morgandria:

seph7:

Actually, I agree with naturewitch. They didn’t actually ‘steal’ our celebration perse, they just placed their own very near to the time of ours, in the hopes that it would overshadow Yule and people would eventually forget Yule.If it had worked, we wouldn’t still be celebrating the Winter Solstice now, would we?

Also, it wasn’t Cernunnos they turned into Satan, it was Pan. Cernunnos was relatively undiscovered, and there are actually very few carvings and inscriptions relating to him.

Absolutely. You can find pagan aspects in Christian holidays. There’s plenty of historical evidence for that. But that doesn’t make it theft. I actually think it was even more simple than that: People can’t steal their holidays from themselves. And that’s really what people are saying ancient Christians did.

A culture in the process of converting, or having converted, to Christianity would likely still desire their cultural holidays. A party is a party, after all. They’d find way to justify them within their new religion, or find ways to ‘unpagan’ them enough into secular holidays. And this meant that in some cases ‘new’ holidays had dates on or close to ‘old’ ones. Again, deliberate - but not really in the sense of malicious intent.

It’s no different from Christmas these days. Plenty of non-Christians in the Western world still celebrate the holiday with their family and friends, even if it has no religious significance to them. There is a secular, non-religious Christmas in existence now, alongside the religious Christian one.

Paganism really needs to drop the persecution complex. Yes, some Christians did shitty things to non-Christians. Pagans also did shitty things back to Christians. PEOPLE are assholes, and people will use whatever excuse they like to be shitty to other people. Hiding behind history and holding onto pointless resentments from the past only holds you back.

(Source: thenaturechick)