's motivation for that divide, but it may be a mistake. It is enough that whether Jesus is the Mashiach was a deal-breaking issue for early Christians to cause the divide, even if it was just a forgivable mistake from the Jewish perspective. (All the relevant Talmudic material known to me is about how Christians are heretics, how Jesus was preaching idolatry, etc. Nothing about how dare he claim to be the Mashiach)
This is complicated. While the Temple stood, Christ-believing Jews continued to worship there, and it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to stop them. After the destruction of the Temple, church and synagogue decisively separated, but one has to keep in mind that both communities were rife with internal disagreement. I think the ultimate rejection by Christians of Jewish dietary laws is likely to have been important, but there are also important social factors: the fall of the Temple required a reassessment of what it meant to be a Jew.
Interesting. The Talmudic story/tradition is that some decades after the destraction of the temple Raban Gamliel the second added to the prayer a passage asking God to destroy "the heretics" and "your enemies and haters". If I remember correctly, it is explained as an attempt to make the heretics (=early Christians?) feel unwelcome in the synagogue.
> Most Jewish children know lots of Hanukkah songs that sound suspiciously like Christmas carols.
FWIW I was raised Jewish and don’t know any Hanukkah songs that sound even *remotely* like Christmas carols. The Hanukkah songs I learned all had truly terrible melodies based on earlier Yiddish folk tunes (often in a weird “Altered Dorian” musical scale).
I was jealous of Christians for their actually-good songs, many (oddly) having been written by Jewish composers.
…but I’m in my 50s, so maybe this is a recent change?
I’m thinking of songs like “Oh, Chanukah”, “I Have a Little Dreidel” and “Sevivon”. What songs are YOU thinking of?
"Oh Chanukah" isn't terrible! Wistful and slightly sad, yes. Altered-dorian? Yes. But it is not terrible (unless all klezmer music is similarly terrible, as it uses very much the same melodic and harmonic toolkit) with the usual disclaimer of taste being subjective.
I'm mostly annoyed that "I Have a Little Dreidel" convinced generations of English-speaking Jewish children (including me) that clay was ever a reasonable material to make a top out of. In the Yiddish original it's lead ('blay").
(For which there are other reasons one might not choose to make a children's toy out of it, but there were fewer material choices and I don't know when heavy metal poisoning became common knowledge.)
I feel as if the translator, who was clearly willing to work loose, could have tried a little harder to come up with a plausible rhyme. The teetotum, the dreidel's precursor, is described as being made of "wood, bone, ivory, [or] metal", so there are options.
(I also agree that maybe Irving Berlin could have tossed off *one* Chanukah song in his 1200+ song career.)
Also, some noticeable fraction of the time, "made it out of clay" had "and throw it in the bay" added or substituted (in the way that kids do that sort of thing to songs).
I don't recall anything that was stolen from a Christmas song, and Chanukkah bushes were a thing you hear about on a slow news day that people laugh at.
Late to the party, just sending appreciation for mentioning that a surprising amount of classic Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers.
Also, I wasn’t aware there were ‘a lot’ of Hannukah songs, let alone many that sound like Christmas carols (which again, were dominantly written by Jews).
Some of the generic Christmas songs(like Rudolph the red nosed reindeer) from the last 50-100 years were written by American Jews. Christmas carols(like Silent Night) are religious and were not written by Jews.
"[...] the series of epidemics and slave plantation systems that killed most of the natives alive in 1492."
Please forgive my pedantry.
Were the epidemics fast enough to actually kill more than 50% of the natives alive in 1492?
Was the slave plantation system fast enough to actually kill more than 1% of the natives alive in 1492?
While these things definitely happen and definitely were horrible, I don't think they were as fast as you seem to make it. Didn't you mean killing their descendants?
I’d love to see someone with a background in this question answer Emilio. A quick lookup on Wikipedia seems to confirm it though:
“A specific example was what followed Cortés' invasion of Mexico. Before his arrival, the Mexican population is estimated to have been around 25 to 30 million. Fifty years later, the Mexican population was reduced to 3 million, mainly by infectious disease.”
I'm no expert, but my experience is that earlier historians tended to dismiss the higher casualty estimates as hyperbole, while in more recent decades a closer look at the archeological data has led to sharp upward revisions in just how badly Old World diseases devastated immunologically naive New World populations.
"All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites."
There are two related claims here that should be distinguished:
(1) Being an anti-holiday was one aspect of the origins of our best holidays.
(2) Being an anti-holiday was the primary cause of our best holidays.
Most of the discussion seems to be centered around (1). I don't know enough about the history to determine if this is true or not. But (2) seems to be obviously false for Christmas, Easter, and Hanukkah, and true for Indigenous People's Day.
Whether or not the date for Christmas or the symbols of Easter or the prominence of Hanukkah were chosen to compete with other holidays, they each have something important and specific that they're celebrating. Maybe, if Christianity originated in China, Christmas would be celebrated at the Chinese New Year instead of Winter Solstice and have dragons instead of reindeer. But Christians would still have a big holiday celebrating the birth of Christ.
I don't think that Indigenous People's Day has something similar. Would it exist, if Columbus Day never had?
A correction to Valjean's comment under heading 3:
>The highest-profile modern followers of Arian theology are the LDS and JW movements, which I'm grateful to note are pretty broadly acknowledged to be outside the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity.
>or Mormonism (this is the really big deal about why Mormons are not considered Christians even though they say they follow Christ and accept the Bible and all the rest of it).
LDS/"Mormons" are not Arians. It's understandable to make that mistake -- the church originates from the same historical context as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who pretty clearly believe that Jesus is a created being, and is similarly outside mainline Protestantism -- but we are not. The "Mormon" heresy is in fact opposite: the belief not that Jesus was created, but that man was not created. Joseph Smith (LDS founder) says, speaking of the spirits of man: "Is it logical to say that the intelligence of spirits is immortal, and yet that it had a beginning? The intelligence of spirits had not beginning, neither will it have an end. That is good logic. That which has a beginning may have an end. There never was a time when there were not spirits". He holds that man is essentially uncreated, though he is elevated and ennobled by God as Father. Man, then, is indeed on a level with Christ -- this is the heretical thought -- but not because both are created, but because neither is. LDS thought diverges from mainline Protestantism not because Christ is brought too low in the Arian manner but because man is elevated too high; it is understood that every man is a God in the making and that God Himself was once a man like ourselves. But none of these beings are created, all are eternal.
It is alright if one considers that all this puts "Mormons" outside the umbrella of Christianity, but it is incorrect to say that LDS doctrine is Arian.
I was going to say something similar. It is difficult for people from the LDS tradition and from Protestant / Catholic traditions to understand each other when talking about the Trinity. It's not that we have different answers to the questions - we have completely different questions. To me, it looks like Trinitarians, Arians, and Modalists all assume a Platonist understanding of the nature of God that does not appear in Jewish thought before Maimonides. I've written about this [actually it's not on my blog yet, let me fix that] here: http://thechaostician.com/so-you-dont-understand-the-trinity/
> Confused, well-meaning adherents of these systems, I would engage warmly. Leaders who are actively seeking to lead more and more people astray with their anti-Biblical nonsense, I wouldn't mind seeing punched in some circumstances.
This sounds sort of like a call for violence against (some members of) religious minority groups. Less of this please.
Platonism appeared in Jewish thought long before Maimonides. See Philo of Alexandria in particular, but this was generally an important (though highly contentious) thread in Jewish thought around the time of Jesus.
I should have said "did not become dominant in Jewish thought". I have read some Maimonides, and many of the objections he addresses come from rabbis who believe in an embodied God and angels. I have read effectively nothing in Jewish theology between Maccabees and Maimonides, so it's not surprising I missed Philo.
Thank you. You said it better than I did. Key references in LDS scripture would be Doctrine and Covenants 93:29 and Abraham 3:23.
I might also reference Romans 8 and John 17. Latter-day Saints are odd, but not really Arian. We also get accused of being Gnostic, or whatever other heresies, but if you want to be accurate, we're our own thing.
Luckily, the Father in LDS theology has made lots of accommodation for you Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or whatever other "heresies" to be saved anyway! I'd be happy to send a couple of nice young missionaries, but they won't really know or care that much about "begotten not created" or how many angels dance on the head of a pin.
"A possible counterexample: my family descends from various Jews who emigrated from Russia and Poland because of pogroms and then interbred. The people who sparked those pogroms (let’s say the Tsar) caused the current generation of my family to exist. Should we celebrate the Tsar, even though all he ever did was try to ruin our ancestors’ lives? And did Columbus - who really just wanted a quicker route to Asia plus maybe to find the Garden of Eden - really “aim at” creating America in any way more profound than the Tsar “aimed at” creating my family?
Re artificial holidays Japan had a national (bank!) Holiday celebrating the 50th anniversary of the shinkansen.
This feels like the perfect holiday to me: celebrates an unironic point of national pride, is a good mix of top-down (decreed by the government) and bottom-up (celebrating a cool thing that's still part of people's daily lives), and involves fast trains.
So there is/was a sect fractured from Christianity which denies the eternity of Christ, and (per Wikipedia) the Trinity altogether, which in turn would make their doctrine a lot more compatible with Judaism, possibly furthering inter-faith dialog etc.
And then they make the terrible branding decision of calling themselves the Arians.
(Even better, per Wikipedia, there are even semi-Arians.)
Columbus is often accused of being wrong about his chances of reaching China if there were no pesky Americas in the way. People say no fifteenth century ship could go that far. I think they are wrong- the winds and currents would favor him, and fifteenth century caravels were pretty good ships with plenty of room for food and water.
On the other hand, in 1492 every political economy on Earth was based on slavery. Socialists used to know this- see 'Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism'. But as a cynical appeal to bourgeois sentimentality, they now pretend to be shocked that the slaver Columbus brought slavery to the slave-trading Americas.
Depends entirely on what you mean as 'organically' - the federal holiday designation arose out of the protests and riots of the latest great unpleasantness and it's kinda insulting to the work of the activists and strifemongers who brought that about to call it "organic".
If you mean the longstanding Texas African American tradition, then, yes, *among that group*.
"punishing people who don’t give you gold after you take over their country seems pretty bad regardless of what the punishment was."
Wasn't this the entire point of taking over countries prior to about 1850 (and arguably after)? It was usually just called "tribute" or "taxes" or something, but the reason you took over countries was so that the peasants there would give their taxes to you, rather than the previous overlord...
I play to deploy that argument the next time a Congress for which I didn't vote wants to raise my taxes. "Yo! It's evil to punish me for not handing over my gold after you take over my country!"
"whether Jesus was himself divine, or whether he was a created being; like us, albeit greater. This is a point on which Scripture is emphatic,"
No Scripture is not unambiguously empathic on this point and that the reason Nicaea had to use non-Scriptural language "homoousion" to claim that Arias was wrong.
As for who cares, Protestants are full Nicaeans just like Catholics and Orthodox.
Eggs almost certainly aren’t connected to Eostre—they have a long history of traditional use among Slavic, Latin, and Arab Christians as well as Germanic ones.
I think the importance of Arianism vs Nicene trinitarianism is actually more that, on traditional Christian explanations, for the atonement to work, Jesus must be fully divine. Otherwise, the incarnation doesn’t unify the divine nature with the human one (thinking of Irenaeus’ “nature based” treatment of atonement here).
"By the 1900s, it started to become a commercial holiday like Christmas, with Hanukkah gifts and decorations appearing in stores and Jewish Women's magazines printing articles on holiday decorations, children's celebrations, and gift giving."
I think this shows that whatever the origins of national holidays, the successful ones will be monetised to the last degree. See the way (St.) Valentine's Day has become a big holiday, and compare that with Columbus Day. As various commenters have pointed out, Columbus Day would really be a bigger deal if it was a day that people put models of the three ships on their mantlepieces and went out to eat Mexican Pizza.
"We should celebrate the people responsible for our society / our birth" just becomes more nonsensical the more it's scrutinized. Every human had a good day-long window to get the right egg fertilized in their mom but the process by which your specific sperm was generated, and won the race from there, was completely chaotic.
(This is why alternate universe / time-travel stories where the same people are somehow conceived in different realities don't make any sense, if you want to nitpick.)
Yeah, it doesn't make sense unless there's some force outside the understanding of modern science which can guide one particular sperm to one particular egg across all timelines. It's hard to come up with an explanation without resorting to "destiny" or something like that.
Many historical precedents have shown the expansion of holidays and gradual phasing out of the old one through emphasis by elites or other powerful interested parties. Often syncretic blending process of beliefs happened over a few generations was the mechanism of change.
In this way, I'd think to expand it into an Exploration Day or Explorers day. Just like how on the Eiffel Tower they have the names of many prominent scientists, it'd be great to just directly name the holiday for the trait or feat we want to focus on and keep all the old ones and add new ones. This way no Italian ethnic enclave group misses out on celebrating their intercontinental slaver, thief, murderer, lunatic, and explorer of choice and historical happenstance.
I think if we tried to pin down one person for Labour Day, we might run into some level of controversy with a given historical Labour leader for this or that reason. So a generalised holiday works well.
We could add in Neil Armstrong, that russian guy who was the first in space, maybe the dog and chimp launched into orbit too, Sacagawea with Lewis and Clark, Magellan, Captain Cook the evil bastard who shot first and asked questions later, Leif Ericcson and his proto-jamestown, that mountain climber guy on Everest, the guy who went to the north pole or Antartica or whatever, all those lunatics flinging themselves into the unknown and undone etc. etc. to pick many historical figures while keeping Columbus. Just pour in more people to dilute him with more baddies and explorers.
Then we can have some combined geography, history, science, etc. programs in all the primary schools and early secondary schools to support it and kids can learn and get a day off from school. Maybe a program for fitness and encourage people to go hiking, see nature, take up canoeing or kayaking or something, etc. We can even go around to have a new round of statue building with diorama collections of various explorers from different eras in a single statue. Maybe a new mount rushmore project in a less controversial location? Maybe pair it up with new NASA/SpaceX missions? It'd be great!
On the Chesterton theme, let’s remember that Arias was not just any presbyter in the Alexandrina Church. He was a popular influential preacher (said t have introduced hymn-singing in to Christian worship) AND the most important catechist in the largest most cosmopolitan and intellectually sophisticated city in the Empire. As such he would be in intimate dialogue with Neoplatonists who were accustomed to thinking about a metaphysical One from which emanated other entities that eventually filtered down to some lowly demi-urge who actually created the world. “There was a time when the Son was not” would have made a lot more sense to a Neoplatonist covert than gobbledygook about a co-eternal one of three Persons.
I was surprised that there wasn’t more discussion of the assumption that Columbus was Italian. Although I haven’t heard Americans question this, my impression is that there is quite a bit of skepticism in Western Europe. You’ll get questions like “Why was his Spanish so much better than his Genoese?” and “Why use Hebrew in the letters to his sons?” (hinting at Iberian crypto-Jew origins, AFAICT).
No one is a native anything! We all came from the ocean.
I do find the idea that 60% of Americans don't answer "American" for ethnicity kind of absurd. I know that is mostly an appalchian thing, but in my experienc eis absolutely the truth for most people of the 3rd or 4th generation. Often their heritage is pretty mixed and fairly irrelevant compared ot their identity.
> My best counterexample is 9-11, which seems to have semi-organically become a nationwide day of remembrance, although realistically that seems to mostly involve newspapers publishing “It’s the somethingth anniversary of 9-11 today, never forget!”. Any more . . . exuberant . . . commemorations tend to be considered insensitive (eg this).
I have a memory of reading an article about the Japanese holiday celebrating the atom bombing of Japan. In my memory, it came from Azrael's collection of essays on Outpost Nine, but archives of that page don't seem to contain it.
Anyway, a big theme of the piece was that (1) the holiday is viewed like any other as a day on which you get together with your friends and throw a party; (2) WWII veterans tend to find this offensive; and (3) their opinion doesn't really matter because there are barely any of them, so they have to just observe the holiday their own way privately with each other.
Mohammad was a murderous slaver and almost nobody objects to him being basically worshipped by hundreds of millions of people (to the point that murdering people for insulting him isn't a rare occurence).
As a distant relative of Vlad the impaler I approve of his (and Eastern Europeans in general) methods of repelling Islam and allowing the enlightenment to incubate in the west so we can now have this conversation.
I thought that December 25 was chosen for Jesus’ birthday, not only because of the solstice and correspondence to pagan celebrations, etc. but also so that then, the “brit” (ritual circumcision) would occur on Jan 1, which occurs 8 days after birth (count the day of birth, given Jewish days begin at sundown, etc.). This then puts the naming of Yeshua on the very significant solar calendar day of the first of the year. This makes sense, because Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on Jan 7. This strongly implies a dispute among the split church as to whether to set Jesus’ birthday or circumcision day as Jan 1, and then which to celebrate: birthday or circumcision day. Up until the revision of the Latinate Mass, apparently Jan 1 as a festival of the Circumcision of Christ was celebrated by the Catholic Church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Circumcision_of_Christ?wprov=sfti1
But it is now an “Octave Day” celebrating Mary. In any case, the fortuitous ability to have both days overlap pagan holidays was surely a bonus.
January 1 wasn't a pagan holiday. It was the day on which new consuls took up their office, which is why it came to be regarded as the first day of the new year, but there's no indication that people in general held a celebration then.
Also, Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on January 7 because the Orthodox still use the Julian Calendar, which lags behind the Gregorian Calendar by a couple of weeks. It's got nothing to do with any convoluted process of people arguing over whether to celebrate birthday or circumcision day or which one to put on which date. Plus, the logic doesn't even make sense: why would the Orthodox setting Jesus' birthday on Jan 1 cause them to celebrate his birthday a week later?
I think that the real reason the "Arian heresy" was so important was that it was incompatible with Neo-Platonism, whose metaphysics logically require the existence of exactly one creator God--no more, no less--yet a God which was a trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Orthodox Christology was based on Plato's conception of God, not on the scriptures, which didn't even posit a Trinity.
(IIRC, all the verses referring to the Holy Spirit either refer to divine inspiration, just as in the Old Testament, or aren't found in any texts from before the time of the Arian controversy. Also, we know from letters, and from the rest of the New Testament, that the formula "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit" wasn't used regularly for baptisms in at least the first 2 centuries of Christianity. I've twice read that The Holy Spirit out-competed God the Mother to fill out the necessary Trinity. IIRC the worship of Mary, Mother of God, was strongest in those Coptic areas which had worshipped God the Mother as the third person of the Trinity circa the 3rd thru 5th centuries. But I can't recall where I read this. If anyone has references to the early Christian Trinity of God the Father, the Mother, and the Son, please reply.)
If the scriptures had been "emphatic" about the Nicaean conception of God, there wouldn't have been any argument. If the matter had been theologically important to Jesus, he could've cleared it up in a few sentences. The distinction isn't as simple as "Christ is God or he isn't"; it really is incoherent metaphysics. There's only a contradiction between Jesus being God, and being begotten by God, when "God" is defined using Platonist metaphysics. Platonists insist that "God" must be /defined/ by an essence. Jesus is thus either of the same essence/substance as God, or is not God by definition, /and anything that is not God is by definition not perfect/. And if Jesus wasn't perfect, then your sins aren't forgiven and you're going to Hell.
Arianism WAS a big deal. The "fall of the Roman Empire" and Europe's entry into its second Dark Age? Was caused by the Orthodox Christians in their frenzy to exterminate Arians. The Western Roman Empire was churning along pretty well under the Goths and Vandals with little cultural change after the Arian Odoacer, with the support of the Roman Senate, expelled the Western Emperor Nepos in 476. Most of the art and architecture made under them was indistinguishable from that made under the Romans. It was Justinian's 20-year crusade against Arianism which physically destroyed the people and infrastructure of the Western Roman Empire, and the economy of the Eastern Empire, nearly a century after the "fall" of the last Western emperor. It was Charlemagne's later 30-year crusade against Arianism which finished the task of exterminating the Arians. They had ruled continental Europe in 500 AD, and were completely eliminated by 800 AD, as was almost everything they wrote; and the people who killed them, were all Christians who specifically said they killed them because they were heretics.
"Christianity without the divinity of Christ, as a person of the Triune God, is not Christianity. The highest-profile modern followers of Arian theology are the LDS and JW movements, which I'm grateful to note are pretty broadly acknowledged to be outside the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity."
LDS are not Arians. We believe that Christ is fully divine and that His Father is fully divine. We do believe that they are separate beings, and if you want to argue that this makes us polytheistic or "beyond the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity," you are entitled to your opinion, I don't really care. But if we care about getting facts right it simply is not the case that LDS believe in Arianism.
I am grateful to Deiseach for so clearly explicating the reasons I should stop tarrying at agnosticism and go full-blown atheist. I have never quite seen the truly alien heart of Christianity with such clarity, so thanks for that.
14 “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation.
15 “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. 17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. 19 Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent."
Just out of curiosity, was it (1) religion (2) ivermectin (3) calendars (4) all the above that I enlightened you to move?
Christianity is not *cuddly*. It's not about *niceness*. It's about joy, love and eternity, but it is not any "eat pray love" slop where you can pick a bouquet of daisies from different faiths here and there of the pretty bits to put in a charming glass vase on your coffee table.
> whether Columbus was good or bad for the world, he was presumably good for us
I don't think you need to qualify this, and I think it goes straight to the real point we should be debating; I think Columbus (and the subsequent European colonisation of the Americas for which he is in this context a synecdoche) was absolutely a great thing for the world, and for everyone alive today.
I think that modern civilisation is better than barbarism, I think that literacy is better than illiteracy, I think that science is better than ignorance, I think that modern medicine is better than witch doctors, I think that a steady food supply is better than periodic famine, I think that no slavery and no human sacrifice is better than slavery and human sacrifice, I think that being rich is better than being poor, and I think that modern civilised values are better than the values of prehistoric tribes.
I think that the slow but steady spread of all these good things from their origin points to other parts of the world is the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of man, and that it should be celebrated. I think that everyone, regardless of their ancestry, who lives in the Americas today is a lot better off for it, and those of Native American ancestry should be most grateful of all.
I think native Americans were literally better off before colonization. They did not evolved to live in modern industrialized society even less than Europeans did and they do not fare well. They may literally have more material wealth than they did before colonization, but I think living their traditional lifestyles and practising their traditional culture is FAR more important than any material wealth. America was probably better off for everyone else overall, but I think the natives would be much better *from their own perspective* if they had never been conquered.
The vulgar American materialism you obviously subscribe to doesn't make sense considering how unhappy and dissatisfied people are in the US in spite of monumental gains in material wealth over the past century, because having more stuff isn't that great of a predictor of contentment. Wealthier countries tend to be happier than poorer ones, but this is HUGELY confounded by the fact that the sort of people who make wealthy countries also tend to make safe and functional modern societies, and that poorer countries aren't living traditional lifestyles, they're living low-quality modern lifestyles.
Scott’s writing is great. His audience is pretty damn interesting too. Amazingly well informed on a wide swatch of knowledge as well. This is a great place to find the next book to read.
>Dia de la Raza, celebrating the undeniable fact that Hispanics literally would not exist if not for October 12, 1492
>Oooh, I like this one.
I don't know about this one, Scott. Suggesting an American national holiday be renamed to "race day" might win the award for "most likely to make people on *all* sides angry"
> We can ditch Cinco de Mayo (boring, unrelated to America, non-inclusive of non-Mexican Hispanics), save Columbus Day, and have an extra excuse to eat tacos. Let’s do it!
A different holiday switch for Columbus Day has actually been my personal solution to having the "Italian American Heritage Day" celebrating a problematic guy. St Francis of Assisi's Feast Day is Oct 6th, pretty close to Columbus Day, and he's a much more stand-up Italian guy (I've done very little personal research on him besides scanning his WikiPedia page for a "controversies" section and am fully prepared to eat those words if someone has some dirt on him). I've always wanted to do for his feast day vis-a-vis Italian culture what we did to St Patrick's feast day for the Irish, allowing us to dispense of all this Columbus Day business.
This doesn't solve for the lack of a holiday about the American myth of exploration and discovery, but I never got the sense that that was what it was truly about learning about it in elementary school. I definitely remember memorizing the names of Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, but not exactly being led to inspiration about setting out from comfort to discover new frontiers. Maybe that's more of an indictment of American schooling as an institution than Columbus Day though!
My headcanon for Cinco de Mayo is based on the (probably dubious) historical theory that the Mexican defeat of France commemorated by Cinco de Mayo eliminated the possibility of a French-aligned regime providing assistance to the Confederacy. Which is why it is not a major holiday in Mexico but is in the United States.
I missed the chance to comment on the original post, but I'm disappointed nobody took up the presumably playful Hitler reference. As far as I can tell, modern-day fans of Hitler absolutely do fit the mythologized criteria: they believe he wanted to peacefully settle Jewish people in Madagascar but couldn't because he lost the naval war before it started, and also that he never wanted war in the first place but was forced to preemptively strike so the world powers that hated him for no reason other than him being pro-German couldn't attack him first. Also, depending on the fan's individual proclivities, that he was a devout Christian (or not). Oh and also that he was a great lover of art and of animals, and never wanted to hurt anyone.
Thus the Santa Claus version is an overly-sensitive art student who liked cosplay and attending the equivalent of Rammstein concerts. Art holding up a mirror and all that.
Had to come down and respond to #3. When I was taking a world religions class in college, it was taught that "Son of God" was actually just a title, another way of saying "Divinely Chosen King". For example, Solomon and King David were both referred to as the "Son of God". With this interpretation, it now makes sense why (at least one that I know of) the Gospels starts with a long recounting of Jesus's pedigree: the fact that he's supposedly descended from King David means he has a legitimate claim to the Son of God throne, hence he is LITERALLY the KING of the Jews (allegedly). Here's a Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_God
My take as a Jew (free/secular, so take it with a grain of salt) on the whole trinity debacle is rather simple - it's the kind of crazy you get when religion starts being about what you*believe in*, instead of what you *do*.
Religion is referred to as *practice* in English Jewish communities because that is the defining feature of the religious life - whether you keep the Shabbat, eat Kosher, ect'. I know many religious (as in, practicing) Jews who are agnostic or even atheists, it can be problematic for them personally (whether because of family tensions or cognitive dissonance) but it's still clear to the people around them they are religious, as this is the meaning of being religious Jew.
from this perspective, worries about theological issues like the trinity, removed from any practical concern of the religious Law, exist because Cristians put believe in the center stage. Trinity disputes are useful for religious consolidation exactly because they are *practically* meaningless - different groups needed something to argue about, and there was no substantial *practice*.
I have to point out that we don't celebrate Washington's birthday, or Lincoln's birthday, any more. Instead we celebrate the anodyne "Presidents' Day", which rarely involves the mention of any specific President.
The federal government hasn't gotten that memo. "Washington’s Birthday, the third Monday in February" is listed in section 6103(a) of title 5, United States Code, as one of the federal government's "legal public holidays."
> Thus, note that in Israel Hanukkah is a Big Deal holiday, while Christmas is observed mostly by tourists/pilgrims.
Having lived in Israel for three years, I can confirm that the first part of this really isn't true. Hanukkah is hardly noticed, and most people don't even get any days off of work.
It is a thing in México, but just a minor holiday, except for one city, where it is a bigger deal.
It is definitely more of an American thing nowadays. You can keep it.
Little Big Horn was a victory of indigenous people over Europeans. I don't think any of the generals on the Mexican side at the Battle of Puebla were indigenous... but apparently Juan Almonte's mother was purely indigenous, and he fought for the French.
Go back beyond the generals and look at the politicians they're fighting for, I think that's at least part of what's being celebrated. Mexico's first indigenous president defeating a French-imported Hapsburg.
September 16 is the big holiday in most of Mexico. May 5 is big in Puebla.
There's a great speech to go with the battle- 'Soldiers of Mexico! You face the finest soldiers in the world. They have come to take your country! Kill them!' or something. Great speeches make great holidays.
While Labor Day is supposed to be about unions, it seems to be pretty light on that lately... It's more like "OK, we're done with summer vacations but let's have another holiday to make it better". Also to go shopping for school year. Doesn't have much to do with unions for most people, I think...
Supposed to be about unions? Grover Cleveland didn't sign the law establishing "Labor's Holiday" as a federal holiday because he suddenly changed his mind about unions after sending out the Army to break the Pullman Strike.
I can't read Cleveland's mind, but I heard many times from people still alive today (and friendly to the idea of organized labour) that this is what it's supposed to be - well, maybe "unions" is too restrictive, about organized labour and achievements by such movements. I suspect Cleveland's idea was "if we can't fight it, let's direct it into more palatable direction - away from the commies" - but it's just my guess.
Yes, many supporters of the organized labor movement in the US want Labor Day to be about the organized labor movement and its achievements, and thus will tell you that's what it's "supposed to be" about. The historical record doesn't lend them much support.
Yeah, in practice Memorial Day and Labor Day seem to have drifted away from their original meanings of honoring those who died in the Civil War and honoring organized labor, respectively, to taking a couple of mondays off in order to grill some burgers and hot dogs in order to bookend the summer season.
I see more observations of Memorial Day (for American war dead generally, not just the Civil War) than Labor Day, though that very likely reflects my bubble.
My dad always posts a memorial of his uncle, who died in the Battle of the Bulge during my dad's infancy. For years he posted a faded magazine photo the family had treasured for decades, showing him sitting in a Paris cafe.
Then the Internet made it practical to order a much higher resolution (and color) copy of the photo. And on closer examination... I discovered that none of the soldiers' insignias actually matched my great-uncle's unit.
(By that point it was too late to ask anyone who'd known what he looked just like how they'd come to the conclusion that he was in the photo. I'm kind of sorry I checked.)
Another friend posts the name of the first known death in the American Revolution, and the then most recent US military loss, "and everyone in between".
My weird British experience of May 1 was the sharp contrast between Berlin (where there is/was essentially an annual riot) for International Workers' Day, and Oxford, where students stay up all night drinking and then gather under one of the college towers to hear madrigals sung at dawn (along with Morris dancers lurking in the streets) for May Day.
But I also found Scott's discomfort surprising there.
The annual Berlin riots had been a Punk Rock/ lunatic fringe thing, probably by now handled like bigger football events or G20 meetings. Weird events for the sensation seekers.
I thought that line was hilarious, personally.
I'd probably be more skeptical of the idea that Pride Month is likely to be around a century from now, and certainly to the idea that it gets vastly more sponsorship and attention than Mother or Father's day. That's not a very sustainable order of social priorities.
> But also, use common sense. US celebrations of Hanukkah are centered around gift-giving - not a traditional part of the holiday at all.
Erm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah_gelt
The tradition of giving money (Chanukah gelt) to children is of long standing. The custom had its origin in the 17th-century practice of Polish Jewry to give money to their small children for distribution to their teachers. In time, as children demanded their due, money was also given to children to keep for themselves. Teenage boys soon came in for their share. According to Magen Avraham (18th century), it was the custom for poor yeshiva students to visit homes of Jewish benefactors who dispensed Chanukah money (Orach Chaim 670). The rabbis approved of the custom of giving money on Chanukah because it publicized the story of the miracle of the oil.
Also:
> Most Jewish children know lots of Hanukkah songs that sound suspiciously like Christmas carols.
The tradition of appropriating secular songs and giving them Jewish retelling goes far beyond Hanukkah. I think Chabad has been especially productive in this regard but may be others too. I have heard remakes of dozens of songs (having nothing to do with Christmas or - in Jewish version - Hanukkah). It doesn't exactly disprove anything about the main point just emphasizes that's not something specifically happening to Christmas songs - any popular song could get this kind of treatment, and often does.
Scott mentions Hanukkah gelt in the piece; I don't think it's unreasonable to say that gifts of money (or chocolate coins, or nuts) are substantially different from gifts of objects like toys or clothing as are associated with Christmas, and which are now often given at Hanukkah. I agree with Scott that it's a pretty clear influence from Christmas.
(For a comparator, there are Chinese traditions of giving money as gifts which haven't morphed into giving objects, so I don't think that 'tradition of giving money' naturally morphs into 'tradition of giving object gifts'.)
Giving Ang Bao, red packets with money in them, is alive and well in Singapore.
Especially for Chinese New Year, but also for some other occasions.
I even got some from my employer.
How does this work exactly? Is the giving only one way? Giving someone a packet with $40 in it only for them to also give you a packet with $40 seems silly.
Indeed there are rules about who gives to whom that avoid most of those back and forth situations.
As a rule of thumb, it's from elders to youngers. But that's rather imprecise. For Chinese New Year the obligation doesn't come strictly with age, but whether you are married or not plays a role.
I think I have to disagree here. While traditions of course do not morph "automatically", it's only natural that in 17th century Poland there's much less variety of gifts possible than in 21th century America, with department stores and next-day delivery. So if you're a cobbler in 17th century, what you're going to give as a gift - a sole? I think some coin would be more appreciated. Chocolate coins are obviously a modern riff on that tradition and it is pretty obvious, also it would be natural that if money gifts as such if frowned upon culturally where you live, then the traditions brought from other places would adjust - that doesn't mean they didn't exist beforehand.
"I have higher credence that other pagan beliefs made their way into the holiday (for example Santa’s sleigh as remnant of earlier Wild Hunt traditions)." This also seems to be a myth. Santa's sleigh originated in a poem in 19th century New York. There's no connection between it and Scandinavian mythology.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/12/07/the-long-strange-fascinating-history-of-santa-claus/
Fine, I'll remove that part pending more research.
Well that sort of works, or did the poet get the idea from older traditions, and/or did that poem and description catch on due to it slotting into already well known structures.
Sometiems I find some of this "well actually" research that traces things back to the first *extant written* example of something as sort of missing the forest for the trees historically speaking.
Yeah, I wondered that. One problem is that most accounts of the Wild Hunt origin for Santa's sleigh and flying reindeer are like this: "Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir was the source for the legend of the eight reindeer of Santa Claus. Santa himself was the old Holly King/Odin and Saint Nicholas rolled into one." https://www.sarahwoodbury.com/santa-claus-and-the-wild-hunt/
But the initial mention of a sleigh (well, wagon) has it magically flying on its own. Then a poem comes along giving Santa a single flying reindeer. It's a bit after that that he gets 8. So it seems more likely that the legend just was made up in NY, maybe with some Dutch influence, than that writers and poets were influenced by Scandinavian mythology and just took a while to imitate it properly. That plus the fact that an 8-legged creature isn't much like 8 different 4-legged creatures.
Yeah I was talking less about this specific exmaple, and more the phenomenon of articles thatare of the form:
Actually the practice of nicknaming people "Big X" (like Big Tom or Big Jim) isn't as old as you would think. The first written example is from 1820s London (or wherever) and you are a silly ignoramus for thinking it was an old common tradition.
Ignoring that you know, the first extant written example of something is hardly indicative of the first time something happened, and that something might not appear in writing until it was quite common. And morover the general issues with translation and claiming things "started at X time in NY or London" that really have a long and robust tradition in some other cultures/langauges.
It is one of my pet peeves and something I associate with the Vox/Vice era of online wirting and journalism that cares more about having a surprising unexpected explaination for something than the correct explanation. It is often as though the authors are allergic to common sense.
Isn't the whole point about the Eostre thing just that it's fairly silly to look at the Christian celebration of Easter from such an anglocentric context? We know that Christians have commemorated Easter around the time of the Jewish feast of Passover, for obvious and Biblical reasons, from earliest times; it's not like the Christians in Greece and other Mediterranean lands went "Well, ackchually, there's this goddess (possibly?) in the remote islands of Britannia by the name of Eostre, and..."
The holiday is called some variation on "Pascha" in most languages, which makes perfect sense, it's Christian Passover.
In Irish it's Cáisc, which comes straight from Church Latin "Pascha". Just as a traditional name for children born around Christmas would be Noel/Noelle (depending on sex), so for male children born around Easter it is Pascal.
For English-speakers, Easter was celebrated in the Easter-month, so it took on that name because it replaced and was more important than whatever celebrations for Eostre/Estre "a Teutonic goddess of the rising light of day and spring" went on. It is not, however, the reason that we celebrate Easter around the time of the Vernal Equinox because when Christian missionaries arrived in England they saw Big Huge Festivals for Eostre and went "Okay, we'll take that over and invent a Christian festival for that date". That would be like saying the Jews decided to celebrate Passover around the Vernal Equinox because of the Big Huge Festivals for Eostre - nobody would believe that for a second, but it's trotted out every year as "Ackshully Easter is pagan".
Could you explain for general curiosity reasons what the Irish tradition for the celebration of Easter was that got squashed at the Council of Whitby? How did it differ and why was it out of synch with Rome which hadn't just recently settled on a way of calculating Easter.
Okay, come with me to the seventh century!
Very roughly, around this time we're talking a north-south divide in England regarding religious influence. The northern half is heavily influenced by the Irish missionaries and their various settlements, from Iona to Lindisfarne, and the native English/Anglo-Saxon clergy and monastics educated at Irish monasteries or brought up under the Irish practices (I dislike the term 'Celtic Church' because there is too much tendency to present this as a totally independent, hippy-dippy, flower crown and free love movement which it wasn't, but that's a rant for another day). The Irish church is more on the Eastern/Orthodox model, where monasticism and the monasteries are the important centres; there are claims that there was influence from the Coptic Church but these can't be substantiated. Other differences ranged from the minor, like how the tonsure was done, to larger disciplinary matters (Irish monks developed the practice of private confession and penances, and were a lot stricter on these matters: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/how-irish-changed-penance)
South of England, we have Canterbury and the missions from Rome, representing the continental church. Rome is trying to establish its authority, for both political and religious reasons, so as to have a universal practice and belief of religion. This of course clashes with some of the Irish practices.
The dating of Easter is one controversy which has been going on for a long time; the Eastern and Western churches have different methods and different doctrines as to when and why to celebrate it, and the big problems are (1) how do you calculate it, anyway (people do know it's around the vernal equinox/Passover, but when do you calculate Passover?) and (2) should a Christian major feast be celebrated in tandem with a Jewish one, since we're not Jews anymore?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter
The Irish church, being influenced by the older wave of evangelisation, sticks to a more 'Eastern' calculation while the Canterbury church of course goes with Rome. This is not ideal, but people muddle along, although having Christians celebrating Easter on one side while the other side is still undergoing Lent is confusing and awkward.
It gets even more awkward when a royal marriage is involved. Enter King Oswy of Northumbria, who hews to the Irish way of doing things, for reasons, while his wife and one of his sons go by the Romans (the son is involved with St Wilfrid of Northumbria, a monastic who has been educated in Rome and is bitterly opposed to the Irish interference at home, and wants to root it out). To quote the Venerable Bede:
"Equally, 665 would be a year, as Bede writes, "that Easter was kept twice in one year, so that when the King had ended Lent and was keeping Easter, the Queen and her attendants were still fasting and keeping Palm Sunday".
How to solve this? Convoke a synod where all the leading church figures of the day (including the abbess St. Hilda of Whitby) can thrash it out: will Northumbria follow the Irish or the Roman tradition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Whitby
So it lines up with Bishop Colman for the Irish/Ionan side, and St. Wilfrid for the Romans, with the king as final arbiter. The story goes that the king asks "who holds the authority, St. Columcille of Iona or St. Peter of Rome?"
"Oswiu then asked both sides if they agreed that Peter had been given the keys to the kingdom of heaven by Christ and pronounced to be "the rock" on which the Church would be built (as stated in Matthew 16:18–19), to which they agreed. Oswiu then declared his judgment in favour of the holder of the keys, i.e. the Roman (and Petrine) practice."
So that is the decision that is laid down, and now everyone (Irish and Northumbrian) is (nominally at least) under the authority of Rome.
Thanks and not to complain about the history, but what was the different in the algorithms that gave different dates and (if possible) how did the differences arise?
[I had heard something like this from Jaime at History of Britain podcast.]
Oh, calendars are always a pain to try and get straight. Even leaving aside the gradual slippage of the Julian calendar out of sync with the astronomical one, various large important provinces of the Classical world had their own methods of calculating calendars.
The simple(r) version is from the Catholic Encyclopaedia; basically there were three successive controversies over dating Easter.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05228a.htm
First, should it be celebrated on Sunday (the Christian Sabbath) or on a week day? If you calculated, as the Jewish calendar did for Passover, then the date could fall on a weekday. The Asian church took the "14th day of the moon" calculation, the churches elsewhere celebrated it on Sunday.
So the first decision was settled that Easter should always be celebrated on a Sunday.
There's a relevant bit here to quote, which will be important later:
"Further, Irenaeus states that St. Polycarp, who like the other Asiatics, kept Easter on the fourteenth day of the moon, whatever day of the week that might be, following therein the tradition which he claimed to have derived from St. John the Apostle, came to Rome c. 150 about this very question, but could not be persuaded by Pope Anicetus to relinquish his Quartodeciman observance."
With that out of the way, came the second question: okay, so it is to fall on Sunday, but which Sunday? It seems like this one got kicked up all the way to the Council of Nicaea for a final decision:
"The important Church of Antioch was still dependent upon the Jewish calendar for its Easter. The Syrian Christians always held their Easter festival on the Sunday after the Jews kept their Pasch. On the other hand at Alexandria, and seemingly throughout the rest of the Roman Empire, the Christians calculated the time of Easter for themselves, paying no attention to the Jews. In this way the date of Easter as kept at Alexandria and Antioch did not always agree; for the Jews, upon whom Antioch depended, adopted very arbitrary methods of intercalating embolismic months before they celebrated Nisan, the first spring month, on the fourteenth day of which the paschal lamb was killed. ...The Alexandrians, on the other hand, accepted it as a first principle that the Sunday to be kept as Easter Day must necessarily occur after the vernal equinox, then identified with 21 March of the Julian year. This was the main difficulty which was decided by the Council of Nicaea. "
So the decision laid down was:
- that Easter must be celebrated by all throughout the world on the same Sunday;
- that this Sunday must follow the fourteenth day of the paschal moon;
- that that moon was to be accounted the paschal moon whose fourteenth day followed the spring equinox;
- that some provision should be made, probably by the Church of Alexandria as best skilled in astronomical calculations, for determining the proper date of Easter and communicating it to the rest of the world
Great, now everything is settled, right? Well, no.
Third problem was that because of the different calculations which had been adopted and then rejected, there were a lot of places behind the times, as it were. And here's where the Synod of Whitby comes in at last:
"It was to the divergent cycles which Rome had successively adopted and rejected in its attempt to determine Easter more accurately that the third stage in the paschal controversy was mainly due. The Roman missionaries coming to England in the time of St. Gregory the Great found the British Christians, the representatives of that Christianity which had been introduced into Britain during the period of the Roman occupation, still adhering to an ancient system of Easter-computation which Rome itself had laid aside."
So as I said before, a big quarrel for control and "who is the boss of whom" between the native Irish/British church, and the Roman missionaries arriving in to convert the natives and make sure everyone was following the same path.
And here we come to the record by Bede, who seems to have been strongly on the pro-Roman (or more accurately, anti-Irish) side:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/anglo-saxon/earlychurch/paschal.html
As stated previously, some of the British Christians were celebrating Easter on one date while for others it was still Lent. What system did the Irish use? It doesn't seem to be exactly clear, but it was one of the older, Asiatic-influenced ones, on an eighty-four year cycle (don't ask me to explain the maths or the motions of the sun and moon involved).
"Originally, the early Christians had followed the Jewish calendar and celebrated the resurrection on the Passover, which was the fourteenth day of Nisan, the first month of the new year. In time, Easter was separated from the Jewish festival and came to be celebrated on a Sunday. The two dates could coincide, however, and in AD 325 the Council of Nicaea declared that Easter was to be celebrated on the same Sunday. Still, when Easter fell on the fourteen, the Roman church celebrated it the following week, on the twenty-first; the Celtic church, the week before.
There was another problem. Easter is a moveable feast, its date based on a lunar cycle. To correlate the lunar year with the solar year of the Roman calendar, a certain number of days have to be intercalated into a cycle of so many years. Easter was calculated based on these cycles. But, when Rome adopted the more accurate nineteen-year cycle followed by the church at Alexandria, the Celtic church continued to adhere to one based on an eighty-four year cycle."
Remember what was said earlier about 'this is the system that was taught by St. John the Apostle' claimed by Polycarp and used by the Asian church? That seems to have been the model for the system used by the Irish church, as put forward at Whitby:
"Bishop Colmán defended the Ionan calculation of Easter on the grounds that it was the practice of Columba, founder of their monastic network and a saint of unquestionable holiness, who himself had followed the tradition of St. John the apostle and evangelist."
The eighty-four year cycle does seem to have become more inaccurate over time, and the new nineteen year or Alexandrian cycle to be better, but don't ask me about the celestial mechanics. The new calendar was more in tune with the astronomical year so it won in the end. Calculating the proper date was a pain in the backside for everybody involved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter#%22Paradoxical%22_Easter_dates
"Although a process based on the 19-year Metonic cycle was first proposed by Bishop Anatolius of Laodicea around 277, the concept did not fully take hold until the Alexandrian method became authoritative in the late 4th century.
The Alexandrian computus was converted from the Alexandrian calendar into the Julian calendar in Alexandria around 440, which resulted in a Paschal table (attributed to pope Cyril of Alexandria) covering the years 437 to 531. This Paschal table was the source which inspired Dionysius Exiguus, who worked in Rome from about 500 to about 540, to construct a continuation of it in the form of his famous Paschal table covering the years 532 to 616. Dionysius introduced the Christian Era (counting years from the Incarnation of Christ) by publishing this new Easter table in 525.
A modified 84-year cycle was adopted in Rome during the first half of the 4th century. Victorius of Aquitaine tried to adapt the Alexandrian method to Roman rules in 457 in the form of a 532-year table, but he introduced serious errors. These Victorian tables were used in Gaul (now France) and Spain until they were displaced by Dionysian tables at the end of the 8th century.
The tables of Dionysius and Victorius conflicted with those traditionally used in the British Isles. The British tables used an 84-year cycle, but an error made the full moons fall progressively too early. The discrepancy led to a report that Queen Eanfled, on the Dionysian system, fasted on her Palm Sunday while her husband Oswy, king of Northumbria, feasted on his Easter Sunday".
I thought "Pascha" was from "Passio" about the suffering of Christ.
It's the Greek rendering of Aramaic pascha, related to Hebrew pesach, meaning "passover."
No, it's related to the Hebrew term for Passover.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Pascha
Yes. Scott has snuck in a very limited claim ("Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre.") in a list of examples of appropriated/usurped holidays. The idea that Easter *as a holiday* originates with Eostre is obviously absurd and has been exhaustively debunked, but that's not the claim being made in the original post - that claim just relates to the name. And while there's no real evidence for the motive in renaming the holiday in England, it's not absurd in the same way that the implied claim about its origins would be.
The problem is that the limited claim isn't really sufficient for the argument being made. If you want precedents for creating new holidays to suck the oxygen away from old ones, you need examples of people doing that, not of an old holiday (Christians had been celebrating Easter for 500 years by the time of the first mission to England) which in one part of the world happened to acquire the name of another holiday that occurred around the same time.
Yes, it feels a little falling prey to the correlation = causation fallacy, as if one argued that the date of Memorial Day was chosen to honor the gods of barbecue. People are perfectly capable of freighting a holiday with whatever their favorite method of goofing off might be, without that ancillary activity forming part of the raison d'etre of the holiday.
I believe Memorial Day was chosen to be at a nice time of year, where people would presumably do outdoorsy stuff (if not barbecue specifically).
Sort of. There were a number of relatively spontaneous "Decoration Days" that preceded it in the 1870s, roughly, in May, when people would put flowers and flags on the graves of Civil War dead. So it's connected to going outside in the sense that you wouldn't put flowers on graves in Gettysburg in February, on account of maybe having to clear away the snow and them being blown away by the wind in 20 minutes.
It might be also that people were inclined to remember the war, and those who died in it, around the same time of year that the war ended (April-May).
Either way, it would be a mistake to think that the date of Memorial Day was chosen to co-opt people who were used to having their first outdoor barbecue in late May. If nothing else, people in the 1870-80s, when the date became relatively fixed, were not as enthused as we are about grilling meat outdoors, it presumably not being much of a novelty.
The date of Memorial Day was also specifically chosen *not* to coincide with any of the major American Civil War battles even though its original purpose was to honor those that died in that war. (I guess so it didn't privilege one group of dead soldiers over any other, or something.)
Yes, but it's *such* a minor point. When people have arguments about the origins of Easter, at the deepest level it's a question of whether it originates from Christianity or is a recuperation of some pagan festivity, which in turn goes back to arguments on whether *all* of Christianity is a recuperation of paganism. That's why people have fiery debates about this topic, not some etymological point.
Also, when it comes to hares and eggs, it strikes me that these are parts of modern Easter imagery specifically because there's been a need to secularize Easter for the modern society. When there's people who still wish to celebrate Easter for the religious reason (ie. He is Risen and all that) and also people who don't wish to do so (either because they don't believe He is Risen or, earlier on, because they were Protestants who saw celebrating a certain day as popery).
The compromise solution has been to retain the holiday but focus on the imagery that doesn't have an obvious direct religious root, ie. eggs and hares - they might come from pagan sources, they might come from more obscure (to Westerners) Christian traditions, they might be generic spring imagery, but they're not from the Bible or other sources of well-known Christian tradition, and that's what counts. Thus, when you have a concerted effort in the recent decades to put eggs-and-hares imagery front and center when talking about Easter, it creates an impression that the origin of eggs and hares is somehow very important as far as the meaning of Easter goes, when it's altogether rather subsidiary a question in relation to the main point.
Also, of course, many people seem to operate from a logic where any such imagery just *must* come from pagan traditions, even if no-one has demonstrated that, for instance, eggs and hares have any direct historical link to Eostre, either; of course such claims are easy to assume if you're a Protestant seeing pagan popery everywhere, or a modern pagan eager to rediscover signs of lost paganism wherever they can be found, or just an atheist who loves to get solid dunks on silly Christians who are ignorant of their own supposed history. *That's* the main point of the History for Atheists blog, as far as I can see.
The pity is that there are perfectly good arguments to be made about pagan influences on Easter traditions, but you need to start from pagan traditions concurrent with the development of the Easter tradition, i.e. roughly around 1st century Palestine, 2nd century hellenism and 4th century Rome.
It fascinates me, how the easter issue is still revolving. A few years ago, a boxing coach of armenian origin complained about a fighting venue being hold on, what you call it, Good Friday, it being the highest christian holiday and all. The other representatives were like "What´s the fuss, we have been doing that for 50 years now.". I`m not sure if anybody does venues on Bayram in these parts; probably as well, though many boxers here are muslim. I thought, if one of the christmas days off work here is called boxing day in Britain, it wouldn`t hurt any more to box on Good Friday as well.
I'm adding SAS's retreat to Easter's-name-and-customs-in-northwestern-Europe-are-taken-from-the-name-of-a-pagan-holiday-and-customs-in-northwestern-Europe to my collection of Motte & Bailey examples.
I agree with your point about Christians in Greece and other Mediterranean countries, but I'll note that Easter is called "Ostern" in German, which clearly has the same origin as "Easter", so it's not quite *anglocentric*, but probably “Germanic-centric”.
Sure is. The center of gravity of the Church has never been located anywhere near the Baltic Coast raiders who brought assorted minor deities to the British Isles,and it's asking a lot of credulity to believe that the Church saw some powerful need to co-opt a bit of by then fading Old English culture from a peripheral demographic of hairy northerners in late Antiquity to maintain its establishment in what was then the cosmopolitan heart of Europe, the southern region from Byzantium to Avignon.
If anything, you'd expect an effort to co-opt some Celtic, Frankish, Lombard, or Dacian rituals in that time period, since these were regions of much greater importance to the early Church than the British Isles.
Cinco de Mayo is boring… said no Juan ever.
(This is not my joke, don’t cancel me, and also don’t steal it for an episode of the Great British Bake Off)
The argument around Arianism seems like a pretty big example of "sneaking in connotations." Somehow we get from "The Son was created by the Father" to "The Son is less divine than the Father," "The Son is less powerful than the Father," "The Son is less special than the Father," "the Son has less moral authority than the father," and "the Son is subordinate to the Father." It does not seem obvious to me at all that saying that the Son was created by the Father somehow "demotes" the Son so that he is more like an angel. When exactly the Son came into existence relative to the Father seems totally orthogonal to all of that.
Rather than say something like "the Son has to have existed eternally with the Father to have the same properties," why not just say "The Father created someone who is just as divine, just as powerful, just as special, and has just as much moral authority as He does, and is His equal in every way." If you believe that the Father is incapable of doing this then this seems like a weird example of the Omnipotence Paradox. Instead of saying "If God can create a stone not even he can lift?" you say "Can God create someone just as omnipotent as he is?"
Also, if you really take the idea of omnipotence seriously, couldn't you just say the Father used some kind of time-manipulation ability to make the Son have always existed? So that the moment of the Son's creation was at around 1 AD, even though the Son was around earlier?
While I understand what you're getting at, Christians see "existing eternally" as one of the fundamental properties of divinity in itself, as is being uncreated. For us, "being created by God" not only implies but necessitates being subordinate to God. Arius himself also believed that Jesus was inherently subordinate to God, so in history the thought experiment you propose just didn't make an appearance.
Christianity is also firmly committed to monotheism, and we believe that saying "Jesus was created by God as a God equal to him" steps across the fine line that divides trinitarianism from polytheism, because it makes the Son a different being from the Father. For us, it's not just that the Son has the same *properties* as God -- we believe he shares the same substance, the same essence, the same "what-ness" as the Father, that he's the same God, yet mysteriously a different person. And a key part of that essence, in our view, is being uncreated. ("For You, O God, are ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, existing forever, forever the same, You and Your only-begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit.")
We believe that saying anything else would commit us to polytheism, which we are utterly unwilling to do. "The Lord is one" is as fundamental a principle to Christians as to Jews, though we of course disagree rather strongly as to what that entails.
"For You, O God, are ineffable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible, existing forever, forever the same, You and Your only-begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit."
To quote the Robert Hollander translation of the 'Paradiso':
"In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
there appeared to me three circles
having three colors but the same extent,
and each one seemed reflected by the other
as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third one seemed fire,
equally breathed forth by one and by the other.
O how scant is speech, too weak to frame my thoughts.
Compared to what I still recall my words are faint --
to call them little is to praise them much.
O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,
knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself
and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!"
>or us, it's not just that the Son has the same *properties* as God -- we believe he shares the same substance, the same essence, the same "what-ness" as the Father, that he's the same God, yet mysteriously a different person.
I wonder if from that you could postulate some kind of view where the substance and essence that the Son is composed of has always existed eternally, but it did not acquire the "mysteriously a different person" quality until circa 1AD? Or does that not work either?
I am aware that Arius himself did not believe anything like this. I remember reading about Arius and getting extremely annoyed with him that he made the unjustified leap from "the Son was created by the Father" to "the Son is subordinate to the Father."
There's the redundancy of it; if God is omnipotent and omnipresent, what point does it serve in creating a second omnipotent omnipresence? Surely there's a meaningful distinction of some kind, if it's worth doing. The most obvious presumption would be that they disagree on some things, which creates bedrock problems in the faith. Especially when you extrapolate to potentially infinite omnipotent Gods, all contradicting each other.
If the Father doesn't need anyone else to create him, but the Son needs the Father to create *him*, then the Son isn't equal to the Father.
No no no no no, if the Son is a created being, then He is not God, he is like one of the angels (who also are spiritual intelligences etc etc etc). This hinges on the difference between "begetting" and "creating", and this is why the Creeds were hammered out at those ecumenical councils where people may or may not have been slapped:
https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43801/creeds.pdf
"We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten not made, one in being with the Father."
Slip away from that, and over time you get to "Jesus was a wonder-working man and/or prophet", as you get with Islam. Arianism developed over the centuries to be "God the Father is God alone, the Son is inferior to him". To quote online Britannica:
"Arius’s basic premise was the uniqueness of God, who is alone self-existent (not dependent for its existence on anything else) and immutable; the Son, who is not self-existent, cannot therefore be the self-existent and immutable God. Because the Godhead is unique, it cannot be shared or communicated. Because the Godhead is immutable, the Son, who is mutable, must, therefore, be deemed a creature who has been called into existence out of nothing and has had a beginning. Moreover, the Son can have no direct knowledge of the Father, since the Son is finite and of a different order of existence."
So that can also slide off into some Gnostic stuff, or Unitarianism, or whatever it is exactly Mormons believe (which I don't know beyond surface, shallow information I have read online, so can't really comment on their beliefs). Calvinism's divine sovereignty is a very much weaker shadow of this, re: the qualities of Godhead which cannot be communicated to another being.
Arianism is *not* "God made someone exactly the same as Him" (though a compromise moderate position on "the Son is like the Father who begot Him" was promulgated to make peace between the Arians and non-Arians). It is "The Son is sempiternal, contingent on the Father, and does not share in the essence of the Father":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_and_eternity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essence%E2%80%93energies_distinction
I'd like to pull the analogies to Mormon beliefs off the table, since it's not applicable to the discussion and nobody else seems to understand what we believe vis-a-vis the nature of God - partly because it's wrapped up in a lot of other things we believe that diverge from other Christians. The whole thing becomes a non-issue in our theology, but that's because we don't approach other doctrines in the same way as most of Christianity. Saying we're 'sliding toward downgrading Jesus Christ' is to simply misunderstand everything we believe. Trust me that when members of my church invoke, "but it's literally in the name: The Church of *Jesus Christ*, how can you miss that?" it's not because we're trying to slide something past you with a clever naming scheme.
I will admit our beliefs about the nature of God are much different from most of Christianity, but I think it's not a good precedent to deny other people's faith in Jesus Christ. So I try not to judge someone else's doctrine so harshly as to deny their faith. I know many Mormons don't understand Trinitarian language, and consider it extremely extra-Biblical. I appreciate the discussions here, which help me understand why other faiths adhere so strongly to creeds we don't think are scripturally sound. In my experience, usually when I don't understand someone else's theology it's because I'm reading my own interpretations into both scripture and their theology, creating a hybrid conception that the other person would disagree with. It's the hybrid that's absurd and offensive, and seeking to understand the other person's theology is at least enlightening (and drives greater charity for others' beliefs). I'll try to do the same here.
Where to start with our theology on the nature of God? How about ex nihilo creation: it's not a thing in Mormon theology. We believe that the central identity that makes up a person (we call it 'intelligence') isn't created nor indeed can be. Same as matter (ergo no ex nihilo creation). That stuff has always been around, though in a chaotic state. God the Father and you, dear reader, both share an eternal identity. However, the Father has the capacity to organize matter into the 'worlds without number' we observe. He also created spirits - meaning he organized 'intelligences' with greater capacity to have bodies made of spirit, then he trained them, then clothed those spirits with physical bodies. The Father isn't just an intelligence, though. He has both a spiritual and a physical body. That body looks like ours (or rather we look like Him), both spiritually and physically. We're just not as capable as He is.
Okay, that's the Father. Now how about the Son? Let's start with the Plan: Before creating the world, but after creating a bunch of spiritual bodies, the Father presented a plan to those spirits - his children - for advancing us to become something greater. We would obtain physical bodies and be able to make choices in a probationary state (life and death). Everyone thought this was a great idea, except there was a catch: sometimes people would make the wrong choices. In order to grow you have to be able to fail, but if you allow a bunch of evil into heaven it's not really heaven anymore. So the rule is that if you sin you get cast out - which means nearly everyone gets cast out of heaven forever. This isn't a good trade: physical body for eternal damnation. So instead of learning to use our physical bodies in Heaven, we get to come to Earth, outside the presence of the Father.
We need a way to overcome sin, though, so we can return to the Father's presence - this time tested/trusted and with perfect physical bodies like He has. The Plan accounts for that, too, and this is where Jesus comes in. One spirit would be anointed to bear everyone's sins, be resurrected, and act as intercessor after everyone has fallen. This person, once anointed, would become co-equal with the Father, but to do so he would have to be perfect/sinless, and willing to suffer a lot. Jesus offered himself, and God chose him. Satan didn't like the plan and he rebelled, drawing off a third of the Sprits after him, who were cast out of heaven and didn't get physical bodies.
Once he was called up and anointed, Jesus became the 'lamb slain from the foundation of the world' (Rev 13:8) and did all the work of physical creation under the direction of the Father. All the sinners on Earth were cut off from the Father and had to communicate through the Son - who was called Jehovah in the OT, and Jesus Christ in the NT. That's right, we believe Jesus Christ is Jehovah of the Old Testament. From a Trinitarian viewpoint maybe that's both not a significant distinction and also nonsensical. But from a Mormon viewpoint - where the Father and Son can stand next to one another as separate people - that means something different (we read Steven's testimony before his stoning as having literally witnessed the physical bodies of the Father and Son standing together). This was the Plan all along.
"Doesn't that make Jesus less than the Father?" I don't see how it matters. The principle of intercession means everything passes through Christ anyway. You can't downplay Christ without rejecting the Father's plan. Indeed, the fact that the Father chose to do everything through Christ - including the physical creation of all things - means Jesus Christ is trusted as a kind of caretaker of the Father's plan and of all humanity. If the Son's will was different from the Father's, there's no way He could be trusted with that role. So when we talk of the Son and the Father as both being God, we talk of them having different roles in the same function governing the universe in support of the same Plan of Salvation. Kind of like how the US has three different branches of government, but they're all the "government", our understanding of the nature of God has three different parts made of distinct individuals who all have different roles to play (not discussing the Holy Ghost - a person of Spirit who does not yet have a physical body - because this is already too long).
Thank you for the explanation.
So, Aumann's Agreement Theorem holds in this case, too.
>No no no no no, if the Son is a created being, then He is not God, he is like one of the angels
I think what might be going on is that I've never really seen "existed eternally" as a particularly important part of God's divinity. I suppose if the Son was created he might be like the angels in that one specific way, but in every important way could be as divine as the Father. Why can't the Son just be created with the power to attain the highest order of existence and obtain direct knowledge of the Father?
I don't see how this can lead to eventually disbelieving in the divinity of Christ. It seems more likely that Islam and other views that Christ was a prophet or a human developed from syncretism with other traditions, not from some kind of slippery slope.
What's the counter-Arian / counter-Nestorian take on Matthew 27:46?
Separately, even as someone raised in the (Protestant) Christian tradition, I admit that I've never really "gotten" an understanding of the (non-heretical) nature of the Holy Spirit either as an entity, essence, or as having nature separate (or at least distinguishable) from that of the Father -- it always seemed that the existence of the Holy Spirit was strongly relevant to Pentecost, but there wasn't a lot of other textual exposition to be found specific to that aspect of the Trinity. Might I have the temerity to beg for a brief summary on that topic from one of our most esteemedly theologically educated commenters?
This is difficult to summarize briefly, but the first thing to notice is that the Holy Spirit is already mentioned numerous times in the Hebrew Scriptures, usually by the title "The Spirit of God". Starting in Genesis 1:2, where the Spirit is present at the start of the work of creating the universe (and in later passages, giving life to humans and animals---a meaning which may be partly related to the etymological meaning of spirit as "breath" or "wind"). As the Hebrew Scriptures progress one sees the Spirit involved more specifically in inspiring artists (e.g. Exodus 31:3), heroes (esp. in Judges), kings (e.g. 1 Samuel 16), and prophets (e.g. Numbers 11, Micah 3:18, Isaiah 61:1). As a corollary, later Jewish writings including the New Testament regard the Spirit as the cause of the unique "inspiration" (note the etymology) of the biblical writings.
It is interesting to note how this Spirit-language functions in the context of Jewish monotheism. If you are a pantheist or a deist, then God is equally present (or equally absent) everywhere and you don't really need to talk in this way. But Judaism is a *revealed* religion involving (scandalously to the rest of the world) God choosing to become specially present to specific people, places and things. But how can the unique God who transcends heaven and earth (or as we would say, spacetime) also be present to specific people, in a way that can be "given" or "taken away"? The language of "Spirit" is one (of several different) ways in which the Bible talks about God's presence being manifested. At the same time, because the things the Spirit does (creation, inspiring scripture, doing miracles etc.) are clearly divine acts, the Spirit also cannot be considered in isolation from God as if it were a separate deity (that would be polytheism all over again).
To summarize, in the Hebrew Scriptures we see the Spirit involved not just in creation but also in giving certain individuals a unique relationship with God that equips them to do special tasks. And yet, there are multiple promises in the later prophets that in the future---in the Messianic era---the Spirit will be available more generally, to all of God's people! From this perspective, the significance of Pentecost (and the many other times in Acts that people are filled with the Spirit) is not a unique one time event but rather the inauguration of a new type of relationship with God. St. Paul in particular emphasizes how the Spirit changes our relationship to God: rather than trying to obey externally given laws (interpreted primarily by scholars), the law instead becomes a matter of God dwelling inside us (making us holy) and changing our minds to become responsive to his will. (When people talk about following the "spirit of the law rather than the letter", this language is a sort of fossilization from a more theological proposition where "spirit" actually refers to the Holy Spirit!)
Obviously, to turn this into a full Trinitarian theology one would also need to say how the Spirit relates to the Son, i.e. Jesus. In the Gospels, we see the Spirit overshadows Mary in a unique way so as to initiate the Incarantion (Luke 1:45). The Spirit also manifests on Jesus at his baptism, guides him, and is the power by which he does his miracles. In a passage which is of particular importance to Trinitarian theology, in John 14:15-16:15 Jesus promises that after he ascends to the Father he will send the Spirit to help them. Also important is the baptismal formula "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (note that since "name" is given in the singular, there is an implied reference to the Tetragrammaton, which pious Jews would not even speak out loud).
The Spirit also appears in the New Testament in a more epistemological role as the "Spirit of truth" (and this is perhaps the aspect of Christianity most infuriating to rationalists, although I think it is compatible with evidentialism broadly understood). There is a sense that it is not really possible to perceive or acknowledge (in a non-superficial sense) the truth that Jesus is Lord except by means of the Spirit of God working inside of us.
One way to put this is that in Judaism one has the triadic structure:
God ---- sends Spirit -----> inspired person or word
but Christianity insists that salvation is not possible unless all 3 "persons" of this triad are fully divine, where Jesus now plays the role of the "word of God". When Christians talk about becoming sons and daughters of God, we mean entering into this triadic structure in the role of the Son, which involves dying to our old selves and receiving new life from the Spirit, following the pattern of Jesus' death and resurrection.
In other words, not only the source of the revelation (the Father) but also the thing revealed (the Son) and the thing in us which allows us to receive the revelation (the Spirit) are regarded as fully divine, because only God can save us. But if they are fully divine, then they are eternal which means: 1) that the Son and Spirit also pre-exist in the Father even before creation, and 2) the Trinity is itself our deepest revelation of what God is like in himself.
Firstly, thank you *very* much for the comprehensive response and explanation to my questions. I really appreciate getting such an in-depth response.
Is it fair to characterize the basic thrust of the first half of your comment as indicating that while there might seem to be an implicit notion of omnipresence in the notion of God, that's actually at odds with most of the Old Testament characterizations (consider inter alia the Temple and the Ark as having special significance) and indeed the lack of omnipresence is even reflected in current Judaic practice (AIUI a minyan in a essence a quorum required to establish the Divine Presence), and so the *localized presence* of God is essentially the nature of the Holy Spirit, with Jesus then being understood to localize the Holy Spirit within all believers?
As for Matt 27:46, the simplest orthodox explanation is that Christ had (and still has!) a complete human nature as well as the divine nature. As a human being, he was capable of experiencing the feeling of abandonment by God (which as a pious Jew, he expressed by quoting Psalm 22). It is only by the Incarnation that God could enter into the experience of being abandoned by God.
Attempts to explain this passage as some sort of metaphysical rupture within the Trinity are likely to get heretical pretty fast, but I don't think this is in any way necessary. To me, the significance of this is that God was entering into the worst experiences which it is possible for human beings to have, in order to redeem them, and the feeling of divine abandonment is one such experience.
The terms "creation", "creature", etc., and the entire ontological argument for the existence of God, are all about how only greater things can create only lesser things. There's a similar debate in Islam about whether the Qur'an is created or eternal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quranic_createdness
It's interesting that Christianity came up so much in the comments, but given that it was a big part of the original post, it's not all that surprising. From the Christian perspective, I have a few notes to add.
Pope Spurdo does well to note that Arianism has major implications for Mariology. But I would quibble with his assertion that when you talk with Protestants about Mary that it inevitably gets them to make Arian arguments. While I think Protestants are many things, I agree with Valjean that they are definitively not Arians. The much more common position you see get brought up isn't Arianism but *Nestorianism* -- that Mary gave birth to *Jesus the man*, but did not give birth to *Jesus the God*. I don't think most Protestants are Nestorians either -- If you press them, you can probably get them to admit that they believe Mary's child is God, and therefore that Mary gave birth to God (which is really what the debate over the term "Mother of God" is trying to get at). I think a lot of Protestant misgivings over the term have more to do with their objections to Marian veneration in general, or to a misconception that it means Catholics and Orthodox Christians believe Mary somehow is the cause of Jesus being God, which is not what anyone believes. Jesus did not become God through Mary, but he did become human through her.
As for the main topic of the post, holidays becoming other holidays -- yeah, I think it's pretty straightforward that many aspects of the pagan solstice observations became a part of Christmas, and that many springtime festivals (including that of Eostre) had their celebrations merged into Christian Easter. The use of the term "Easter" for the holiday, though, is an *incredibly* Anglophone phenomenon; in most other languages the term for the holiday is just a translation of Passover. And in general, the Eastern Orthodox prefer to use the term "pascha" for the great feast even in English for this reason, and frankly I wish Western Christians would adopt that naming convention too, though it is for example in major use in Catholic theology (the Paschal mystery, the paschal celebration, etc).
Easter (Paschal?) eggs, while not ultimately of Christian origin, also have a much deeper connection to the symbolism of the holiday than I think many recognize. The central celebration of Easter is the resurrection of Christ -- and the new life and rebirth brought about by that resurrection. This is why Christians have traditionally celebrated baptisms on that day. So, eggs, which are a source of new living animals, symbolize that new life and birth. It's easy for me to see why Christians a long time ago saw eggs as a perfectly fitting tradition to integrate into the Christian holiday, whatever its original source.
For me, it's undeniable that the dating of Christmas has everything to do with the winter solstice, and in fact I think your statement of "perhaps God liked the symbolism" is actually 100% correct. The winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, with the longest and darkest night, but after that day the light slowly increases. This is perfect symbolism for the emergence of the Messiah into the world: "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." (John 9:5). So I think, in addition to being the celebration of Jesus' birthday, Christmas is definitely a solstice celebration. And I see that as perfectly fitting, and find no reason to be embarrassed by it. The solstice is astronomically significant, just as the birth of Christ is soteriologically significant, and the two go along together quite well.
You offered a throwaway joke about God being mad at Pope Gregory for changing the calendar, but hilariously enough there were, are, and probably always will be some Christians who are actually mad at him for doing that. The Eastern Orthodox have never totally adopted the Gregorian calendar in place of the Julian calendar, in large part because they don't take orders from the Pope and are highly reluctant to do anything that even has the *appearance* of taking orders from the Pope.
The Gregorian calendar is, of course, more astronomically accurate than the Julian calendar, and lines up with the secular calendar in most countries. But those Orthodox churches which have adopted the "new calendar" call it the "Revised Julian calendar," even though it *just so happens* to line up with the Gregorian one. And even then, many countries like Russia steadfastly refuse to use the new calendar. Since the Orthodox judge that sharing the same date for Pascha worldwide is more important than strictly following one calendar, even the churches that use the new calendar celebrate the holiday on the old calendar date. So Orthodox Easter is universally at least a little bit offset from the Catholic and Protestant date, no matter where you are.
Many Protestant countries, for essentially the same reason of "not taking orders from the Pope," also did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until centuries after its promulgation. England (and therefore the English colonies) for example didn't adopt it until 1752. I suppose there could have been an alternative history where British North America never adopted the Gregorian calendar, and therefore the United States could have been a Julian-calendar nation all the way.
Yes, good point: Nestorianism is more consequential than Arianism for Mariology, and Protestants seem more likely to commit the former heresy. I'll send you some SlateStarCodex Gold.
As a Protestant, I'd disagree that it has much to do with Nestorianism or Arianism. I think there's a misunderstanding in all this in how Protestant beliefs are formed. The historical Protestant objections to Catholic Mariology have very little to do with philosophizing about the logical consequences of one Christological understanding or another and a lot to do with the lack of direct Biblical support for Marian veneration (or, for that matter, veneration of the saints). And those ideas were formed within a theological culture that was interested in distinguishing between the original content of the Christian religion and various assorted superstitions and extrabiblical traditions that were understood to have accumulated over the centuries, which made those Marian traditions a prime target for exclusion.
If I understand Calvin correctly, he didn't object to the specific title "Mother of God" in principle, though he objected to it in practice because he thought it led naturally to idolatrous Marian "superstitions".
If you're speaking to a less thoughtful or catechized Protestant today, he might not have thought through all this very much (and he might well carry one or more Christological heresies in his head), but he will immediately understand Marian veneration to be either an alien or a distinctively Catholic practice and therefore his objections will ultimately be rooted in the historical objections of Calvin and others and not to any malformations in his Christology.
His objections might be *rooted in* historical objections, but that doesn't mean they don't *lead to* malformations in Christology.
I would like to second this comment--a lot of modern Protestants are weirded out by veneration of the saints in general, Mary just being an easy example to point to as "why are we asking a human to intercede for us instead of just praying to God directly as his heirs through baptism?"
This, absolutely.
I have the impression that there's a strain of Catholic thought that conflates the historical nature of the Catholic / Protestant schism (in which Protestant belief would have been essentially definitionally reactionary and formulated in opposition to Catholic belief, because Catholic belief was the only game in town) and modern Protestantism, in which, for those raised Protestant, Catholic teachings don't form an implicit background against which Protestant beliefs are contrasted, and instead Protestantism represents a from-the-ground-up comprehensive belief system -- one that wholly lacks certain classes of Catholic orthodoxy.
In short, it's an error to treat the contemporary Protestant-on-the-street view of Mariology (or the veneration of saints, or the concept of purgatory, or confession, or any of a million other doctrinal differences) as a principled rejection of an established doctrine. Rather, it's the result of encountering concepts like the veneration of Mary or the notion of the intercession of Saints and being like "Wait...What? Where is *that* in any the Gospels?"
YES. You've said it far better than I could (to my shame, as a Lutheran.)
There's far less in modern Protestantism that's anti-Catholic or a reaction against Catholicism than one might think--for example, a lot of Lutheran worship services have much the same structure as Catholic Mass (can't speak for the Calvinists or the Protestant churches descended from Zwingli) (and also the Anglicans and by extension the Episcopalians are basically just Protestant-flavored Catholicism thanks to Henry VIII establishing the Church of England, but that's a different issue).
The issues a lot of the early Reformers had were specific doctrinal things that were not supported by the Bible. Those specific things were rejected, but a lot of Catholic doctrine has its copies in Protestant doctrine because *that's still in the Bible and didn't come from the Papal Office.*
The Arian heresy never came into it, because the sticking point isn't "is Jesus true God" it's "why do we care so much about Mary again?"
Well put, all of this.
Here's how I think about it: Catholic converts are heavily overrepresented among American devout conservative Christian intellectuals, for various reasons. And even conservative Protestant intellectuals who don't convert to Catholicism at least heavily flirt with the idea at one time. Therefore, it's easy for people in this camp (myself included) to "typical mind fallacy" themselves into thinking other people must have had some of these thoughts.
But most self-identified Christians are nominals and not very thoughtful or devout, and even the vast majority of devout Christians think very differently from the sort of theology and history nerd that feels he needs to investigate and systematically either accept or debunk Rome's claims.
Among these more ordinary Protestants, converting to Catholicism (aside from reasons of marriage) is, in my experience, basically unthinkable. And not in the sense that they have an anti-Catholic apologetic in mind. I mean in the sense that they haven't thought about converting to Catholicism any more than they've thought about converting to Shintoism, and it has zero appeal to them. Whatever doubts they have in their faith, they never spend a second of their lives asking, "Could Rome be the One True Church? Have we erred in splintering from her?"
Way back at the height of the Anglican Wars, I used to have some fun playing "Name That Heresy!" when bold and bright young theologians came up with "Hey, guys, have you ever considered that maybe [new thing/new definition/new angle to approach the divinity and humanity of Christ] might help us update to be a modern faith for a modern era?" and nine times out of ten, the Novel New Insight turned out to be an old heresy that had been thrashed by ecumenical councils during the first four centuries or so of the Church.
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun 😁
What were the Anglican Wars? When I google it, I get more confused.
Ah, back around the time the Episcopal Church elected its first female primate (head of the church) there was a lot of progressive movement around gay rights, including consecrating gay bishops, this was around 2004.
So there had already been a split between the traditional/conservative side and the liberal/progressive side, and this just blew it wide open. Some parishes and dioceses tried to leave TEC (The Episcopal Church) and set up on their own, and there were a lot of bitter lawsuits where the national church sued for the property and the protestors counter-sued.
This also spilled over into the global collection of churches which make up the Anglican Communion, and it became racially-tinged as well; what is called the Global South (think Africa etc.) were traditional and anti-gay bishops, and the progressive element kind of snobbishly said that this was all down to colonialization by whites so they weren't able to think for themselves (there was an infamous remark by a female African-American bishop that the African bishops had been bought off by chicken dinners).
The Lambeth Conference, which is the assembly of all Anglican bishops every ten years, tried to come to some kind of compromise between both sides, pleasing nobody. So the Anglican Wars was the sort of jokey name the more traditional online presence of Episcopalians and Anglicans gave to the whole affair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambeth_Conference#Fourteenth:_2008
It's all quietened down a whole heap since then, but at its height it got very hot and very nasty.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/tag/Anglican+wars
Thank you. Nothing of that has been reported in the media I consumed then.
3. I agree, but wonder: Jews should be very fine with Islam as an Abrahamitic faith then:
"Jews’ top objections to Christianity: it flirts with polytheism (the Trinity)" check
"that it flirts with idolatry (icons + Michelangelo-esque depictions of God)" check,
"that it says you don’t need to follow the Law." check
Oth, who better to ostracize than those similar. See: the despised Samaritans
(Early observers viewed Islam as another Arianic + half crazy Eastern version of Christianity. And M. did consider Isa/Jesus to be the prophet of prophets. Born by a virgin, talking as a baby, making birds alive from clay toys.) https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Parallelism:_Talking_Baby_Jesus (found when googling for a source, nice wiki to include this.)
Read about the Noahide Code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah) for Jewish takes on what non-Jews should do. I think there's certainly a long tradition of Judaism considering Muslims to be righteous gentiles, although I don't know enough about it to have a sense of how settled that issue is.
Didn't Mohammed basically write his own version of the law? His take is certainly more in spirit of Judaism than Christianity, except for the most important part, the lack of proper respect to Jewish traditions and authorities.
In mediaeval times, Jews and Muslims generally had better relations with each other than either had with Christians (admittedly not a very high bar to clear), partly for this reason. The Zionist movement and the subsequent backlash among the Islamic world have kind of ruined this, though.
This is pretty much true to the best of my knowledge, stressing the "not a very high bar" though. Jews did suffer legal discrimination, and where even forced to become Muslim on occasions (less often than in Christian lands). In one such occasion, Maimonides (arguably the greatest of middle-ages rabbies, in terms of both theology and Jewish law) told the Jews of Yeman that they are allowed (and therefore obliged) to choose "converting" to Islam over death, because "the Tora told us to give our lives to avoid idolatry, not to avoid calling some crazy guy prophet" (not a quote, but very close in spirit).
I can attest that the basic attitude is still the same, even by the settler rabbis that I heard - something like "Islamic theology is basically fine, it just happened to be that Mohammed was not a prophet. Could in principle be pretty good allies - suck that they are trying to kill us."
Christianity from the other hand is usually considered basically as bad as vanilla polytheism, with some more tolerance to Protestantism than Catholicism for the obvious reasons - and of course with much baggage that have more to do with history than with theology.
After the Christian authorities in Spain and Portugal expelled the Jews in 1492, many fled to… the Ottoman Empire, which was pretty ecumenical. There was no particular hostility to Jews at that time, at least not in Ottoman controlled areas. I have a colleague whose family lived in Istanbul since about 1500. Regarding antisemitism and the Church, there was some effort on the part of the papacy in the Middle Ages to try to protect the Jews, even as they were ghettoized and vilified by locals, but the serious anti-semitism did not begin in earnest arise until about the 1200s (though the first crusade was brutal). From about 1250 on, things got progressively worse.
Pretty much, yes. Churches are devoted to idolatry so you shouldn't ever go in one, but Mosques are alright.
I see the point of avoiding idolatry. It tends to get confusing and leads many bad ways. It also can help spiritually (if that word is still allowed). I guess I`ll stay with it, seeing it as another entertaining challenge. Reducing input is a noble but still cowardly way.
It's not really a point or an entertaining challenge, it's the second commandment
Oh, so I`m fucked up. Wait a minute. The second commandment , oh shit. What means "make unto thee"? How could I accomplish avoiding that? If I draw a naked mole or a satellite, am I damned? This commandment is incomprehensible to me. I thought it was about making pictures of god and comic strips didn`t count. I saw idolatry as appreciating some image as the real thing. I don`t see how I could go any other way.
Read the entire talmud and get back to me if you still have questions. If you don't have time for that you can skip to masechet avodah zarah https://www.sefaria.org/Avodah_Zarah?tab=contents
Ok, I have read a german translation of the Talmud with some pages missing, will dleve into that again and look at the link. Thanks.
The antagonistic part is me calling the second amendment cowardly. I have to stand to that, I guess. Human brains make ideas. Human perception is predominantly optical. So it gets difficult to get a grip on ideas that are not literally imaginable. Some people can do that more ore less, others can`t. For all human beings, it is some challenge to imagine one almighty god. If pictures and statues of Jesus and Mary help some or even many to anchor their faith, what damage us done? Maybe even pictures and statues of Kali and Pan help to further the One Love. I really don`t know. I know barrenness helps and I know it is not a good way of life.
Some references to add in on #1, on the "origins" aspect —
(1) So far as I know, the most compelling research on the date of Jesus' death in relation to Passover is Helen Bond's essay, “Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination,” New Testament Studies 59.4 (2013): 461–75. Unofficial abstract: "Around there somewhere...."
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688513000131
(2) And as for Hanukkah, I'm puzzled that the connection between its origins and comets is not more widely known. (Maybe it is? But I mean, if planetariums can have things on the gospel of Matthew's "star in the east", why not Hanukkah's comets?) So far as I know, this was proposed by Al Wolters, “Halley’s Comet at a Turning Point in Jewish History,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 55.4 (1993): 687–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43721551 (and in another more technical article of his), then modified by Wayne Horowitz, “Halley’s Comet and Judaean Revolts Revisited,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 58.3 (1996): 456–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43722716.
Fascinating stuff, IMO.
Rather than replace cinco de mayo, I propose that we just add more hispanic elements to columbus day so that I can eat more delicious food. Heck, I'm not above fomenting competition between the pro-columbus faction and the anti-columbus faction. Whoever makes the best food gets naming rights. American BBQ vs tacos show-down?
Barbecue tacos…
Día de la Raza is (AFAIK) not much of a thing outside the US and Mexico, and completely unknown in much of Latin America. It actually strikes lots of Latin Americans (e.g., me) as hugely objectionable, for multiple reasons, once they come into contact with it.
It was on all the common calendars in 2006 when I was in Argentina. Not that unknown.
I thought it sketch myself, but I come from a background more colorblind oriented.
My understanding is that the day was first proposed by a Spaniard as a celebration that would unite Spain and Latin-American countries. The name Día de la Raza caught on in Argentina - where there were dissenting voices from the get-go. For those same reasons, the name was soon phased out in Spain. From Wikipedia:
El propio vocablo hispanidad fue propuesto a fines de los años '20 por Mons. Zacarías de Vizcarra (sacerdote español, residente en Buenos Aires) al periodista Ramiro de Maeztu -por entonces embajador de España en Buenos Aires-, ya que consideraba «poco feliz y algo impropia» la denominación Día de la Raza. El nuevo nombre fue paulatinamente reemplazando al antiguo en España, hasta que el 10 de enero de 1958 es oficializado por decreto de la Presidencia del Gobierno.
The name was eventually abandoned in Argentina as well, but only much, much later.
As to why the name Día de la Raza has been kept in México, and (even more so?) by Mexican-American organizations - that is something I have never been able to completely understand. I had thought of something related to Scott's explanation - namely, that there is a bleed-over from the early-20th century notion of *La raza cósmica* (the blending of European, Amerindian, Black African and Asian races to create a blended Latin-American super-race, implied to be better than the others to the point of taking humanity beyond the limiting concept of race). It would be good to know how much reality there is to this. At any rate, this particular use of "raza" is, again, particular to México, where the originator of the phrase "raza cósmica" was from.
Interesting. Brazilian Jiu-Jistu is something good AFAIK. And culturally cooperative endeavours are fine , when seriously feasible.
Growing up (in México), I remember it being known as "Día del descubrimiento de América." I do remember hearing the term Día de la Raza, but if you had asked me yesterday, I wouldn't have said that it was the same day. Either way, I would not have considered it a major holiday.
Who knows what they do nowadays though. Per Wikipedia, the current president changed the official denomination to "Día de la Nación Pluricultural" a few years ago, which just sounds very stupid to me.
It may be more important to Mexican -American communities, then.
Yeah because la raza = Mexican in the US and Mexico.
José Vasconcelos "La Raza Cósmica," or "The Cosmic Race," (1925)
Consider also, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, José Carlos Mariátegui (1928)
It is no coincidence that the 20s are when Catholic Notre Dame students are battling the Klan in South Bend Indiana and Italian Americans are battling the Klan in Niles Ohio.
WWI was the beginning of the end of colonialism - Ukraine's eventually defeat of Russia will mark the end.
Eugenics and white supremacy and nazi mythology and fascism were the backlash against multi cultural pluralism and competencies made obvious by the formation of newly forming ideas identity and cultural which are persistent evolutionary feature of solidarity and subsidiarity of the human reality.
Contrary to Marx's claims of a historical march to the elimination of ethnicity and contrary to fascist claims of purity of a people bundled together as a "nation", the Colombian exchange and immigration of people to the US revealed an ongoing and persistent creation and recreation of cultural meaning.
Both Wiktionary and Etymology Online agree with you about the Eostre etymology. It's only the Ishtar part that's nonsense.
Scott made a very limited claim about the English etymology of Easter in a list of larger claims about the *origin* of holidays. People have thus been arguing about the origin of Easter, which wasn't part of the strictly limited claim made.
Seems like the crux is between people talking about Easter, and people talking about "Easter". I don't think anyone disputes that Eostre has nothing to do with Pascha, but the pagan angle is focused on why Pascha is sometimes called "Easter" and involves rabbit iconography.
My personal experience was that the eggs and rabbits stuff was not really connect with the religious holiday very directly. As an American Catholic, I remember getting ash on my forehead, lent, palm procession, etc, no rabbits or eggs for any of that stuff. Then we would also go out to a park somewhere and do an egg hunt, but at least from what I remember it was more like, a wedding and then the wedding reception.
Oh, when some of the rabid Protestant anti-Catholics got going, they dragged in everything. I think the winner is still Alexander Hyslop and "The Two Babylons" which I think is where the "Easter = Ishtar" stuff comes from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Babylons
"The Two Babylons heavily relies on Austen Henry Layard's publications of his excavations at Nineveh, which had only been just discovered in 1851. This gave his work an appearance of being well-researched at the time of its publication. For example, Hislop linked the name of Easter with Astarte, the Phoenician fertility goddess by citing Layard's recent discovery of Astarte's Assyrian name, Ishtar, which Hislop took to be "identical" to Easter.
What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name. It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name, as pronounced by the people Nineveh, was evidently identical with that now in common use in this country. That name, as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar.
— Hislop, The Two Babylons, Chapter 3, Section 2, Easter"
Opening the way for Cortez very likely wasn't a bad thing - the Aztecs were just overwhelmingly godawful and having them taken down _even by the Spanish_ was a good thing. Quoting 'Cryptonomicon':
*
"The Aztecs can go fuck themselves, Randy! Repeat after me: the Aztecs can go fuck themselves." [...] "You know what those fucking Aztecs did, Randy?"
Randy uses his hands to squeegee away sweat from his face. "Something unspeakable?"
"I hate that word ‘unspeakable.’ We must speak of it."
"Speak then."
"The Aztecs took twenty-five thousand Nahuatl captives, brought them back to Tenochtitlan, and killed them all in a couple of days."
"Why?"
"Some kind of festival. Super Bowl weekend or something. I don’t know. The point is, they did that kind of shit all the time. But now, Randy, when I talk about Holocaust-type stuff happening in Mexico, you give me this shit about the mean nasty old Spaniards! Why? Because history has been distorted, that’s why."
"Don’t tell me you’re about to come down on the side of the Spaniards."
"As the descendant of people who were expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, I have no illusions about them," Avi says, "but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around there."
I go back and forth about this, personally. Some of the descriptions of Aztec mass sacrifice have to have been exaggerated (it wouldn't have been physically possible to kill captives that fast without 20th-century technology), and I recall at least one estimate that overall violence in the aztec/nahua sphere was actually pretty low compared with most bronze-age societies (maybe twice as high as under the roman empire, rather than 10 or 20 times, which would be more typical.)
The Aztec system of slavery was also relatively humane, and their medicine and sanitation was arguably more effective than what was typical among Europeans at the time, despite the latter having more expertise in construction and a long tradition of classical medical sources to draw on. I don't know if all that compensates for infant sacrifices regularly being ritually drowned to appease the God of Rain, but it doesn't count for nothing either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas
Ursula K. Le Guin once shared a tidbit of her creative process. The name Omelas was inspired by catching a glimpse of a highway sign for Salem O(regon) in her rear view mirror.
If you want to reject "lesser of two evils" arguments entirely, go ahead, but then you can't make the argument in favour of the Spanish conquest being an improvement either.
Sure I can. I'm not a utilitarian. I believe human self-determination and dignity lie far above mere medicine and sanitation, and a judgment that would tolerate a single child being deliberately sacrificed in exchange for arbitrarily high levels of medicine and sanitation is to me horrific.
That's why I think the vast slaughter at Gettysburg was worth it, because the stain of enslaving even one family is greater than any amount of genteel plantation culture, or dignified and improved political traditions.
If the conquistadors had had a policy of deliberate child sacrifice I might have to think a little bit about which I prefer. As it is, the choice is trivially easy.
Setting aside that the Spanish were A-OK with burning heretics alive- you can debate the scale of this practice relative to Aztec ritual sacrifice, but if EVEN ONE SACRIFICE IS TOO MANY then it doesn't matter- there were also tens of thousands of indigenous Mexicans 'sacrificed' to a higher cause during the Spanish conquests, simply because war has casualties and a lot of the women got raped. That didn't get imposed on them as a function of 'human self-determination and dignity'.
If you're not willing to make some kind of utilitarian argument based on long-term benefits and the needs of the many, how do you even begin to argue this was ultimately for the best?
Burning a heretic is punishment for a crime. It may well be a crime we think is ludicrous or imaginary -- although the behavior of the "cancel" enthusiasts these days makes me wonder a little about that -- but there's zero doubt that the culture of the time thought it was a crime, and a grave one at that. There is no reasonable comparison between judicial punishment and the sacrifice of the innocent, and it's kind of shockingly careless that you would make it.
Similarly, deaths through military conflict are either those of active participants (if they're soldiers), or are at least usually unintended (barring the Russians these days). Again, making the comparison to the deliberate sacrifice of the innocent is to diminish the exercise of ethical judgement to a ludicrously cramped endpoint, where *all* you care about is the mere number of violent deaths, and not a particle for how or why they came about. It's a familiar form of the crassest caricature of utilitarianism, which is one reason the philosophy reeks, but I wouldn't expect someone defending the philosophy to employ it.
I certainly don't have space here to point you towards alternatives in ethics that consist of a smidge more than counting up the negative utils of suffering, but surely you are aware they exist? So hopefully your question of how on Earth one could make ethical judgments in any other way was merely rhetorical.
The Rwandan genocide didn't technically have pre-20th century technology, but they managed to kill a lot of people with simple cutting implements. The Khmer Rouge did as well to save on bullets.
Basically no medicine was effective back then, you were better off avoiding it.
Yeah, I was going to say something like that as well.
Yeah, but we're talking about reports of hundreds of thousands of people supposedly being killed over a 5-day period at the single location of Tenochtitlan's Huey Teocalli, not over an entire country over a period of weeks.
EDIT: (Sorry- the actually figure is 80,000 people being sacrificed over a 4-day period, but I think the argument still holds.)
Ghengis Khan's armies allegedly did huge numbers quickly by the simple expedient of just assigning each warrior an equivalent allotment of prisoners to kill.
I hate to be pedantic, but again, that's not quite what's described. The Great Temple/Huey Teocalli is (was) a large structure but not city-sized. You'd have space on top for maybe a dozen altars, and the prisoners don't just have to be killed, but brought up the steps, drugged, bent over backwards, have their chest cavity cracked open to remove the heart and the body and blood thrown down the steps for consumption by the masses while the heart was (I think) burned as an offering to Huitzilopochtli.
That's a relatively time-consuming and physically strenuous operation, even if you had a queue going up the steps. To get through 100,000 prisoners in 5 days you'd have to process 1 sacrifice every 4 seconds or so, if I'm getting the math right. Not to mention that the entire population of Tenochtitlan was somewhere in the ballpark of 300,000 people, so just *storing* that many captives would put a huge strain on available living space.
It's more plausible that that many prisoners might have been sacrificed across the empire as a whole to commemorate a notable occasion (e.g, the reconsecration of the Huey Teocalli), but almost certainly not at that single location at a single time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#Scope_of_human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
Or a certain number of important captives were sacrified with full ritual, accompanied by tens of thousands of lesser supporting sacrifices at subsidiary altars, holding pens, etc., possibly even ditching the heart-removal bit. There's any number of ways this could have happened and have the casualty count be more or less accurate.
About anti-holidays, it seems to be consensus. It's rather amusing that Christians (presumably) call others midwits. I think this space got rather too tolerant of this nonsense.
In Poland it's particularly obvious; there are loads of 'traditions' which are commonly thought to be Christian, despite being pagan. Quoted from this: https://culture.pl/en/article/roots-revival-how-slavic-faith-returned-to-poland
> Slavic Paganism was officially abandoned in Poland in 966, when Mieszko I, the first historical Prince of Poland was baptised, and with him, the whole country. It did not disappear overnight, however. In fact, for many years pagans doggedly resisted conversion, even leading to so called Pagan Reaction – a series of pagan uprisings that highly destabilised Poland and was one of the reasons Mieszko II had to flee the country in 1031. It also culminated in a huge peasant uprising in 1038, against both their overlords and the Christian faith.
> It seems the Slavic faithful were not so easily converted to Christianity. As late as the 12th century, most of the peasants on Polish lands were still Native Faith believers. The Slavic faith was rooted out only as late as the 15th century, but that’s still only the official, ceremonial part. Many of the traditions and beliefs are still here today in slightly adapted forms. For example, drowning an effigy of Marzanna – to drive back winter and summon spring – dates back to Slavic faith, while Zaduszki, the Polish All Saints’ Day, supplanted the older Slavic Forefathers’ Eve. It is mainly because these religious practices were so deeply rooted in tradition and rituals that they can be recovered and re-popularised today.
Or from the Wiki:
Christmas Eve is rife with superstitions allegedly possessing extraordinary powers, usually originating in ancient local pagan beliefs.
> Back in the 19th century, it was believed that during the Christmas Eve supper one could see a person who had died in the current year - just go out into the hallway and look into the room through the keyhole, and one would see him sitting together with others.
> Until recently, it was believed that the souls of the dead appeared at the Christmas Eve supper. There is even a free place left at the table for such a "visitor from the afterlife" - a custom that has presumably survived to this day as a free place left for an unexpected visitor.
(I've always wondered if it ever happens; I mean someone homeless trying to take advantage of this custom and someone actually letting them in.)
> It was also superstitiously believed that disrespecting the sacred evening could cause various misfortunes. To this day, people are cautioned not to quarrel on Christmas Eve and to show kindness to one another. One of the superstitions of Christmas Eve states that on Christmas Eve night you can hear animals speaking with a human voice.
Or from the Wiki on Christianisation:
> Christianization - the process of displacement of ethnic religions by the Christian religion. Its greatest intensity occurred during the Middle Ages, and was caused by the dominance of Christianity among the European rulers of the time and the growing influence of the papacy.
> All signs of native faith, were completely replaced by Christian symbols - in the place of sacred groves and temples, churches were erected; on the days when religious festivals were celebrated (such as Celtic Samhain or Slavic Dziady), various kinds of church holidays were established (All Saints). In this way, a gradual process of abandoning earlier beliefs took place, de facto changing only the names and forms of the celebrations. Local deities were replaced by the worship of saints, and images of the gods were usually transformed into icons, so that in the early Middle Ages, most images depicting Jesus were identical to earlier depictions of Zeus and gods from the local pantheon.
> Secular rulers called upon the assistance of, among others, knightly orders to give them military support against non-Christian peoples.
" while Zaduszki, the Polish All Saints’ Day, supplanted the older Slavic Forefathers’ Eve"
There may be slight confusion there - looking it up, Zaduszki is celebrated on 2nd November, All Souls' Day, which aligns with the rest of the church calendar everywhere. There may be an argument for "this replaced a pagan holiday" but I think the stronger argument is "pagan traditions carried on, retrofitted for the new holiday". The same with Hallowe'en in Ireland, which is where we the tiresome "X is really a pagan holiday" arguments from - there was a Christian memorial feast for the departed souls, it was in May, got shifted to November - but not because 'ooh we must copy the pagans'.
I don't like how we are trying to group into anti-holiday both merging/repurposing local traditions/nearby holidays and active opposition to an existing tradition.
Those seem to be very different things and I really don't think the former is what is being done for Columbus Day.
I'm not saying that neither version doesn't exist or that some have aspects of both, but not for the base example.
"loads of 'traditions' which are commonly thought to be Christian, despite being pagan" seems to be an ongoing way of connectingvtraditions with catholic faith, which I accept. In my postgrad studies, there was a Nigerian catholic priest talking about the conciliation of local demon beliefs into christianity. It can be done and it doesn`t have to be a crime. There is a weight to carry and lots of ways to fail.
Did you mean specific vaccines that Americans invented or the concept of vaccination itself? I always thought, it was invented by a british person:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner
Given that this is about Americans fighting over American holidays, secular or no, then making vaccination about Americans is what you'd expect 😁
I think they mean Salk for the polio vaccine specifically.
"When I lived in Ireland I was creeped out by things like the May Bank Holiday. It felt too much like I was living in a dystopia. “Worker #4113, you and the rest of North West City get the May Bank Holiday off from your job at Nutrient Factory 87”. If you tried to pull that in America, we would revolt. "
How? By working?
https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/why-do-americans-have-less-vacation-than-anyone-else/
August Bank Holiday does give us one of the few jokes I remember from The Goodies, a Python-adjacent British comedy from that same era: a trip to August Bank Holiday Island, which is halfway between Easter Island and Christmas Island.
There are complications and stumbling blocks, because while the August Bank Holiday was created in 1871, behind it lurks the shadow of an older, religious festival: Lammastide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lammas
While this is called Anglo-Saxon "Lammas Day (Anglo-Saxon hlaf-mas, "loaf-mass"), also known as Loaf Mass Day...It is a festival in the liturgical calendar to mark the blessing of the First Fruits of harvest, with a loaf of bread being brought to the church for this purpose", there is also an Irish festival of Lughnasadh/Lúnasa, named after the god Lugh, a solar deity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lughnasadh
So May 1st is the inheritor of May Day, and June Bank Holiday of Midsummer/St John's Eve, and August Bank Holiday of Lúnasa/Lammas. American holidays, by contrast, are all fresh-faced and new and bare, with no ancestry, if they're not the traditional ones carried over with the immigrants and established like Christmas and Easter and Hallowe'en. Thanksgiving is one of the new ones that is organic, and I always think that there's the slight hint of the ghost of Harvest Festival hanging around it, even if the Puritans were much more stripped-down with the calendar and had cleared off the old Catholic/Christian festivals from it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_festival
I was surprised by the claim anyway. College students in the United States love "Spring Break", which seems just as bland and flavorless as "May Holiday" if you're not used to it.
(And I write this while I'm away from Texas A&M on "Fall Break", which is a new break they created this year that happens to fall on the second Monday in October, without any obvious mention of the people who inhabited or discovered a continent.)
The astronomical winter solstice was actually a few days before December 25th. And perhaps it had to be? If you see the sun as a deity, perhaps you are not absolutely, 100 percent, sure that it will recover once more from its lowest path, despite its „unbeaten“ record („Sol Invictus“). And if it failed to recover, that would obviously be catastrophic. So perhaps wait to get confirmation before celebrating the solstice.
Yes, I'm not so sure any more. Then again, Carl Pham below now also says "the actual solstice would have fallen on December 22 or 23 of the Julian Calendar". Do you have a source (if you disagree)?
My own source had been "Temples and Priests of Sol in the City of Rome", Steven Hijmans, 2010. On page 390 it says (in footnote 45): "We should also bear in mind that instead of calculating the real winter solstice, imperial practice was simply to identify, incorrectly, December 25th as such". And from page 393: "But what, then, of Julian's claim that the winter solstice festival was as old as Numa? [....] his explanation for the date --- a few days after the astronomical solstice --- is hopelessly convoluted and clearly fabricated, as it would not make any sense in the calendar of Numa's day". So I just thought that in Emperor Julian's own day (4th century) the festival, on December 25th, took place a few days after the astronomical solstice. Admittedly, on closer look it doesn't strictly follow.
On the contrary, the Julian calendar adds (from our POV) 3 surplus days every 4 centuries, so its equinoxes (and solstices) drift earlier. Per Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Transition_history "By the time of the reform in 1582, the date of the vernal equinox had shifted about 10 days, from about March 21 at the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325, to about March 11." So by the 4th century, the equinoxes were where they are now (by design of the new calendar), but at the time the Julian calendar started (and still when Jesus lived and died), they would have been approximately on 25th.
That's what I wrote!
I think the Romans intended the equinoxes to fall on 25th (hence why Hippolytus and others thought they did) and (subject to the implementation problems mentioned below) the Julian calendar gave approximate effect to this. The drift is of course actually continuous rather than occurring specifically on the leap days omitted in the Gregorian system, so there would be some small drift by (say) 33 CE, but less than a whole day.
By the time of Nicea the equinoxes had drifted to 21st, so the Easter date calculation assumes they're there. By 1582 they'd drifted to 11th. At that point the calender would fixed so they would always be on the date assumed by Nicea.
The drift starts the moment the calendar is initialized. But in any event the Julian calendar was not implemented correctly by Roman pontifexes between 46 BC and 8 BC (see the reference I gave below). Augustus fixed things up by omitting all intercalaries for the next 16 years, so that presumably everything was back in approximate astromomical agreement by AD 8.
The (correctly implemented) Julian calendar drifts forward by 1 day every 128 years (which is what eventually prompted the Gregorian reform), and between 8 AD and the earliest known celebration of Christmas (AD 336) there are 328 years, so the calendar would have drifted earlier by 328/128 = 2.6 days. Hence assuming the solstice was correctly on the 25nd in AD 8 it would have fallen on the 22nd or 23rd in AD 336.
The biggest problem with the "I'm glad [event] happened, because that led to . . . me existing" is that it means celebrating pretty much everything, no matter how horrible, that ever happened more than a few weeks before your own conception.
No, seriously. The first thing you have is the Butterfly Effect on weather, and then you have the fact that spermatozoa are highly sensitive to environmental conditions. Between them, pretty much everyone conceived more than a few weeks after an event would have never existed had the event happened differently. In the very short run most of the result is replacement by siblings ("one sperm over and we would have been our sisters, and we'd never have been missed", to quote Lois McMaster Bujold), but then the consequences cascade from there.
The flip side is this also means that any crimes committed against anyone substantially before your conception did not actually hurt you, because without those crimes, you would never have existed. If you think your existence is an injury, the cure is within your own power; if it is not, you clearly were not injured by the but-for cause of your existence.
Sure, the damp-out level is probably a bit higher than butterfly wings qua butterfly wings, based on modern weather model research on thermodynamic thresholds.
But for anything big enough to be a matter of historical debate? The Nagasaki detonation was certainly big enough to beat the threshold on any modern Lorenz model. Further, it directly affected any number of human actions (which cumulatively could easily have affected the weather in turn), and any weather changes affected human behavior (which then affected weather and human actions) and so on. The version of this world where the Nagasaki bombing didn't happen (or it was dropped elsewhere) is filled with the otherwise-unborn siblings and cousins of the people in this one, except for a 3% or so continuity from people conceived before it (assuming they didn't get killed off in a different history).
> if I stopped WWI how that would affect births in Argentina. Europe would be totally different population though.
People read the newspaper less -> move around through physical space at slightly different rates -> different sperm makes its way into the vagina when somebody gets conceived in 1915.
Remember, every time you nut, tens of millions of sperm are in competition to actually be the one that conceives. And sperm are short lived. Virtually anything that adjusts behavior even at a level that humans would not perceive (e.g. you take two seconds longer to reach your destination), will probably have knock-on effects on which sperm wins the conception lottery.
I think that even moving a speck of dust on Mars a few weeks before your conception would totally change "your" genetics. Weather is not required to explain why.
If you change the trajectory of a billiard ball by 1 degree before it hits another, the trajectories after the collision are changed by 2 degrees. This effect escalates exponentially. So a tiny perturbation becomes completely random rather quickly. And everything is coupled very weakly by gravity! So after a speed of light delay and a modest number of interactions, all chaotic thermal systems will be "re-randomized" by any displacement of any mass.
I am pretty sure that the molecular scale operations in the formation of haploid gametes are heavily affected by thermal noise, and I expect that the movement of sperm is to at least some degree.
Quantum effects are significant on this scale, but to my knowledge they don't do anything to "damp" such changes relative to a classical model.
Strangely enough, it's the chaotic behavior of many-particle dynamics (which you're describing with the billiard ball example) that is thought to produce the thermodynamic stability of large systems, which is why tiny events (like the speck of dust on Mars) end up having essentially no effect far away. What happens is that the chaos causes complex dynamical systems to rapidly evolve to a thermodynamic end point (if one exists, and for a few very unusual systems it does not), at which point its behavior is entirely predictable from a surprisingly few thermodynamic variables (e.g. temperature, pressure, total mass), and where the behavior of the system after a perturbation becomes highly stereotyped and predictable (more or less Le Chatelier's Principle).
So what we almost always observe is that complex physical systems are at their thermodynamic endpoints, and are extremely resistant to change, and exhibit "restoring forces" that push them back to that equilibrium in response to any perturbation. And ironically it's the fact that the underlying dynamics are so chaotic that drives them to that endpoint so quickly.
There is also a strange and wonderful theorem, due to Poincare, that says these endpoints are not, in fact, real endpoints, and that any closed finite dynamical system must return to any arbitrary state after some non-infinite time. So the endpoints aren't actually endpoints, they are merely states that occupy some very large fraction of the overall cycle. (The overall cycle time for even very small systems is many, many times greater than the lifetime of the Universe, so this distinction is entirely theoretical.)
Let's say you have a body temperature container of water. As thermodynamically stable as anything can be. Moving a dust speck on Mars won't cause anything visible to happen, but it will still affect every individual water molecule drastically. Their motion is not individually predictable even though the distribution of energies is. A piece of DNA floating in the water is of a scale where the impacts of individual water molecules matter; its position in the container will be sensitive to initial conditions. I feel like the extension to real biochemistry is tedious but clear.
Well, no, it wouldn't. First of all, it's too far away. Inverse square law and all that. But let's make it a dust speck that falls right on top of the water. What happens? Certainly the motions of the first 10,000 water molecules it hits *are* significantly changed. And if this was a very weakly coupled system, so that chaos was mild, then that might persist for a while -- your imagination of the billiard balls caroming around in an unpredictable way.
But it's not, it's a strongly coupled system with a practically infinite (10^23) number of degrees of freedom, like most systems in equilibrium, and what happens is those 10,000 water molecules rapidly and repeatedly collide with the 10^23 water molecules all around them, and the original impulse from the dust particle is extremely rapidly distributed into random heat. Within an extremely short time all 10,000 revert to exactly the same distribution of velocities as they had originally, and you cannot tell that they were disturbed at all. And this happens *because* of the rapid chaotic dynamics, which "decohere" the original impulse, and cause the system to revert to the state of thermal equilibrium it was in. A piece of DNA floating in the water will experience no unusual perturbation at all provided it wasn't actually within nanometers of the impact point.
Indeed, that this is true is the heart of why computer simulation of complex systems (like solvated DNA) are even possible (and the subject was debated fiercely in the 50s when the method was first invented). If the outcome was that sensitive to initial conditions, then computer simulation would be inherently worthless, because the accumulated roundoff error in doing "only" 16 (or later 32 and 64) bit math would mean that the real trajectories would deviate from the calculated trajectories so quickly that the outcome would be absurdly wrong.
But that's not how it works. It turns out almost nothing is affected other than single-particle trajectories, on which not even the outcome of biochemical reactions depends. (There are some exceptions for calculating certain thermodynamic properties I'm eliding here because they don't matter for this issue. Also, chaotic dynamics matter very much when you're looking at weakly coupled few-particle systems, e.g. trying to predict the position of the planets over a billion years is a notoriously difficult problem.)
What you are claiming is that random number generators (like a lottery machine, or say crossover) are predictable not just in their ensemble statistics but in detail, and that is wrong. "Random heat" does impact brownian motion. Simulations can predict (sample and integrate) the *distribution* of outcomes of a system like this, not the exact outcome in any given situation. For some properties of the system (like the distribution of energies of water molecules) the outcome will be insensitive to perturbations (otherwise the world would not be predictable at all). For others (where does a random walk take the bit of dna exactly) it won't be a narrow distribution and the exact sample within that distribution will depend on even the (merely quadratically tiny) gravitational effect of a faraway object.
"celebrating pretty much everything" is a way of life some people I met have tried. It doesn`t work out. You need a base of everyday efforts to enjoy a holiday fully. The time and place of proper celebrations depends on the social circle. To get millions of people together for some celebration can`t easily be fabricated. But if a lot of people, who seem to be no threat to you, celebrate together something you don`t really care about and are ok with you joining in, you can have a good time and learn stuff.
On the importance and reasons for intense conflict over seemingly abstruse points of theological debate, I like the argument which I think I've stolen from Gibbon (though I can't immediately find it in Decline and Fall) - that it's generally the case that these debates are used as shibboleths, to divide people into us and them, and that for the division to separate out everyone you already wanted (for other, non-theological reasons) to persecute/ostracise/attack, while keeping everyone else on your side, it often needs to be quite weird. So if, for example, you were the ruler of France and you wanted to be able to seize the property of every German and Spaniard within France, the easiest way to do it would be to brand them as heretics; but the precise nature of the heresy you chose, which would have to be something that was believed by every German and Spaniard with property in France, but by as few other people as possible, would almost certainly look very strange.
You could argue that this wouldn't work, because the Germans and Spaniards you were targeting would just turn round and say "actually we don't care about this weird point of theology and we'll agree to your interpretation rather than fight over it", and I think Gibbon says (though again, I can't immediately find it) that this did happen - campaigns against heresies would get started and then collapse when it turned out that the people who you wanted to target were prepared to agree with you. Then, despite this supposedly vital theological dispute being sorted out, shortly afterwards another, equally vital theological dispute would restart, which curiously seemed to separate out a similar group of people as potential heretics, even if the actual point of dispute was different.
To be clear, the argument isn't that these abstruse theological debates were invented by machiavellian rulers - but that in a world in which these debates existed, a lot of people genuinely cared about them, and at least a few people united by other characteristics were prepared to die rather than recant a belief that they shared (though not necessarily one that most people united by those characteristics shared - so ten Gothic Arian bishops determined to hold onto their Arian beliefs could be crucial to the persecution of hundreds of thousands of Goths who didn't give a damn about Arianism), then these bizarre disputes became very useful tools for people with power to use in getting what they wanted.
And it could be an iterated process - people struggling for power trying to build coalitions by using complex theology to create and define the identity of their group and of other groups, each power base defining itself in response to the position of other power bases, until you've got multiple systems of belief of byzantine complexity, seemingly of overwhelming importance to those holding them, which then mysteriously disappear a few years later - or are superseded by the same people holding diametrically opposed beliefs with an equal fervour.
Parallels with our culture wars self-evident.
I found the Chesterton quote from Deiseach about 'the trinity is a miniaturised holy family and God can't be Love otherwise' to be interesting, albeit effectively polytheistic. But I could see the badge-of-membership explanation being quite plausible as well.
Re point 9.
Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican Pizza for this October elides the Hispanic dia del la raza and Italian Americans as well as a full dose of consumeristic holiday cooption.
If the holiday were renamed Mexican Pizza Day would the competing HIPD be a thing? Would there be clamoring for Fry Bread day?
Is the process of the evolution of "holidays" primarily a substitution mechanism (implying a zero sum game - there is a limit to the number of holidays)?
Another point in favor of the Great New Holiday of Mexican Pizza Day must certainly be the overwhelming popularity of the Mexican Pizza among immigrants to the land Columbus discovered from the land Columbus thought he discovered.
>It seems that the Russian word for their amped-up New Year’s festival is “Novyi God”, which is an interesting kabbalistic correspondence
It can sound even more kabbalistic if add existence of this idea in early USSR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God-Building
Hmm, seems I need to become a lot more evitable 😁
"When I lived in Ireland I was creeped out by things like the May Bank Holiday. It felt too much like I was living in a dystopia. “Worker #4113, you and the rest of North West City get the May Bank Holiday off from your job at Nutrient Factory 87”. If you tried to pull that in America, we would revolt."
Well, this is because we are *not* American. The May bank holiday (and the rest of them below, we are getting a new one in February for 2023):
1 Jan Sun New Year's Day
6 Feb Mon St Brigid’s Day (note: St Bridget's Day is 1st February, but they switched this to Monday because they are trying to make every bank holiday fall on Monday for the long weekend, and for convenience - first Monday of the month is the same every year)
17 Mar Fri Saint Patrick's Day
10 Apr Mon Easter Monday
1 May Mon May Day
5 Jun Mon June Bank Holiday
7 Aug Mon August Bank Holiday
30 Oct Mon October Bank Holiday
25 Dec Mon Christmas Day
26 Dec Tue St Stephen's Day
Okay, the May bank holiday comes from May Day, which was being celebrated thousands of years ago, so if this is a dystopia, it's lasted a long time: "Fenian #4113, you and the rest of North West Troupe get the May Bank Holiday off from your job hunting deer, wandering the length and breadth of Ireland, and fighting off the Vikings":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_Cycle
19th century translation of poem attributed to 3rd century legendary hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill:
In Praise of May (Ascribed to Fionn Mac Cumhaill.)
By T. W. Rolleston (Translated)
May-day! delightful day!
Bright colours play the vale along.
Now wakes at morning’s slender ray
Wild and gay the blackbird’s song.
Now comes the bird of dusty hue,
The loud cuckoo, the summer-lover;
Branchy trees are thick with leaves;
The bitter, evil time is over.
Swift horses gather nigh
Where half dry the river goes;
Tufted heather clothes the height;
Weak and white the bogdown blows.
Corncrake sings from eve to morn,
Deep in corn, a strenuous bard!
Sings the virgin waterfall,
White and tall, her one sweet word.
Loaded bees with puny power
Goodly flower-harvest win;
Cattle roam with muddy flanks;
Busy ants go out and in.
Through the wild harp of the wood
Making music roars the gale —
Now it settles without motion,
On the ocean sleeps the sail.
Men grow mighty in the May,
Proud and gay the maidens grow;
Fair is every wooded height;
Fair and bright the plain below.
A bright shaft has smit the streams,
With gold gleams the water-flag;
Leaps the fish, and on the hills
Ardor thrills the leaping stag.
Loudly carols the lark on high,
Small and shy, his tireless lay,
Singing in wildest, merriest mood,
Delicate-hued, delightful May.
So why not just call it 'May Day'?
"it really is suspicious that some unrelated method just happened to"
Welcome to the conspiracist fold! Refreshments are over on the long table, there's decaf and leaded over on the side.
Sorry, but that deserves a jab. It is the language, more or less, that we've become accustomed to seeing online. Note that I'm not saying that you are wrong (I'm agnostic on the how's and why's behind Christmas because I just don't give a damn), just that this immediately pinged my radar for tinfoil hats.
It's worth bearing in mind, too, that there were an awful lot of pagan cults throughout the ancient world with an awful lot of festivals between them, so no matter when the Christians decided to celebrate Christmas, you'd be able to find some pagan festival somewhere or other celebrated at around the same time.
There is a very traditional way to celebrate the Tsar in this mode: “God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us!”
"But December 25 was literally the winter solstice on the Roman calendar (today the solstice is December 21st), and it really is suspicious that some unrelated method just happened to land on the most astronomically significant day of the year."
Eh. I don't get the impression the Romans were especially careful about the correspondence between their calendar and actual astronomical events[1,2], and I also don't think the winter solstice is the most astronomically significant day of the year unless you're a primitive and still think the Sun might not come back if you don't sacrifice a goat. (The Romans were not primitive.)
The vernal equinox is probably the most important of the astronomical quarter days, since it marks the start of the planting season. There's a good reason the year tended in most ancient cultures to start near the equinox. The second most important is probably the autumnal equinox, which marks the harvest. Solstices are interesting, but probably of tertiary importance because they don't mark anything important in the agricultural cycle of the Mediterranean year. You can keep track of them if you're a nerd, but they're basically just halfway points between the two most important events of the year, planting and harvest.
----------------------
[1] e.g. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/romancalendar.html
[2] Also note by the time of Constantine adopting the chi rho at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, around the time Christmas supposedly began to be celebrated, the actual solstice would have fallen on December 22 or 23 of the Julian Calendar.
Regarding the dating of Christmas, to quote the 1903 Catholic Encyclopaedia (handily online for all your theological conundrum needs!)
"But Lupi has shown (Zaccaria, Dissertazioni ecc. del p. A.M. Lupi, Faenza, 1785, p. 219) that there is no month in the year to which respectable authorities have not assigned Christ's birth. "
There seems to have been a tendency to set it sometime in the spring:
"The first evidence of the feast is from Egypt. About A.D. 200, Clement of Alexandria (Stromata I.21) says that certain Egyptian theologians "over curiously" assign, not the year alone, but the day of Christ's birth, placing it on 25 Pachon (20 May) in the twenty-eighth year of Augustus. [Ideler (Chron., II, 397, n.) thought they did this believing that the ninth month, in which Christ was born, was the ninth of their own calendar.] Others reached the date of 24 or 25 Pharmuthi (19 or 20 April). With Clement's evidence may be mentioned the "De paschæ computus", written in 243 and falsely ascribed to Cyprian (P.L., IV, 963 sqq.), which places Christ's birth on 28 March, because on that day the material sun was created."
But also that around the date of what would become Epiphany was popular:
"Clement, however, also tells us that the Basilidians celebrated the Epiphany, and with it, probably, the Nativity, on 15 or 11 Tybi (10 or 6 January). At any rate this double commemoration became popular, partly because the apparition to the shepherds was considered as one manifestation of Christ's glory, and was added to the greater manifestations celebrated on 6 January".
However:
"In Cappadocia, Gregory of Nyssa's sermons on St. Basil (who died before 1 January, 379) and the two following, preached on St. Stephen's feast (P.G., XLVI, 788; cf, 701, 721), prove that in 380 the 25th December was already celebrated there, unless, following Usener's too ingenious arguments (Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, Bonn, 1889, 247-250), one were to place those sermons in 383. Also, Asterius of Amaseia (fifth century) and Amphilochius of Iconium (contemporary of Basil and Gregory) show that in their dioceses both the feasts of Epiphany and Nativity were separate (P.G., XL, 337 XXXIX, 36)."
So you pays your money and you takes your chance!
The Catholic Encyclopedia is generally a good resource, but its entry for Usury is hopelessly muddled, to the point that I'm reluctant to trust it on other topics that I cannot independently verify.
Of course, this makes me just want to use the CE to look up "usury". That it would be muddled would be entirely expectable to me, because we have lost our way on usury.
It reminds that I've always wanted to investigate further the parable figure who buries loot in land and didn't get a return. Is it a commentary on laziness and not using gifts/talents/wealth to make more or is it really an anti-rent seeking commentary (the hiding of wealth in land) which Georgists and land value taxers should seize upon.
A lot of the comments, and some of the post itself, strike me as having a weirdly mechanistic and linear approach to history, like all these things happen as a result of intentional decisions and are monocausal, and that's it. That's often a useful metaphor, e.g. for evolution as well as history, but we should be careful when it breaks down.
The idea that Easter 'comes from' any of the other holidays doesn't really make sense. I think a better way to think of it is that people in places with the appropriate seasons will generally have some kind of major celebration on the Vernal Equinox and the two Solstices, and these need some kind of religious flavour. When the dominant religious flavour changes, the festivals get rebranded, but some mixture of the old and the new stays. Whether the specific etymology of 'Easter' is correct is kinda irrelevant, probably it had a mix of names until the culture settled on one.
Similarly with Jesus, there seems to be a huge imbalance in the demand for evidence. The common-sense idea (assuming no actual God) that the festivals replaced one another needs to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, while the assumption that the ancient math on Jesus day of birth (if it was recorded!) is otherwise correct by default - why? You have a big festival and a new state religion, you need to reflavour it. Maybe in the case of the Spring fertility festival they were lucky and Jesus really died then, but if he hadn't, maybe we'd be celebrating the feast of Lazarus, he's a fine symbol for rebirth, or something else entirely with a Christian flavour. Doesn't matter, it was gonna be something.
In general, I think trying to trace cultural events like linguistic etymologies has a lot of pitfalls - even in linguistics! - as is obvious in the Santa Claus discussion, where he is kind of a syncretic modern minor deity. And for the record, when I lived in Israel briefly I was told that Hanukkah was an American thing that wasn't considered one of the major holidays, but has gotten steadily more popular due to globalisation.
Yeah but this is a little ahistorical, since if we were educated people any time between AD 400 and 1500 we would be discussing this all in Latin or Greek, and the fact that there was a term for the holy day season in the vulgar floating around in certain barbarian villages, a word that bore a similarity to the vulgar word for "east" and the name of some old pagan goddesses would not cause us to assume some deep connection between Pascha and Gothic forest spirits. We might shrug and wonder briefly why the barbarians chose to translate "paschal season" into that particular word.
I mean, if there *were* such a strong connection, you'd imagine the important name seducing barbarians into the worship of Christ would penetrate right into mainstream Church writing, for the sake of taking real ownership if nothing else, and the *official* name of Easter in the voluminous Church writing on the subject would be however you write the sound "Easter" if you speak medieval Latin. Which it is not.
My point is to remind you that any conclusion that starts from "we speak a Germanic language" has to be confined to either after AD 1500 or to the illiterate class. If either of those conditions do not apply, then the correct starting point is usually "we speak Latin or Greek."
And if Church Latin was rarely influenced by the local language, then it's even harder to credit that Curch *rituals* would be influenced -- even determined by -- local rituals. Conversely, if one wants to imagine that Church rituals were profoundly influenced by local pagan rituals, it seems difficult to imagine that the language of the Church, and only the language, would be unaffected by the importation.
<i>The common-sense idea (assuming no actual God) that the festivals replaced one another needs to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, while the assumption that the ancient math on Jesus day of birth (if it was recorded!) is otherwise correct by default - why?</i>
The original claim was that Christmas (as well as Easter) was deliberately invented, or at least deliberately placed on Dec 25, to supersede an older pagan festival. "Ancient Christians calculated that Jesus was actually born on Dec 25" is a valid piece of counter-evidence, regardless of whether the calculations were correct or not.
It's not a very strong piece of counterevidence; it would be completely normal, then and now, for someone to decide he needed to show that something happened on a particular date and then publish a badly-reasoned paper "showing" that what do you know, it did.
For the specific example here, I would say that far and away the most likely course of events would be, in chronological order:
1. There is a longstanding pagan holiday on the winter solstice.
2. Christians have a holiday there too, because that is holiday time.
3. The Christian holiday gets formalized to the particular calendar date of December 25.
4. Christian scholars attempt to retroactively justify the existing date of Christmas.
There's no evidence of Christians deciding they needed Christmas to fall on December 25. Nor is there strong evidence that the early Church had a particular drive to overlay previous festivals anyway -- at least one Pope tried to excommunicate some other bishops for celebrating Easter on the exact day of the Jewish Passover, for example. Before you claim that calculations of Jesus' birthday were fixed to reach a pre-determined conclusion, you need to show that the conclusion actually was pre-determined.
I'm not sure why one would assume the astronomical quarter days have that much power in the primitive world. I mean, I would guess hunter-gatherer societies would celebrate stuff like the typical day the river unfreezes, or when the game animals return, or depart, or when the fruit of a certain staple tree ripens. I would guess astronomical observations are usually confined to easily noticed things like the phase of the Moon. A more sophisticated agrarian society would probably notice natural events that correspond to the cycle of planting and harvest, e.g. the annual flood of the Nile, or the first frost, and even better if these can be linked to observable astronomical events, like the rising of Sirius in Egypt.
Getting sufficiently sophisticated about long-term timekeeping that you start being able to predict the annual cycle of day length -- with special points that are basically purely mathematical, that have no direct impact on your world at all -- seems pretty abstract and specialized, the kind of thing you start to do when you can afford to have professional astrologers.
No doubt, and if one could point to hundreds, or even dozens, of copies of Stonehenge all across the ancient world, then I could start to believe that the exact timing of the solstice mattered far and wide, instead of meaning as little to the typical peasant farmer as the details of ISO 8601 matter to the person jotting down the date of an appointment today.
Really? Then you should have no difficulty pointing me towards a significant number of references to these many copies of Stonehenge. Being made of stone, they will have survived excellently. Have at it.
Certainly we agree the seasons were essential to Bronze Age man, indeed long before that. Where we disagree is that the date of the solstices would've been much more important to the broad swathe of common men -- you'll note I'm excluding the priests and astrologers, right? -- than the date of the equinoxes, about which I expressed doubt.
The hypothesis that the solstice would be "the most important astronomical event of the year" seems to me to rest on a naive assumption of childish ignorance in the past (which is not untypical of the modern looking backward). I doubt very much that a Bronze Age farmer over the age of 15 would've worried that the day wasn't going to get longer again after the winter solstice, and I doubt he would've been fearfully awaiting proof that it would. "Well, it has every single time for the past 20 years, or 40 years if I believe my Dad, but golly it might not this time!" Don't think so.
He might take note of the solstice with mild interest, as indicating the turning point of winter to some extent, but it wouldn't have been very important to predict the exact date, because there was nothing important to do. (I'm sure the priests might have cared, so they could schedule their celebrations, but once again I am focused on the peasant's concerns.)
By contrast, I think the generic peasant would have been much more interested in having an accurate knowledge of the vernal equinox, which would suggest the time for planting. Of course, he would rely on environmental clues to know exactly when to actually plant, but the virtue of knowing the date of the equinox[1] is that you can compare to environmental clues and be able to know whether you're in an unusually mild or unusually harsh year -- which is very useful indeed to the farmer.
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[1] Or more precisely, since "the date" would not be something he would usually know anyway, knowing whether the equinox was today or in the past or yet to come. He would already know that the cycle of Moon didn't match up sufficiently well to the seasons, so he couldn't use that. And the approiximate date of the equinox is subtle, but not difficult, to deduce from naked eye observation of the skies.
I imagine winter solstice is not about anything happening but about hope. The longest night has been managed, with the rest of our stuff we may all make it to spring.
Technically, many of these holidays aren't timed to the solstice or equinox themselves, but rather to the "cross-quarter days", which are the halfway points between the solstices and equinoxes. (I think Halloween/Samhain and May Day/Beltane are these, but I'm not sure about the ones that would fall in February or August (Wikipedia tells me that these coincide with Candlemas/Groundhog's Day and Lammas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_days)).
> people in places with the appropriate seasons will generally have some kind of major celebration on the Vernal Equinox and the two Solstices
I was interested by the observation that the myth of Persephone is generally felt to have arisen before the Greeks arrived in Greece, on the grounds that, while it is transparently an explanation for the annual pattern of the seasons... Greece doesn't really have the type of seasons depicted in the myth.
In other words, it's not necessary to be in a place with the appropriate seasons in order to have seasonal celebrations.
> Arius had it coming. The practice of punching those supposed church leaders who are his theological descendants should be normalized and celebrated.
Christianity 101: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Unless he disagrees with you about the nature of Jesus, in which case, punch him in the face as Santa Claus hath done.
The old joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/avshhm/once_i_saw_a_man_on_a_bridge_about_to_jump/
Did a whole army of Christians descend upon ACX while we weren't looking?
In that case it might be useful to remind them that ha-ha-only-jokes about "punching leaders who lead ... people astray with anti-Biblical nonsense" isn't exactly the best way to get people in the modern free world to look positively on their religion.
Especially when the entire West had to go through the nerve-wracking trauma of half-dumping its own religion of 1000+ years because of how awfully totalitarian it had become.
<i>Especially when the entire West had to go through the nerve-wracking trauma of half-dumping its own religion of 1000+ years because of how awfully totalitarian it had become.</i>
That's propaganda, not reality, as you can tell from the fact that the "enlightened, liberal" secularism which replaced Christianity was far more totalitarian. E.g., the Reign of Terror killed over five times as many people in just under a year than the Spanish Inquisition managed in three and a half centuries.
Ehhh I don't think it's particularly controversial that thinkers in the West had to tread lightly for centuries for fear of being on the wrong side of Christian authorities, and that this was a major causal factor in gradual shift away from religious authority.
Unfortunately, totalitarianism is a big failure mode of human societies, and has surfaced in many other forms too. As far as I am concerned that kind of thing is evil no matter who is in charge. That doesn't make this particular instance of any less evil.
Whether it's controversial or not probably depends on the company you keep. In any event -- which thinkers? Can you name a few? Great minds who suppressed their real thoughts on some issue or other for fear of Church punishment?
I find it pretty surreal to have to give examples, isn't this basically common knowledge? Hasn't at least everybody who even thinks about these things heard of the story of Galileo (17th cent.) and his condemnation by the Church for propagating Copernican heliocentrism?
Just opening a random book of medieval philosophy shows a host of examples. I'm not even talking about later Enlightenment thinkers who were questioning religion altogether - during the long Middle Ages, people routinely got in trouble for espousing intellectual opinions, and most of those were bona fide God-fearing Christians, too. A few random examples of different types and in various centuries:
- Peter Abelard, 12th cent. - condemnation of his teaching, made to burn his own books, sentenced to confinement in a monastery (later revoked)
- Roger Bacon, 13th cent. - forbidden to publish his works for some time, possibly imprisoned
- Thomas Aquinas (!), 13th cent - some theses condemned and banned from teaching by the bishop of Paris
- Boetius of Dacia, 13th cent. - condemned and detained for pushing the "wrong interpretation" of Aristotle
- Marguerite Porete, 13th cent. - condemned and burned at the stake for her spiritual writings
- The entire Cathar movement, 13th cent. - thousands massacred for following a different theology
- William of Ockam, 14th cent. - condemned for some unorthodox ideas, ended up in exile at some point
- Giordano Bruno, 16th cent. - tried for heresy, burned at the stake
- Galileo Galilei, 17th cent. - condemned to house arrest, forced to recant, writings banned
I mean seriously, the point is not to make a long list of grievances, or even less to go into details or argue to and fro about them. This is centuries-old stuff we're talking about. Honestly, at this point I think the Catholic Church herself has produced enough intellectually honest people, better capable of reckoning with the institution's past than your average internet apologist. In any case, people who have had to suppress their real thoughts for fear of Church punishment are not exactly in short supply.
Ah, I see. So you mean *theologians* and particularly those employed by the Church had to consider how the Church would respond to writings *on the Catholic religion*. Yes, that's such a shock, isn't it? Almost as surprising as if the current presidents of the various Federal Reserve branches had to be careful what the Chairman might think about their writings on monetary policy, or whether the President might summarily fire an Executive Branch employee who questioned his mental fitness. (You can certainly argue the 17th century Church took far more vigorous action to dispute theology than the modern world would tolerate, and that is clearly true, but that is hardly unique to the Church as an institution; I daresay if a nobleman in the Court of Louis XIV were to pen a pamphlet suggesting a republic replace the monarchy he might look forward to more than a tut-tut from Versailles.)
Your only representation of a thinker on nonreligious issues appears to be the usual trope of Galileo. So far as I know, Galileo was condemned because he carried his scientfic arguments over to the religious, i.e. he not only said the Earth went around the Sun he went on to assert that the Church could have no useful opinion on matters such as this, and indeed anything outside of faith -- a pretty provocative statement for the time, and probably undertaken because he had a notorious temper and was on the outs with the Pope. That is, my impression was that Galileo was punished by the Church largely because he got in the face of the then Pope and the Church heirarchy for personal reasons. What they did was absurd and wrong, but it represented a lapse of fallible human judgment, not the steady policy of the Church over centuries.
Which is why Galileo remains this unusual example, and why (for example), you won't find the same problem with Newton, Leibniz, Pascal, Davy, Boyle, Hooke, and all the other major thinkers roughly contemporary who explored and wrote on things *other than* religion. If you want to argue the Church made open debate about the principles of Christianity difficult, that's fine, and it may well be true, but to argue it held back human intellectual progress across the board does not follow, and is not accurate.
"Did a whole army of Christians descend upon ACX while we weren't looking?"
Nah, we've been hiding under the beds all this time and only skulked out like the groundhog when the sacred names of Easter and Christmas were invoked.
Fair enough :)
I for one have only recently joined, and do consider myself an army.
Uh, I`ve just been christened last year. Seemed like a good idea, still does.
Another Russian here. Personally, I feel that our New Year celebration is conceptually much better than Christmas celebration in western countries and creates much less troubles.
The clear distinction between secular holiday and religious one helps to avoid both "Christmas loosing its religious meaning" and "Presumably secular state having a clear religious holiday" issues. You are not associating your good childhood memories with religion and you are not either loosing your favourite holiday when you realise that there is no God. Those who want to celebrate Christmas or any other religious holiday can freely do it, but no matter what there is a universal holiday for everyone.
+1, and this is also something that stood out to me reading the original post. I have really quite a lot of warm tradition feelings around New Year's, and I like that it's NOT tied to a religious thing I don't endorse, and at this point if someone tried to get my family to revert to the older Christmas tradition we would revolt out of BOTH the "how dare you mess with our tradition" feeling and the "why would we celebrate a religious thing" feeling. So I guess half a century is enough time to change where people's tradition-feelings point.
(Also, "novy god" just literally means "new year", it isn't specific to any particular way of celebrating, so the characterization of it here feels kind of weird and incorrect.)
Eh, I dropped Christianity decades ago and Christmas is still great, I just consider it a celebration of winter solstice / life prevailing against the winter / hearth and family, much like my pagan ancestors did for millenia.
There's no reason to comply when a foreign culture steals your holidays, just because it happened a long time ago.
>creates much less troubles.
Could it even be a trouble in Russia? Russia is less ideologically diverse than the US.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'less ideologically diverse'. Russians hold all kind of views, it's just not as politically relevant in the dictatorship compared to propper democracy.
But if you talk to Russian people both those who are really into Christianity and atheists are completely fine with New Year being the main secular holiday and Christmas being a specifically religious one.
Russia tends not to have huge swathes of the population diametrically opposed to each other on basic issues as commonly as the US does.
I completed my graduate studies in Mariology and the term “mother of god” was granted to Mary by third century writers who co-opted the term from the Egyptian goddess Isis (also a “mother of god”) The Greek term used for both women was “theotokos.” Because the Jewish people believed in only one god, the term theotokos was more problematic than previous mythologies using the same term, hence the Arian debate. More info on all of that if you really want to geek out: http://ellegriffin.com/Mary 🤓
Thanks for such an intellectual discussion and debate. I throughly enjoyed both posts!
I was recently listening to Inkubus Sukkubus' "Wytches Chant" of goddess names (starting with "Isis"), and it occurs to me that adding Mary would have been a good way to piss off both anti-Christian pagans and anti-pagan Christians. H. P. Lovecraft would be disappointed that it didn't include Magna Mater though.
Ah, that one must have influenced Christy Moore's song from 2014 (the lyricist is one "C. Murphy"), The Burning Times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASORLE6dPYU
It's all nonsense (nine million witches burned!) but hey, songs and poetry get a free pass on things like this.
Oh here we go again, Isis = Mary. That's an oldie and a goodie, and while the Alexandrian influence might explain this, as well as the Coptic Church in Egypt adopting iconography, this is just the usual "Christianity was just Paganism given a new coat of paint" stuff. I'm going to leave it up to the Orthodox to fight the Greek speaking corner on this one 😁
I would be very interested where you did your grad studies and who the lecturers were, before we get into any hair-pulling over this one. There's a lot of teaching "well I think this new take and if it sounds kinda Gnostic all the better" as the Real Truth Of How It Happened, and the Isis thing has been going around since at least the 18th century founded in anti-Catholic polemics. That Egyptology was a craze during the 18th century is probably not a coincidence (because nothing is a coincidence).
EDIT: Here's our old friend Alexander Hyslop, who has a lot of closely-printed material on the entire topic:
https://www.cbcg.org/twobaby/sect22.html
"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. (see figures 5 and 6) 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 Deoius; 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."
Useful commentary on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis#Possible_influence_on_Christianity. Worth noting that the Greco-Roman cult of Isis was itself only loosely connected to the Egyptian understanding.
What about the larval stage Gnosticism warned of in the epistles of John and Jude?
Honestly, the iconographic influence argument seems unimpressive to me. If you want to depict a mother with an infant child, showing her sitting with the child on her lap is one of the most obvious ways of doing so, so it's not surprising that both Mary/Jesus and Isis/Horus pictures should show them in this position.
According to 'The Dawning Moon of the Mind' the virgin (proto- word kind of like Mary but ancient Egyptian hieroglyph) who gives birth without knowing it is the night sky. Dunno what Mariologists think of Susan Brind Morrow.
I had to look that one up:
"Buried in the Egyptian desert some four thousand years ago, the Pyramid Texts are among the world’s oldest poetry. Yet ever since the discovery of these hieroglyphs in 1881, they have been misconstrued by Western Egyptologists as a garbled collection of primitive myths and incantations, relegating to obscurity their radiant fusion of philosophy, scientific inquiry, and religion."
Court de Gébelin rides again? I wish I had a fiver for everyone who rediscovers Lost Mystic Wisdom Of The Ancient East, and that "astonishing parallels to Judeo-Christian culture, Buddhism, and Tantra" are all to be found in the Pyramids. They were doing this in the time of Herodotus, they're still doing it.
"Morrow studied Classics as an undergraduate and graduate student at Columbia University in New York, where she also studied Arabic and worked intensively on hieroglyphic texts for six years as a student of Egyptology."
That does not tell me if she studied Egyptology under a reputable university, or was autodidact in it. A lot of cranks (pardon the term) are and were self-appointed experts in Egyptology. She strikes me as coming more from the arts side than any archaeology training, so this book sounds to me like another "The White Goddess".
She had a puff on the cover from her hieroglyphics teacher, who wrote a standard textbook. 'The Dawning Moon of the Mind' reads like accurate translation with accompanying commentary of damn dirty hippy poetry. When she says the proto-word for 'Mary' started as a word for the night sky, that's translation.
Most girl's names mean 'something pretty'.
'the time of Herodotus' isn't 'the time of Ramses', but Coptics would say Egypt affected them.
Hm, generally etymology of "Mary" is around the element "bitterness", and any Egyptian element seems to be "love", not "night sky" or whatever. Nut is the sky goddess:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_(given_name)
"Maryām (מרים). In the New Testament of the Bible, written in Greek, her name is transliterated Mariam (Μαριάμ) or Maria. Several other women in the New Testament, including St. Mary Magdalene, are called by the same name.
In antiquity, it was variously etymologized as "rebellion", "bitter sea", "strong waters", "exalted one", "ruling one", "wished for child", or "beautiful".
St. Jerome (writing c. 390), following Eusebius of Caesarea, translates the name as "drop of the sea" (stilla maris in Latin), from Hebrew מר mar "drop" (cf. Isaias 40:15) and ים yam "sea". This translation was subsequently rendered stella maris ("star of the sea") due to scribal error or as a result of 3rd century vowel shifts, from which comes the Virgin Mary's title Star of the Sea."
Still getting "I am Robert Graves and I know the true unifying principle behind all the world myths" vibes from this one.
I bow to your scholarship.
No New Testament writers refer to Mary as "mother of god"/theotokos. The title is not attested before the 3rd century (and was formally adopted at the Council of Ephesus in 431).
Ack! You are right about this! The Sub Tuum Praesidium was the first reference to Mary as the mother of god. It was in a Christian hymn found in Egypt and dated to the third century. Editing my comment!
>If we’re celebrating Columbus Day at all, then it has to be because we’re attributing downstream effects to him, in which case he had many downstream effects but these were (hopefully) overwhelmed by the good effects of the US and all other modern New World countries.
Although you also have to apply the Billionaire Replacability logic here; in the counter-factual world, how long would it have taken another country (including the modern American nations made of unconquered natives) to invent vaccines or w/e, and what else of value might we have gotten from those unique cultures surviving to modernity?
Realistically the Columbus-replaceability scenario is that instead of Columbus's voyage in 1492 we get someone else in the decades shortly afterwards, probably Spanish or Portuguese or English.
Then we get the same European powers colonising the Americas on roughly the same timeline. Maybe not in the same geography, so we might get an English-speaking South America and a Spanish-speaking North America separated by a French-speaking Mexico, but history would mostly play out in a similar way.
Maybe, but only decades later is not certain. I think this discussion has overlooked that Columbus was, by all accounts, a brilliant navigator if a very poor governor. His major contribution was expanding Spain’s navigational knowledge.
“ The admiral’s navigational genius showed itself immediately, for they sailed southward to the Canary Islands, off the northwest African mainland, rather than sailing due west to the islands of the Azores. The westerlies prevailing in the Azores had defeated previous attempts to sail to the west, but in the Canaries the three ships could pick up the northeast trade winds; supposedly, they could trust to the westerlies for their return.”
“ Michele de Cuneo, deeply impressed by this unerring return, remarked that “since Genoa was Genoa there was never born a man so well equipped and expert in navigation as the said lord Admiral.”
Though his plan was also based on very bad math. It’s not true that the world being flat was a common belief. Almost the opposite - Columbus estimated the Earth’s circumference was far smaller than commonly believed and therefore a trip across the Atlantic to Asia was possible. If the Americas didn’t exist his crew would have perished in the middle of the ocean. They were already short on supplies by the time they made landfall.
So Columbus was a combination of superb navigational ability and batshit crazy ideology that led him to take a voyage everyone else knew scientifically (Asia being 3x the distance Columbus claimed and the Americas being unknown) didn’t make any sense.
Sure eventually someone else probably would have eventually made the journey. I just wouldn’t sell Columbus short in what is fair to be labeled Europe’s rediscovery of the Americas.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Christopher-Columbus/The-first-voyage
I'm not sure voyages to the north would have plausibly sparked the same level of interest for economic reason, chiefly labor supply.
The typical playbook for colonization practiced at the time was to enter a land, exploit existing power dynamics among the native nobility to gain a foothold in society, and then exploit the local labor. The Spanish would, for example, find an existing population, marry into the non-ruling nobility, incite civil conflict to overthrow the ruling nobility alongside their new allies, and then send the lower class laborers to mine for resources to send back to Spain.
Integrating into and exploiting existing class structure gave the colonizers quick access to local knowledge and allowed them to subjugate the main populous with relatively few men (using their allies to supply the rest needed).
Compare that to North America where settlements were less concentrated and population density was significantly lower. That led to a totally different colonization model eventually being developed (importing slave labor from Africa). Plus the need to build settlements from scratch (not an easy thing to do).
Given an extra 100 years could a similar result have been achieved by starting from modern day Canada? Sure, probably. But I doubt with the same swift eagerness Columbus's voyages ignited.
Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet traveling to India from Portugal the old-fashioned way (well, the eastward way-- it was still pretty new) almost certainly runs into Brazil in 1500 while making a wide turn around Africa, regardless of what Columbus does.
TIL thanks! I’m somewhat surprised ships might end up so far out of their way but it does make sense with the winds pushing them that way. Best argument I’ve seen so far for if it wasn’t Columbus it would have been someone else.
From Wikipedia:
Historians have long argued whether Cabral was Brazil's discoverer, and whether the discovery was accidental or intentional. The first question has been settled by the observation that the few, cursory encounters by explorers before him were barely noticed at the time and contributed nothing to the future development and history of the land which would become Brazil, the sole Portuguese-speaking nation in the Americas. On the second question, no definite consensus has been formed, and the intentional discovery hypothesis lacks solid proof. Nevertheless, although he was overshadowed by contemporary explorers, historians consider Cabral to be a major figure of the Age of Discovery.
Well, sure, but then we'd be having the same argument about the holiday honoring whoever that person is.
I was more thinking about replacing the class of Columbus-like-historical-events, which I think Columbus here is just a stand-in for.
>(including the modern American nations made of unconquered natives) to invent vaccines or w/e
Thousands of years, if not longer (if they remained uncontacted by the outside world). They experienced very little economic development in the thousands of years before colonization and had absolutely none of the intellectual tradition that led to the science that led to vaccines. They would almost certainly have to undergo significant selection for higher IQ before the prospect of an advanced scientific establishment was realistic for uncolonized America.
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they weren't hunter gatherers starting from nothing who used some significant feature of the American environment to suddenly become scientifically advanced. They inherited an European intellectual tradition dating back ultimately thousands of years, and received some of the most competent and intelligent people from Europe to carry out the most important of the work.
Having anything resembling productive scientific practice for the natives (without first undergoing significant selection for intelligence) is an extremely tall order - achieving what European Americans did within this millennium is completely absurd. The only possible way the British not colonizing North America doesn't lead to monumental losses in scientific and technological accomplishments is either if some other advanced European power colonizes North America instead, or if Europeans all went to some other British colony like Australia and that became more or less what the US did (though the enormous the distance Europe and the lack of non-desert land probably significantly limits the extent to which Australia could have developed to be like the US even if they got all the good European immigrants).
When colonization occurred, most of the colonized hunter-gatherer peoples were not experiencing intellectual or economic development. People have this crazy idea that everyone was right on the verge of rapid economic and scientific growth but the colonizing Europeans ruined it all. This has no basis in reality - the most likely long-term outcome for uncontacted hunter-gatherer societies would be to continue on at exactly the same trajectory that had been for thousands of years. The Europeans weren't hunter-gatherers when they started colonizing, they were already people with the intellectual tradition needed for advanced scientific research to develop.
I think you're misreading my quote/the article, the thought experiment was how long would it take the world to get vaccines if an American hadn't invented them first.
The Assyrians empire had been gone for a Millennia when the events of the Maccabees happened. They were fighting the Selucids who were persanised Greeks.
Interestingly Ethiopian Christians have their own version of the books of the Maccabees
The Seleucids are sometimes (especially in old fashioned retellings) called "Syrians", which may be part of the confusion. I'm pretty sure the first children's book I remember reading about the Chanukah story did that.
Possibly because "Seleucid" is a mouthful for a kid and "Greek" or "Macedonian" makes it harder to draw the distinction between them and the Ptolemies, where "Syria" and "Egypt" is clearer. (Though there's no getting around having to write "Antiochus".)
The contemporary Romans, IIRC, often referred to the Seleucids as Syrians, probably because their power base was in Syria.
Not endorsing punching, but another issue surrounding Arianism and the doctrine of the Trinity involves the nature of Christian salvation as generally believed back then, and still in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, i.e. theosis. (Drawing heavily on stuff I've read from David Bentley Hart here).
The idea of theosis, that "God became man so that man might become god" involves the idea that when you follow Christ, you can participate in the Divine Nature. So if the Son is created as Arius claimed, the nature you participate in by following Christ is infinitely remote from that of the absolute origin of all good. And if the Holy Spirit by which you participate in the nature of Christ is created, or really anything other than God Himself, it is, again, infinitely remote from the Divine Nature itself and not capable of bridging the gap from humanity to God.
So in order for the thing which Christians thought they meant by salvation (union with God by following Christ) to make any sense, it was necessary that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all be equally divine, and have their essence be identical to that of God. Supposedly that was one of the more important arguments people made for the Trinity in the 4th century theological debates.
Similar considerations required Christ to be "fully God and fully human, two natures without separation or confusion" (the subject of all of those debates about "natures" and "wills" and "energies"), so that the nature which Christ has joined to God really is the same as our nature, and the nature to which he has joined ours really is the Divine Nature, and so those natures really have been joined in Christ without obliterating one or the other. Basically, all of those early theological and christological debates to some extent revolved around the idea of making sure the process of theosis was intelligible.
I could have misstated some of the stuff above, but I think it's in the right general direction.
Something bothers me about the "only tried to find a new route to Asia, so ending up in America instead doesn't count" thing; like, really? it may not fit the exact mission statement but "accidentally finds entirely new rich land" seems like a very successful outcome of an exploration voyage
If some scientist had a crazy theory, and did an experiment that ended up disproving it but also incidentally discovering entirely new physics, I think we would still be pretty impressed.
Agreed. It's notable that Columbus, upon discovering the West Indies, decided to make the rest of his career there. He thought he was a lot closer to China than he was, but he didn't continue sailing around looking for someone who could sell him silk.
His backers in Spain also didn't need to believe it was Asia to start funding dozens of competitors along with his own future journeys. That claim was largely dismissed.
What fascinating stuff!
Didn't Columbus think he had discovered India?
"The Indies", not India. The Indies was a pretty general term in those days. He seems to have thought he'd discovered new islands east of Japan... which was true, he just underestimated how far east of Japan they were.
There's a really interesting 16th century map I recommend you look up entitled "Universale Descrittione di Tutta la Terra Conosciuta Fin Qui". Made after when certain facts about the shape of North and South America had been established, but it shows that for some the question "is America Asia?" hadn't *entirely* disappeared.
It shows Quivira (in reality a Wichita settlement-area in Kansas) as being about the same distance overland from Tibet as Paris is from Portugal.
In Peru October 12th used to be a holiday but now it's a mostly forgotten day (and renamed "Día de los Pueblos Indígenas")
"Jesus as the Messiah is not one of Jews’ top objections to Christianity"
I don't spend much time debating Jews on Christianity, but the objections that SAS lists strike more as good debating points in a modern Judaism vs. Christianity forensics competition than as explanations for the original antipathy between Christians and Jews.
Claims that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah were the primary source of disagreement within the first few decades after Jesus. Within the lifetimes of the people who knew and interacted with Jesus, The temple (and therefore the priesthood and the sacrifices) were destroyed by the Romans, and the Christians began conducting their own sacrifices with a priesthood that they claimed was in the same lineage. Then within the lifetimes of the children of the people who knew Jesus, the Jews were kicked out of their homeland, and their remaining rituals were suppressed. The Jewish religion went into crisis and changed drastically from a religion centering animal sacrifice to one centering religious debate, all in the shadow of losing everything. Meanwhile the Christians were continually reenacting the sacrifice of the Messiah to God.
Whatever the current status of Christian-Jewish relations might be, I don't blame the first few generations of rabbinic Judaism for being pissed at the Christian weirdos.
I'm getting this from some Jewish laws (can't remember exact specifics) giving more "privileges" to Muslims than Christians (eg Jews may worship at mosques if a synagogue isn't available) with the express reasoning that Muslims are good at monotheism and non-idolatry and Christians aren't.
Islam came along seven centuries later than Christianity, though, and was more palatable in recognising "people of the Book" (being the Scriptures) and going back to pure monotheism with no allegations of divinity of Christ, as well as recognising Jewish prophets like Moses.
So there had been plenty of time for animosity between Jews and Christians to build up before Muslims came along. The Acts of the Apostles, written sometime in the late 1st century, recounts the alleged origins of the church and there is a lot of conflict and confusion between the new preaching and the Jewish religious establishment; St Peter and others go to preach in the Porch of Solomon and are regularly hauled up before the Sanhedrin to be questioned on what they are teaching and why. St. Paul later comes into conflict with what is called the Judaizers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaizers
Those who believed that converts still had to be circumcised and live by the law of Moses, etc.
For outsiders, there was little distinction between the 'Christians' and the Jews, they were considered a Jewish sect, as in the dispute in Philippi when St. Paul exorcised a slave-girl who was a medium/fortune teller and her owners were unhappy about this:
"19 But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. 20 And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, “These men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. 21 They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.” 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods. 23 And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. 24 Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks."
The Athenians were a bit more welcoming, due to the novelty:
"16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. 17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. 18 Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him. And some said, “What does this babbler wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. 19 And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? 20 For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.” 21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new."
There was more trouble in Corinth:
"12 But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, 13 saying, “This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.” 14 But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint. 15 But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I refuse to be a judge of these things.” 16 And he drove them from the tribunal. 17 And they all seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the tribunal. But Gallio paid no attention to any of this."
And finally back in Jerusalem, and the problems of reconciling the treatment of the Jewish converts and the Gentile ones:
"And they said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed. They are all zealous for the law, 21 and they have been told about you that you teach all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or walk according to our customs. 22 What then is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come. 23 Do therefore what we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow; 24 take these men and purify yourself along with them and pay their expenses, so that they may shave their heads. Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself also live in observance of the law. 25 But as for the Gentiles who have believed, we have sent a letter with our judgment that they should abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality.” 26 Then Paul took the men, and the next day he purified himself along with them and went into the temple, giving notice when the days of purification would be fulfilled and the offering presented for each one of them."
So the outside world considered this a squabble amongst Jewish sects, while there was a real tension going on about what direction the early Church would take - conform to the Jewish ritual laws, or appeal to the Gentiles?
In this case you are correct that the earliest Jewish sources unanimously treated Islam as monotheistic, while most medieval Jewish sources did not afford the same status to Christianity. However, it is important to remember that religions aren't Platonic forms - within "Judaism" there have been huge changes over time, and huge amounts of variance between those known as "Jews" even at the same time (where the dogmas of one are the heresies of the other and vice versa). It is important to look at primary texts, or solid secondary ones to understand the perspective of at least those authors and to some extent regnant attitudes in their times. Simply comparing the reception of Jesus to the reception of Schneerson as though both encountered the same Platonic form of "Judaism" is not very helpful, in my opinion.
I agree that the divide probably originated from the question of whether Jesus is the Mashiach. But it is important to specify what is counted as "the divide" and who made it. Christians are often tempted to ask about the Jew's motivation for that divide, but it may be a mistake. It is enough that whether Jesus is the Mashiach was a deal-breaking issue for early Christians to cause the divide, even if it was just a forgivable mistake from the Jewish perspective. (All the relevant Talmudic material known to me is about how Christians are heretics, how Jesus was preaching idolatry, etc. Nothing about how dare he claim to be the Mashiach)
Doesn't the Gospel of John (5:18 and 10:33) imply that the Jewish opposition to Jesus was driven by his claims of divinity?
This is complicated. While the Temple stood, Christ-believing Jews continued to worship there, and it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to stop them. After the destruction of the Temple, church and synagogue decisively separated, but one has to keep in mind that both communities were rife with internal disagreement. I think the ultimate rejection by Christians of Jewish dietary laws is likely to have been important, but there are also important social factors: the fall of the Temple required a reassessment of what it meant to be a Jew.
Interesting. The Talmudic story/tradition is that some decades after the destraction of the temple Raban Gamliel the second added to the prayer a passage asking God to destroy "the heretics" and "your enemies and haters". If I remember correctly, it is explained as an attempt to make the heretics (=early Christians?) feel unwelcome in the synagogue.
> Most Jewish children know lots of Hanukkah songs that sound suspiciously like Christmas carols.
FWIW I was raised Jewish and don’t know any Hanukkah songs that sound even *remotely* like Christmas carols. The Hanukkah songs I learned all had truly terrible melodies based on earlier Yiddish folk tunes (often in a weird “Altered Dorian” musical scale).
I was jealous of Christians for their actually-good songs, many (oddly) having been written by Jewish composers.
…but I’m in my 50s, so maybe this is a recent change?
I’m thinking of songs like “Oh, Chanukah”, “I Have a Little Dreidel” and “Sevivon”. What songs are YOU thinking of?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Chanukah
"Oh Chanukah" isn't terrible! Wistful and slightly sad, yes. Altered-dorian? Yes. But it is not terrible (unless all klezmer music is similarly terrible, as it uses very much the same melodic and harmonic toolkit) with the usual disclaimer of taste being subjective.
I'm mostly annoyed that "I Have a Little Dreidel" convinced generations of English-speaking Jewish children (including me) that clay was ever a reasonable material to make a top out of. In the Yiddish original it's lead ('blay").
(For which there are other reasons one might not choose to make a children's toy out of it, but there were fewer material choices and I don't know when heavy metal poisoning became common knowledge.)
I feel as if the translator, who was clearly willing to work loose, could have tried a little harder to come up with a plausible rhyme. The teetotum, the dreidel's precursor, is described as being made of "wood, bone, ivory, [or] metal", so there are options.
(I also agree that maybe Irving Berlin could have tossed off *one* Chanukah song in his 1200+ song career.)
Sure, but the real tragedy is a later verse:
"My dreidel is so playful / it loves to dance and spin / a happy game of dreidel / come play now, let's begin"
"Come play now let's begin"? We couldn't do better than that?
Both that and “now dreidel I shall play” have word orderings which suggests the person who wrote it wasn’t a native English speaker.
(As Irving Berlin isn't available perhaps we can get Adam Sandler to write another song or two...)
Maoz Tsur.
Also, some noticeable fraction of the time, "made it out of clay" had "and throw it in the bay" added or substituted (in the way that kids do that sort of thing to songs).
I don't recall anything that was stolen from a Christmas song, and Chanukkah bushes were a thing you hear about on a slow news day that people laugh at.
While I concede you might sing Ma'oz Tzur similarly to a christmas carol (I haven't heard many) Ma'oz Tzur is pretty old
Late to the party, just sending appreciation for mentioning that a surprising amount of classic Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers.
Also, I wasn’t aware there were ‘a lot’ of Hannukah songs, let alone many that sound like Christmas carols (which again, were dominantly written by Jews).
Some of the generic Christmas songs(like Rudolph the red nosed reindeer) from the last 50-100 years were written by American Jews. Christmas carols(like Silent Night) are religious and were not written by Jews.
"[...] the series of epidemics and slave plantation systems that killed most of the natives alive in 1492."
Please forgive my pedantry.
Were the epidemics fast enough to actually kill more than 50% of the natives alive in 1492?
Was the slave plantation system fast enough to actually kill more than 1% of the natives alive in 1492?
While these things definitely happen and definitely were horrible, I don't think they were as fast as you seem to make it. Didn't you mean killing their descendants?
I’d love to see someone with a background in this question answer Emilio. A quick lookup on Wikipedia seems to confirm it though:
“A specific example was what followed Cortés' invasion of Mexico. Before his arrival, the Mexican population is estimated to have been around 25 to 30 million. Fifty years later, the Mexican population was reduced to 3 million, mainly by infectious disease.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics#Effect_on_population_numbers
I'm no expert, but my experience is that earlier historians tended to dismiss the higher casualty estimates as hyperbole, while in more recent decades a closer look at the archeological data has led to sharp upward revisions in just how badly Old World diseases devastated immunologically naive New World populations.
"All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites."
There are two related claims here that should be distinguished:
(1) Being an anti-holiday was one aspect of the origins of our best holidays.
(2) Being an anti-holiday was the primary cause of our best holidays.
Most of the discussion seems to be centered around (1). I don't know enough about the history to determine if this is true or not. But (2) seems to be obviously false for Christmas, Easter, and Hanukkah, and true for Indigenous People's Day.
Whether or not the date for Christmas or the symbols of Easter or the prominence of Hanukkah were chosen to compete with other holidays, they each have something important and specific that they're celebrating. Maybe, if Christianity originated in China, Christmas would be celebrated at the Chinese New Year instead of Winter Solstice and have dragons instead of reindeer. But Christians would still have a big holiday celebrating the birth of Christ.
I don't think that Indigenous People's Day has something similar. Would it exist, if Columbus Day never had?
A correction to Valjean's comment under heading 3:
>The highest-profile modern followers of Arian theology are the LDS and JW movements, which I'm grateful to note are pretty broadly acknowledged to be outside the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity.
>or Mormonism (this is the really big deal about why Mormons are not considered Christians even though they say they follow Christ and accept the Bible and all the rest of it).
LDS/"Mormons" are not Arians. It's understandable to make that mistake -- the church originates from the same historical context as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who pretty clearly believe that Jesus is a created being, and is similarly outside mainline Protestantism -- but we are not. The "Mormon" heresy is in fact opposite: the belief not that Jesus was created, but that man was not created. Joseph Smith (LDS founder) says, speaking of the spirits of man: "Is it logical to say that the intelligence of spirits is immortal, and yet that it had a beginning? The intelligence of spirits had not beginning, neither will it have an end. That is good logic. That which has a beginning may have an end. There never was a time when there were not spirits". He holds that man is essentially uncreated, though he is elevated and ennobled by God as Father. Man, then, is indeed on a level with Christ -- this is the heretical thought -- but not because both are created, but because neither is. LDS thought diverges from mainline Protestantism not because Christ is brought too low in the Arian manner but because man is elevated too high; it is understood that every man is a God in the making and that God Himself was once a man like ourselves. But none of these beings are created, all are eternal.
It is alright if one considers that all this puts "Mormons" outside the umbrella of Christianity, but it is incorrect to say that LDS doctrine is Arian.
I was going to say something similar. It is difficult for people from the LDS tradition and from Protestant / Catholic traditions to understand each other when talking about the Trinity. It's not that we have different answers to the questions - we have completely different questions. To me, it looks like Trinitarians, Arians, and Modalists all assume a Platonist understanding of the nature of God that does not appear in Jewish thought before Maimonides. I've written about this [actually it's not on my blog yet, let me fix that] here: http://thechaostician.com/so-you-dont-understand-the-trinity/
> Confused, well-meaning adherents of these systems, I would engage warmly. Leaders who are actively seeking to lead more and more people astray with their anti-Biblical nonsense, I wouldn't mind seeing punched in some circumstances.
This sounds sort of like a call for violence against (some members of) religious minority groups. Less of this please.
Platonism appeared in Jewish thought long before Maimonides. See Philo of Alexandria in particular, but this was generally an important (though highly contentious) thread in Jewish thought around the time of Jesus.
I should have said "did not become dominant in Jewish thought". I have read some Maimonides, and many of the objections he addresses come from rabbis who believe in an embodied God and angels. I have read effectively nothing in Jewish theology between Maccabees and Maimonides, so it's not surprising I missed Philo.
Thank you. You said it better than I did. Key references in LDS scripture would be Doctrine and Covenants 93:29 and Abraham 3:23.
I might also reference Romans 8 and John 17. Latter-day Saints are odd, but not really Arian. We also get accused of being Gnostic, or whatever other heresies, but if you want to be accurate, we're our own thing.
Luckily, the Father in LDS theology has made lots of accommodation for you Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, or whatever other "heresies" to be saved anyway! I'd be happy to send a couple of nice young missionaries, but they won't really know or care that much about "begotten not created" or how many angels dance on the head of a pin.
"they won't really know or care that much about "begotten not created"
Don't worry, they'll learn.
"A possible counterexample: my family descends from various Jews who emigrated from Russia and Poland because of pogroms and then interbred. The people who sparked those pogroms (let’s say the Tsar) caused the current generation of my family to exist. Should we celebrate the Tsar, even though all he ever did was try to ruin our ancestors’ lives? And did Columbus - who really just wanted a quicker route to Asia plus maybe to find the Garden of Eden - really “aim at” creating America in any way more profound than the Tsar “aimed at” creating my family?
May God bless and keep the Tsar far away from us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZFnKZcids&t=4s
Re artificial holidays Japan had a national (bank!) Holiday celebrating the 50th anniversary of the shinkansen.
This feels like the perfect holiday to me: celebrates an unironic point of national pride, is a good mix of top-down (decreed by the government) and bottom-up (celebrating a cool thing that's still part of people's daily lives), and involves fast trains.
As an aside, "keeping track random of countries' one-off holidays over the last thirty years" is an understated part of working at a hedge fund.
So there is/was a sect fractured from Christianity which denies the eternity of Christ, and (per Wikipedia) the Trinity altogether, which in turn would make their doctrine a lot more compatible with Judaism, possibly furthering inter-faith dialog etc.
And then they make the terrible branding decision of calling themselves the Arians.
(Even better, per Wikipedia, there are even semi-Arians.)
Columbus is often accused of being wrong about his chances of reaching China if there were no pesky Americas in the way. People say no fifteenth century ship could go that far. I think they are wrong- the winds and currents would favor him, and fifteenth century caravels were pretty good ships with plenty of room for food and water.
On the other hand, in 1492 every political economy on Earth was based on slavery. Socialists used to know this- see 'Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism'. But as a cynical appeal to bourgeois sentimentality, they now pretend to be shocked that the slaver Columbus brought slavery to the slave-trading Americas.
I think Pessoa said all that had to be said about Chris Com:
The Columbuses
Other will have to have
What we'll have to lose.
Others could find
What, in our discovery,
Was found, or not found,
As destiny bound.
But what them does not stroke
Is the Magic that evokes
The Faraway and makes it History.
And thus their glory
Is a just halo lent
By a borrowed light.
Os Colombos
Outros haverão de ter
O que houvermos de perder.
Outros poderão achar
O que, no nosso encontrar,
Foi achado, ou não achado,
Segundo o destino dado.
Mas o que a eles não toca
É a Magia que evoca
O Longe e faz dele história.
E por isso a sua glória
É justa auréola dada
Por uma luz emprestada.
I think the best example of decentralized organically arising holiday going mainstream, at least in the US, would be Juneteenth.
Depends entirely on what you mean as 'organically' - the federal holiday designation arose out of the protests and riots of the latest great unpleasantness and it's kinda insulting to the work of the activists and strifemongers who brought that about to call it "organic".
If you mean the longstanding Texas African American tradition, then, yes, *among that group*.
"punishing people who don’t give you gold after you take over their country seems pretty bad regardless of what the punishment was."
Wasn't this the entire point of taking over countries prior to about 1850 (and arguably after)? It was usually just called "tribute" or "taxes" or something, but the reason you took over countries was so that the peasants there would give their taxes to you, rather than the previous overlord...
I play to deploy that argument the next time a Congress for which I didn't vote wants to raise my taxes. "Yo! It's evil to punish me for not handing over my gold after you take over my country!"
"whether Jesus was himself divine, or whether he was a created being; like us, albeit greater. This is a point on which Scripture is emphatic,"
No Scripture is not unambiguously empathic on this point and that the reason Nicaea had to use non-Scriptural language "homoousion" to claim that Arias was wrong.
As for who cares, Protestants are full Nicaeans just like Catholics and Orthodox.
Eggs almost certainly aren’t connected to Eostre—they have a long history of traditional use among Slavic, Latin, and Arab Christians as well as Germanic ones.
I think the importance of Arianism vs Nicene trinitarianism is actually more that, on traditional Christian explanations, for the atonement to work, Jesus must be fully divine. Otherwise, the incarnation doesn’t unify the divine nature with the human one (thinking of Irenaeus’ “nature based” treatment of atonement here).
LDS leader-type person here preaching non-trinitarian theology. Hoping not to be punched today!
"By the 1900s, it started to become a commercial holiday like Christmas, with Hanukkah gifts and decorations appearing in stores and Jewish Women's magazines printing articles on holiday decorations, children's celebrations, and gift giving."
I think this shows that whatever the origins of national holidays, the successful ones will be monetised to the last degree. See the way (St.) Valentine's Day has become a big holiday, and compare that with Columbus Day. As various commenters have pointed out, Columbus Day would really be a bigger deal if it was a day that people put models of the three ships on their mantlepieces and went out to eat Mexican Pizza.
"We should celebrate the people responsible for our society / our birth" just becomes more nonsensical the more it's scrutinized. Every human had a good day-long window to get the right egg fertilized in their mom but the process by which your specific sperm was generated, and won the race from there, was completely chaotic.
(This is why alternate universe / time-travel stories where the same people are somehow conceived in different realities don't make any sense, if you want to nitpick.)
Yeah, it doesn't make sense unless there's some force outside the understanding of modern science which can guide one particular sperm to one particular egg across all timelines. It's hard to come up with an explanation without resorting to "destiny" or something like that.
So people shouldn't celebrate their own birthdays unless they were in vitro then?
Many historical precedents have shown the expansion of holidays and gradual phasing out of the old one through emphasis by elites or other powerful interested parties. Often syncretic blending process of beliefs happened over a few generations was the mechanism of change.
In this way, I'd think to expand it into an Exploration Day or Explorers day. Just like how on the Eiffel Tower they have the names of many prominent scientists, it'd be great to just directly name the holiday for the trait or feat we want to focus on and keep all the old ones and add new ones. This way no Italian ethnic enclave group misses out on celebrating their intercontinental slaver, thief, murderer, lunatic, and explorer of choice and historical happenstance.
I think if we tried to pin down one person for Labour Day, we might run into some level of controversy with a given historical Labour leader for this or that reason. So a generalised holiday works well.
We could add in Neil Armstrong, that russian guy who was the first in space, maybe the dog and chimp launched into orbit too, Sacagawea with Lewis and Clark, Magellan, Captain Cook the evil bastard who shot first and asked questions later, Leif Ericcson and his proto-jamestown, that mountain climber guy on Everest, the guy who went to the north pole or Antartica or whatever, all those lunatics flinging themselves into the unknown and undone etc. etc. to pick many historical figures while keeping Columbus. Just pour in more people to dilute him with more baddies and explorers.
Then we can have some combined geography, history, science, etc. programs in all the primary schools and early secondary schools to support it and kids can learn and get a day off from school. Maybe a program for fitness and encourage people to go hiking, see nature, take up canoeing or kayaking or something, etc. We can even go around to have a new round of statue building with diorama collections of various explorers from different eras in a single statue. Maybe a new mount rushmore project in a less controversial location? Maybe pair it up with new NASA/SpaceX missions? It'd be great!
On the Chesterton theme, let’s remember that Arias was not just any presbyter in the Alexandrina Church. He was a popular influential preacher (said t have introduced hymn-singing in to Christian worship) AND the most important catechist in the largest most cosmopolitan and intellectually sophisticated city in the Empire. As such he would be in intimate dialogue with Neoplatonists who were accustomed to thinking about a metaphysical One from which emanated other entities that eventually filtered down to some lowly demi-urge who actually created the world. “There was a time when the Son was not” would have made a lot more sense to a Neoplatonist covert than gobbledygook about a co-eternal one of three Persons.
I was surprised that there wasn’t more discussion of the assumption that Columbus was Italian. Although I haven’t heard Americans question this, my impression is that there is quite a bit of skepticism in Western Europe. You’ll get questions like “Why was his Spanish so much better than his Genoese?” and “Why use Hebrew in the letters to his sons?” (hinting at Iberian crypto-Jew origins, AFAICT).
“Non native citizens of the US”
LOL
If you’re not a native citizen of the US, what are you?
These kinds of statements are always time-sensitive.
I was born in the geographical United States. Which is a nation that has existed for over 2 centuries.
No one is a native anything! We all came from the ocean.
I do find the idea that 60% of Americans don't answer "American" for ethnicity kind of absurd. I know that is mostly an appalchian thing, but in my experienc eis absolutely the truth for most people of the 3rd or 4th generation. Often their heritage is pretty mixed and fairly irrelevant compared ot their identity.
> My best counterexample is 9-11, which seems to have semi-organically become a nationwide day of remembrance, although realistically that seems to mostly involve newspapers publishing “It’s the somethingth anniversary of 9-11 today, never forget!”. Any more . . . exuberant . . . commemorations tend to be considered insensitive (eg this).
I have a memory of reading an article about the Japanese holiday celebrating the atom bombing of Japan. In my memory, it came from Azrael's collection of essays on Outpost Nine, but archives of that page don't seem to contain it.
Anyway, a big theme of the piece was that (1) the holiday is viewed like any other as a day on which you get together with your friends and throw a party; (2) WWII veterans tend to find this offensive; and (3) their opinion doesn't really matter because there are barely any of them, so they have to just observe the holiday their own way privately with each other.
Mohammad was a murderous slaver and almost nobody objects to him being basically worshipped by hundreds of millions of people (to the point that murdering people for insulting him isn't a rare occurence).
As a distant relative of Vlad the impaler I approve of his (and Eastern Europeans in general) methods of repelling Islam and allowing the enlightenment to incubate in the west so we can now have this conversation.
Heavy, something for another thread. Has there already been one here on this?
I thought that December 25 was chosen for Jesus’ birthday, not only because of the solstice and correspondence to pagan celebrations, etc. but also so that then, the “brit” (ritual circumcision) would occur on Jan 1, which occurs 8 days after birth (count the day of birth, given Jewish days begin at sundown, etc.). This then puts the naming of Yeshua on the very significant solar calendar day of the first of the year. This makes sense, because Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on Jan 7. This strongly implies a dispute among the split church as to whether to set Jesus’ birthday or circumcision day as Jan 1, and then which to celebrate: birthday or circumcision day. Up until the revision of the Latinate Mass, apparently Jan 1 as a festival of the Circumcision of Christ was celebrated by the Catholic Church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Circumcision_of_Christ?wprov=sfti1
But it is now an “Octave Day” celebrating Mary. In any case, the fortuitous ability to have both days overlap pagan holidays was surely a bonus.
January 1 wasn't a pagan holiday. It was the day on which new consuls took up their office, which is why it came to be regarded as the first day of the new year, but there's no indication that people in general held a celebration then.
Also, Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on January 7 because the Orthodox still use the Julian Calendar, which lags behind the Gregorian Calendar by a couple of weeks. It's got nothing to do with any convoluted process of people arguing over whether to celebrate birthday or circumcision day or which one to put on which date. Plus, the logic doesn't even make sense: why would the Orthodox setting Jesus' birthday on Jan 1 cause them to celebrate his birthday a week later?
I think that the real reason the "Arian heresy" was so important was that it was incompatible with Neo-Platonism, whose metaphysics logically require the existence of exactly one creator God--no more, no less--yet a God which was a trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Orthodox Christology was based on Plato's conception of God, not on the scriptures, which didn't even posit a Trinity.
(IIRC, all the verses referring to the Holy Spirit either refer to divine inspiration, just as in the Old Testament, or aren't found in any texts from before the time of the Arian controversy. Also, we know from letters, and from the rest of the New Testament, that the formula "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit" wasn't used regularly for baptisms in at least the first 2 centuries of Christianity. I've twice read that The Holy Spirit out-competed God the Mother to fill out the necessary Trinity. IIRC the worship of Mary, Mother of God, was strongest in those Coptic areas which had worshipped God the Mother as the third person of the Trinity circa the 3rd thru 5th centuries. But I can't recall where I read this. If anyone has references to the early Christian Trinity of God the Father, the Mother, and the Son, please reply.)
If the scriptures had been "emphatic" about the Nicaean conception of God, there wouldn't have been any argument. If the matter had been theologically important to Jesus, he could've cleared it up in a few sentences. The distinction isn't as simple as "Christ is God or he isn't"; it really is incoherent metaphysics. There's only a contradiction between Jesus being God, and being begotten by God, when "God" is defined using Platonist metaphysics. Platonists insist that "God" must be /defined/ by an essence. Jesus is thus either of the same essence/substance as God, or is not God by definition, /and anything that is not God is by definition not perfect/. And if Jesus wasn't perfect, then your sins aren't forgiven and you're going to Hell.
Arianism WAS a big deal. The "fall of the Roman Empire" and Europe's entry into its second Dark Age? Was caused by the Orthodox Christians in their frenzy to exterminate Arians. The Western Roman Empire was churning along pretty well under the Goths and Vandals with little cultural change after the Arian Odoacer, with the support of the Roman Senate, expelled the Western Emperor Nepos in 476. Most of the art and architecture made under them was indistinguishable from that made under the Romans. It was Justinian's 20-year crusade against Arianism which physically destroyed the people and infrastructure of the Western Roman Empire, and the economy of the Eastern Empire, nearly a century after the "fall" of the last Western emperor. It was Charlemagne's later 30-year crusade against Arianism which finished the task of exterminating the Arians. They had ruled continental Europe in 500 AD, and were completely eliminated by 800 AD, as was almost everything they wrote; and the people who killed them, were all Christians who specifically said they killed them because they were heretics.
"Christianity without the divinity of Christ, as a person of the Triune God, is not Christianity. The highest-profile modern followers of Arian theology are the LDS and JW movements, which I'm grateful to note are pretty broadly acknowledged to be outside the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity."
LDS are not Arians. We believe that Christ is fully divine and that His Father is fully divine. We do believe that they are separate beings, and if you want to argue that this makes us polytheistic or "beyond the pale of historic, Biblical Christianity," you are entitled to your opinion, I don't really care. But if we care about getting facts right it simply is not the case that LDS believe in Arianism.
I am grateful to Deiseach for so clearly explicating the reasons I should stop tarrying at agnosticism and go full-blown atheist. I have never quite seen the truly alien heart of Christianity with such clarity, so thanks for that.
Better to be hot or cold rather than luke-warm:
"To the Church in Laodicea
14 “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation.
15 “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! 16 So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. 17 For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. 19 Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent."
Just out of curiosity, was it (1) religion (2) ivermectin (3) calendars (4) all the above that I enlightened you to move?
Christianity is not *cuddly*. It's not about *niceness*. It's about joy, love and eternity, but it is not any "eat pray love" slop where you can pick a bouquet of daisies from different faiths here and there of the pretty bits to put in a charming glass vase on your coffee table.
Specifically the comment highlighted by Scott here.
About Arianism? Well, glad you decided strange Christology was the point of departure for you, at least that is intellectually respectable.
Love it.
> whether Columbus was good or bad for the world, he was presumably good for us
I don't think you need to qualify this, and I think it goes straight to the real point we should be debating; I think Columbus (and the subsequent European colonisation of the Americas for which he is in this context a synecdoche) was absolutely a great thing for the world, and for everyone alive today.
I think that modern civilisation is better than barbarism, I think that literacy is better than illiteracy, I think that science is better than ignorance, I think that modern medicine is better than witch doctors, I think that a steady food supply is better than periodic famine, I think that no slavery and no human sacrifice is better than slavery and human sacrifice, I think that being rich is better than being poor, and I think that modern civilised values are better than the values of prehistoric tribes.
I think that the slow but steady spread of all these good things from their origin points to other parts of the world is the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of man, and that it should be celebrated. I think that everyone, regardless of their ancestry, who lives in the Americas today is a lot better off for it, and those of Native American ancestry should be most grateful of all.
I think native Americans were literally better off before colonization. They did not evolved to live in modern industrialized society even less than Europeans did and they do not fare well. They may literally have more material wealth than they did before colonization, but I think living their traditional lifestyles and practising their traditional culture is FAR more important than any material wealth. America was probably better off for everyone else overall, but I think the natives would be much better *from their own perspective* if they had never been conquered.
The vulgar American materialism you obviously subscribe to doesn't make sense considering how unhappy and dissatisfied people are in the US in spite of monumental gains in material wealth over the past century, because having more stuff isn't that great of a predictor of contentment. Wealthier countries tend to be happier than poorer ones, but this is HUGELY confounded by the fact that the sort of people who make wealthy countries also tend to make safe and functional modern societies, and that poorer countries aren't living traditional lifestyles, they're living low-quality modern lifestyles.
Just came here to say thanks for the discussion. I liked it better than the post and have learned a lot.
Scott’s writing is great. His audience is pretty damn interesting too. Amazingly well informed on a wide swatch of knowledge as well. This is a great place to find the next book to read.
>Dia de la Raza, celebrating the undeniable fact that Hispanics literally would not exist if not for October 12, 1492
>Oooh, I like this one.
I don't know about this one, Scott. Suggesting an American national holiday be renamed to "race day" might win the award for "most likely to make people on *all* sides angry"
Gotta convince NASCAR to move their biggest race to October 12th.
> We can ditch Cinco de Mayo (boring, unrelated to America, non-inclusive of non-Mexican Hispanics), save Columbus Day, and have an extra excuse to eat tacos. Let’s do it!
A different holiday switch for Columbus Day has actually been my personal solution to having the "Italian American Heritage Day" celebrating a problematic guy. St Francis of Assisi's Feast Day is Oct 6th, pretty close to Columbus Day, and he's a much more stand-up Italian guy (I've done very little personal research on him besides scanning his WikiPedia page for a "controversies" section and am fully prepared to eat those words if someone has some dirt on him). I've always wanted to do for his feast day vis-a-vis Italian culture what we did to St Patrick's feast day for the Irish, allowing us to dispense of all this Columbus Day business.
This doesn't solve for the lack of a holiday about the American myth of exploration and discovery, but I never got the sense that that was what it was truly about learning about it in elementary school. I definitely remember memorizing the names of Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, but not exactly being led to inspiration about setting out from comfort to discover new frontiers. Maybe that's more of an indictment of American schooling as an institution than Columbus Day though!
My headcanon for Cinco de Mayo is based on the (probably dubious) historical theory that the Mexican defeat of France commemorated by Cinco de Mayo eliminated the possibility of a French-aligned regime providing assistance to the Confederacy. Which is why it is not a major holiday in Mexico but is in the United States.
I missed the chance to comment on the original post, but I'm disappointed nobody took up the presumably playful Hitler reference. As far as I can tell, modern-day fans of Hitler absolutely do fit the mythologized criteria: they believe he wanted to peacefully settle Jewish people in Madagascar but couldn't because he lost the naval war before it started, and also that he never wanted war in the first place but was forced to preemptively strike so the world powers that hated him for no reason other than him being pro-German couldn't attack him first. Also, depending on the fan's individual proclivities, that he was a devout Christian (or not). Oh and also that he was a great lover of art and of animals, and never wanted to hurt anyone.
Thus the Santa Claus version is an overly-sensitive art student who liked cosplay and attending the equivalent of Rammstein concerts. Art holding up a mirror and all that.
Had to come down and respond to #3. When I was taking a world religions class in college, it was taught that "Son of God" was actually just a title, another way of saying "Divinely Chosen King". For example, Solomon and King David were both referred to as the "Son of God". With this interpretation, it now makes sense why (at least one that I know of) the Gospels starts with a long recounting of Jesus's pedigree: the fact that he's supposedly descended from King David means he has a legitimate claim to the Son of God throne, hence he is LITERALLY the KING of the Jews (allegedly). Here's a Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_God
My take as a Jew (free/secular, so take it with a grain of salt) on the whole trinity debacle is rather simple - it's the kind of crazy you get when religion starts being about what you*believe in*, instead of what you *do*.
Religion is referred to as *practice* in English Jewish communities because that is the defining feature of the religious life - whether you keep the Shabbat, eat Kosher, ect'. I know many religious (as in, practicing) Jews who are agnostic or even atheists, it can be problematic for them personally (whether because of family tensions or cognitive dissonance) but it's still clear to the people around them they are religious, as this is the meaning of being religious Jew.
from this perspective, worries about theological issues like the trinity, removed from any practical concern of the religious Law, exist because Cristians put believe in the center stage. Trinity disputes are useful for religious consolidation exactly because they are *practically* meaningless - different groups needed something to argue about, and there was no substantial *practice*.
I have to point out that we don't celebrate Washington's birthday, or Lincoln's birthday, any more. Instead we celebrate the anodyne "Presidents' Day", which rarely involves the mention of any specific President.
The federal government hasn't gotten that memo. "Washington’s Birthday, the third Monday in February" is listed in section 6103(a) of title 5, United States Code, as one of the federal government's "legal public holidays."
> Thus, note that in Israel Hanukkah is a Big Deal holiday, while Christmas is observed mostly by tourists/pilgrims.
Having lived in Israel for three years, I can confirm that the first part of this really isn't true. Hanukkah is hardly noticed, and most people don't even get any days off of work.