Most non-religious americans are something like Christian Atheists. They don't believe in a god, but their worldview, ethics, and cultural norms are still originating in Christianity.
Anyway, Americanized Muslims tend to be quite "moderate", that is, they are either apostates or firmly on the path to becoming apostates. I don't know if this follows from selective immigration or from social pressure to assimilate into the liberal civic religion, but it is so. So it's not surprising that they would embrace the secularized counterfeit that many Americans already celebrate, just as they probably end up watching the high feast known as the Superbowl and joining into the national prostration before the Almighty Game.
I like latkes and challah, but that doesn't make me Jewish.
All groups influence culture and culture influences all individuals. But simply having adopted a piece of culture that came from some group does not make one a member of that group.
My wife and kids and I all celebrate Christmas. We are not Christian.
If celebrating Christmas made one Christian, then anyone including a yule log in their festivities must also be pagan.
Easter Bunny is another commercialisation of a Christian holiday, which has nothing to do with rabbits. It is a day, where Christians celebrate Jesus raising from grave after being crucified.
> Santa Claus evolved from Dutch traditions regarding Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas). When the Dutch established the colony of New Amsterdam, they brought the legend and traditions of Sinterklaas with them
The mobile app I used did not allow me to edit message and when I got back home HN no longer allows to edit the message.
We Americans celebrating Christmas are definitely celebrating commercialism, though, so that checks out. :)
Easter definitely didn't originate with Christians, though. One of the things that made Christianity's spread so successful (apart from having the force of the great colonial empires of the Western world behind it) was the strategy of syncretizing and recontextualizing local pagan rituals, holidays, deities and (for better or worse) entire mytho-histories around Christianity.
Some quotes from the one about Christmas trees:
>People in the twenty-first century have this bizarre, instinctive notion that any custom we have today that we cannot rationally explain must be a survival of pre-Christian paganism. The idea of “pagan survivals” is so widespread that it has basically become the de facto explanation to any puzzling or peculiar tradition. People essentially just answer the question “Why do we decorate trees at Christmas?” with “I don’t know, so it must be paganism.”
>Most of the customs, traditions, and ideas we associate with the modern, secular Christmas are products of the past two hundred years. If you want to blame something for “ruining” Christmas and “taking Christ out Christmas,” you would be closer to the mark blaming twentieth and twenty-first century American capitalism than seventh-century BC Canaanite paganism (or whatever other variety of paganism you happen to fancy).
The pre-Christian Romans made conquering easier by bringing Roman luxuries (baths, food, wine, commerce, citizenship, etc) to conquered peoples and by making examples out of those who resisted, but Christianity was not part of the package.
Not sure what the Eastern Roman empire was doing with respect to conquering and Christianizing, but if they converted anyone, I don’t think those pagans contributed imagery back to Christian holidays as we know them in America.
That said, after the Western Roman empire collapsed there were lots of European powers who used conversion as part of their larger subjugation toolbox.
Carol of the Bells
The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the retained (though radically transformed) Christian elements of consumerist celebrations like the modern American Christmas.
That doesn't make them Germanic (or Roman) pagans. Ask the average person about Thor and you'll probably get something based on the comic book character. Ask him about Tiw and you're gonna get a blank look.
And if I know someone celebrate Chanukah I’ll say happy Chanukah. Is that wrong?
He was debating a $social-leftist and basically said:
>You say you're not religious, but the things you hold as value, the trappings of your ethics, and your decision making process seems to be more aligned with judeo-christianity than your self-proclaimed naturalist atheism"
Christmas is incredibly popular in Japan, which isn't very Christian at all.
My family does, and we are all mixed. Also the xmass tree, was called New Years's Eve tree, and it went up every year, right before xmass.
This was even in communist Albania, where religions were forbidden. The only thing we changed, was to open presents in 1st of jan, instead on the 25th.
The whole xmass tree thing tradition, is an old pagan one, and existed way before jessus or whoever was born. It is a indo-european thing.