Christmas is NOT Jesus of Nazareth’s Birthday…

So yesterday a lot of people celebrated what is called “Christmas”, “Christmastide”, “Noël”, or worse “Feast of the Nativity”. This “Holiday” is a mix of Christian, pre-Christian and secular themes and origins. So, it’s really a hybrid of a bunch of stuff.

I huge amount of people already know this. I will contribute my little “grain of sand” and post this up in here. The figure of Jesus of Nazareth (A.K.A. ‘Christ’/ ‘Christos‘) was NOT born of December 25 as some people still think. If you’re one of those who still believes that, you need a reality check...Go have fun on Google or some other search engine and find more about the topic. I will give you some hints & keywords to check out:

•  • Pagan winter festivals • Roman winter solstice • April 17, 6BC • Star of Bethlehem theories • Christmas = “Christ’s mass” • Yule • rebirth of the Great horned hunter god • Cernunnos • Pan • Dies Natalis Solis Invicti • Sun God • (Sol Invictus) = birth of the “invincible sun” • Yule singing = caroling •  •

One of the most important things is that the ‘Christ’s mass’ was scheduled at the same time as pagan winter festivals to keep church members from going to pagan festivities. This date was also chosen to help pagans asimilate and convert to Christianity in an easier way, thus celebrations like Yule and Dies Natalis Solis Invicti were a equated and absorbed into the Christian liturgical calendar.

I personally dislike the holiday season. Apart from all that I’ve mentioned above and it’s fake meaning (Yes, I absolutely hate when people say that Jesus the true meaning of Christmas), it’s disgusting how people relate it to material gifts. I hate giving gifts as much as I hate receiving them.

Anyways, I hope that anyone who is ignorant of this be motivated at least a tiny bit to find the actual truth.

- Adrianne Katzen

Thoughts About Religious Beliefs

[[WARNING: This post is not meant to diss anyone's religions convictions. Please forgive me if you feel I have touched upon a sensitive spot on your particular beliefs. It is not the intention of this post.]]

Ever since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by world religions and beliefs. I was brought up in a Christian environment and had to withstand biblical classes throughout high school even when I no longer believed these things. All this made me question religions and people’s motivations to believe in something greater than themselves that kept “order” between what they categorized as “good” and “evil”. Of course, the main religion I decided to explore further was Christianity (along with a bit of Judaism and Islam) because it was the one that hit closest to home and information was widely available to me as a child and teenager.

I started to notice a lot of inconsistencies with it and started to think the Bible had either serious errors or missing information. I believed (and still do) that the Bible is not the literal word of God (and that’s if ‘God’ even exists) as people claimed it was. I knew that information changes as it is passed generation to generation via the memorization and oral transmission because this is evidenced in a multitude of old literature and the different copies of it from different times. Also, every text loses something in translation. Now, if you take that into consideration and add the fact that writing had not yet been invented at the start of the events of the Bible/Torah, it is enough to convince me to take anything I read from this book as it is said “with a grain of salt”.

For example, a lot of people claim the first man and woman on Earth were Adam and Eve. I have two major problems with this: (1) How to account for the different ethnicities in the world?; and (2) Genesis, the first book of the Bible that gives the account of creation, has what one could either call a “flaw” or a conflicting view with this claim. Let’s take this second problem further into examination: Genesis 1:27 tell us that God made man “in his image; male and female he created them” (from dust). Genesis 2:18 states that God saw that Adam was alone and in Genesis 2:21-22 he creates a woman from Adam’s rib. Now, if this does not mean that God created 2 different women, it certainly poses the question of which of the two ways was she actually created.

And that’s just the first of many things I could find wrong with this book, with the Bible. I’m not saying you cannot find good advice and real bits of wisdom. No, not at all. I just think of the Bible as a sort of history book that combines poetry and prophecies in it.