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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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To add to it, even the Christmas tree doesn't originate from Christianity. It was just adapted from a pagan tradition. The Santa Claus image was created by commercialism. The original saint Claus is celebrating on December 6 (or 7, don't remeber exactly) and that was a priest that anonymously was donating toys to children in orphanages and later was discovered.

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.

December 6th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas

> 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

That's right, thanks for correcting.

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.

It wasn't really meant as a correction, more as a clarification: you said 6th or 7th, I confirmed it was the 6th.

If I sounded sarcastic my bad, I genuinely appreciate the clarification.

IIRC the pagan origins of Christian holidays and symbols have their roots in making conversion more palatable for conquered Roman subjects. Christmas and Easter replace the solstice celebrations, the Christmas tree came from placing evergreen sprigs in the home during winter and the rabbit is a fertility thing.

> IIRC the pagan origins of Christian holidays and symbols have their roots in making conversion more palatable for conquered Roman subjects.

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the retained (though radically transformed) Christian elements of consumerist celebrations like the modern American Christmas.

I’ve always heard it was to make conversion to Christianity more palatable, full stop. At least in Western Europe most of the conquering was done before Rome was Christianized, and they never conquered the Germanic peoples who are the pagans who give us most or all of the familiar Christian trappings (Yule logs, Christmas in December, the word “Easter”, Christmas trees, elves, etc).

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.

> 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.

Carol of the Bells

Interesting, but I’m not seeing anything on the Wikipedia page that suggests it was actually pagan (only that the original chant predates Christianity; not that there is any religious significance whatsoever) nor does it seem to have been Christianized by the Eastern Roman empire to convert people.

> The Santa Claus image was created by commercialism.

We Americans celebrating Christmas are definitely celebrating commercialism, though, so that checks out. :)

With regards to the pagan origins of Christmas I learned quite a bit by reading some of the linked articles here (such as the one about Yule or about the Christmas tree): https://historyforatheists.com/2020/12/pagan-christmas/

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 rabbits (and probably the name Easter), I believe (someone will correct me if I'm wrong) come from the pagan festival of Eostre, a goddess symbolized by a rabbit. Although I've also heard that Easter comes from Ishtar, so who knows?

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.

Right. People in English-speaking countries observe Sun Day, Moon Day, Tiw's Day, Odin's Day, Thor's Day, Freyja's Day, and Saturn's Day every single week.

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.

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