Showing posts with label Two Babylons. Show all posts

Friday, May 8, 2015

Nimrod and Semiramis

An interesting article from http://www.ucg.org/ about Nimrod and Semiramis. This follows this post about Islam in the U.K. For a free magazine subscription or to get the books recommended for free click HERE! or call 1-888-886- 8632.
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Bible Story - Chapter 6

by Ken Murray

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Grandad & Nanna's Bible Story - Chapter 6

Nanna says: “Things went well for awhile after the Flood and Noah lived 350 years after he left the Ark with his family. But, Noah died, when he was 950 years old. That’s very, very old isn’t it?”
His son Shem and his wife had many children who were of the white people (Caucasian). They tended to move north, to live in Europe. (1 Chronicles 1:17)
Another son Japheth and his wife also had lots of children and they became the Asian people who moved east to live. (1 Chronicles 1:5)
Noah’s third son Ham and his wife had children, who had lovely dark skin and they moved into Africa to live. (1 Chronicles 1:8)
Ham’s grandson was Nimrod, whose name means “he rebelled”.
Nimrod was big, strong and popular with many people, because he was a great hunter, but he did not love God and did not keep God’s laws of how to live. He did many bad things like building idols and getting people to worship his false gods. He broke God’s laws and taught people to do as they pleased and sin against God. (Genesis 10:8-9)
He worshipped Satan instead of the true God, and he called Satan “Merodach”, meaning “Lord” or “Master”. (Jeremiah 50:2)
In the Hebrew language Merodach was called “Baal” or the “Sun God”. Nimrod made the sun god, who wasn’t really a god, the head of all his false idol gods. He deceived many people and led them away from the true God of our Father and His Son.
Nimrod came up with an idea to draw people to him in his kingdom of Shinar. (Genesis 10:9-10) “Let’s build the highest tower ever, in my city of Babel, reaching up above the clouds, in honour of my god, the sun god!”
So, many people were tricked by Nimrod, and they worked on his evil tower. But God saw what Nimrod was doing and how it was going to lead to more bad things, like before the Flood.
God came down to the Tower of Babel and He mixed up the people’s language from one single language to many different languages. (Genesis 11:1, Genesis 11:6-7)
They couldn’t understand each other and began to argue loudly and get very angry with each other.
Soon they gave up building the Tower of Babel and began to scatter to other lands, with their families. (Genesis 11:8-9)
If God had not done this, people would have become very evil again, like before the Flood. Because they had one language, they might have easily shared their knowledge to make evil weapons to kill many innocent people.
So, from the Tower of Babel, many languages and nations began to form in the world.
Sadly, many false beliefs, false gods and false religions began to develop, which led people away from the true God. (1 John 4:1)
Shem and his family followed his father Noah and his mother in loving the true God and living by God’s commandments and right way of life.
After Nimrod died, his mother Semiramis gave birth to a baby boy and she tricked people with her lies, about how her son Nimrod was a god and this baby boy had no human father, but was made alive by the sun god.
“This is Nimrod’s son, who is come to restore his father’s kingdom”, she said.
Semiramis, whose other name was Ishtar, came to be known as “the virgin mother” and the “queen of heaven”. (Jeremiah 7:18, Jeremiah 44:17-19, Jeremiah 44:25) Sunday became her day for worshipping the sun god and it carries that name to this day.
She taught the people false stories, and held evil feast holidays, which later developed into customs that people keep, even today, such as Christmas and Easter, named after the false goddess of Ishtar.
These false holidays were planned by Semiramis and her priests to trick and deceive people away from the true God and God’s “appointed” Holy Days. (Leviticus 23:1-2, Exodus 23:15-16)
Satan has been allowed by God to be the false god of this world, and he was the one who led Nimrod and Semiramis to worship him, as the sun god. (2 Corinthians 4:4)
Now you can understand how Satan worked through Nimrod and Semiramis to cause people to be deceived and to believe lies (Revelation 12:9), just as he caused Eve to believe the first lie, and then to lead Adam astray, as well.
Why do you think God has allowed Satan to be in charge of this world, our child?
Is it to test us, to see if we will be strong and faithful in loving our true God? (Deuteronomy 13:3)
When we are tested and we succeed in doing what is right and not what is wrong, we become stronger in good character, don’t we. We build good habits of choosing what is right, don’t we? (Proverbs 20:11, Ecclesiastes 12:14, Deuteronomy 8:2, Judges 3:4)
By doing what is right, instead of what is wrong, God will give us good success, won’t He? (Joshua 1:8)
God has promised that one day Jesus Christ, his Son, is going to return to this Earth to replace Satan as the ruler of this world. (Jude 14, Revelation 20:4-6, Daniel 7:18, Daniel 7:27, Zechariah 14)
Won’t that be wonderful in the world tomorrow, when the world will be at peace, and people will love and worship the true God, who is our Father and Jesus Christ His Son. (1 John 5:20, 1 Thessalonians 1:9, Jeremiah 10:10)
Shem and his wife had many children, who loved God and kept God’s laws of how to live.
Grandad says: “Shem’s 7th generation of his great grand children was called Abram.”
Nanna says: “Grandad, let’s save the wonderful story about Abram and his beautiful wife Sarai, for our next Chapter.”
To be continued with Chapter 7…

Friday, March 20, 2015

How Christian Is Easter?

An interesting article from http://www.ucg.org/ about Easter. This follows this post about Human Trafficking. For a free magazine subscription or to get the books recommended for free click HERE! or call 1-888-886- 8632.
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How Christian Is Easter?

article by Steve Myers

Soon up to 2 billion people will celebrate one of the world’s most popular religious holidays—Easter. But curiously, the Bible nowhere promotes such an observance. Where did this day come from? How did it become so popular? And is it even Christian?

Source: 123RF

Where do you get your religious beliefs? Easter is the most important holiday for hundreds of millions of people. Anyone who claims to be Christian should want God to guide and lead them. But could you be misled?
I’m reminded of counterfeit money. Did you know that you could be carrying a worthless bill and not even know it? Counterfeiters are often successful because they make their fakes look like the real thing. Forgery is one of the oldest crimes in history, but it doesn’t just affect money.
Today a much greater counterfeit is so successful that most people don’t even realize they’re deceived. What counterfeit? The religion known as Christianity, as surprising as that may be! Jesus Himself warned about religious counterfeits, saying, “For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew:24:24).
Deceptive religion and its wrong traditions have been foisted on the world by the greatest forger in the universe, Satan the devil (1 John:5:19; Revelation:12:9). Could religious celebrations like Easter be part of that? Let’s examine three ways to answer the question posed by the title of this article: How Christian is Easter?

A lesson in Satan’s deceptive techniques

To begin to understand how Satan uses religion to confuse and deceive, we need to go back to the beginning—back to the Garden of Eden. And here’s where we find our first point: Satan leads people to decide good and evil for themselves and fools them by making evil look good.
The Bible is clear that God wanted to guide Adam and Eve. But Satan was in the business of deception right from the very beginning. He knew exactly how to make his counterfeit sense of good and evil pass for the real thing.
So how did he do it? He lied. He told Adam and Eve that if they ate of the forbidden fruit, “You will not surely die” (Genesis:3:4). In fact, he contradicted God. But it wasn’t all lies. He also said, “For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis:3:5).
Did you catch the deception? Part of it was true—the knowledge of good and evil part, but it was only in the sense of acting as God in deciding what is right and wrong. God had placed two trees in the garden—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God wanted to lead Adam and Eve, and for them to choose life. But when they chose the wrong tree, they chose to decide for themselves what was good and bad, rejecting the real truth as to what is good and bad as determined by God.
So right at the very start, our ancestors began rejecting God’s guidance—and that tendency has continued down to this day.
This tells us a lot about the state of our world—it’s filled with error that seems to be truth, fable that seems to be fact, bad that seems to be good. At times it’s hard to tell the difference between the real thing and an evil counterpart. Why? Because of relying on faulty human judgment—especially as perpetuated over many generations. As Proverbs states, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death (Proverbs:14:12; Proverbs:16:25).
Some things seem good and right, but the devil cleverly makes them appear as though they were not evil. Sometimes he does this by mixing in some elements that truly are good as determined by God—though corrupted in context.
And he is so devious in his deception that it will hurt you. He kept Adam and Eve from God, and he wants to keep you from having a great relationship with God, too. He’s also affected Christianity and its customs and practices and wants to deceive everyone so they won’t understand God’s truth.
Sadly, most can’t discern the real from the replica. God’s true days of worship found in the Bible are priceless, but the devil has crafted multiple forgeries—fraudulent, cheap copies of what God gave us that is valuable and good.
It’s true with money. It’s true in religion as well. Satan uses his advanced counterfeiting techniques. He’s constantly working to get you to trust your own sense of right and wrong, following what looks good to you (as influenced by him), rather than listen to and trust what God has to say. Instead you must “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs:3:5).
As with Adam and Eve, God wants to lead you. He wants to guide you in truth and in love. He wants you to honor Him in the way that He directs. And that includes observing the days and the ways that truly honor Him as revealed in the Bible. That’s where God’s Holy Days come into the picture—as opposed to humanly devised holidays and religious traditions.
That’s why it’s important for us to answer the question, “How Christian is Easter?”We first have to recognize the disguising of error as truth, often by the inclusion of some actual truth out of proper context.
Once you understand Satan’s tactic in this, it’s time to take the next step of recognizing Easter for what it is—a counterfeit.

Easter’s ancient, pre-Christian origins

Do you know where Easter celebrations originated? It may seem hard to believe, but they began hundreds of years before Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection!
Genesis 10 tells how, several thousand years ago, people gathered into cities and opposed God. Remember the story? They began to build a massive skyscraper called the Tower of Babel.
Here again we find the devil at work. This time he inspired and used this kingdom of Babylon to help with his slick counterfeiting job. God finally confused the people’s language, and they were scattered over the earth (Genesis:11:9).
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus records what they took with them. What was it? Their religious beliefs and rituals. He wrote that Babylon was the prime source of evil from which all systems of idolatry and false worship flowed.
Did it affect Christianity? Here’s where the story gets very interesting!
The Babylonian fertility gods were Tammuz and Ishtar. Ancient tribes of Europe worshipped a variation of that goddess of spring named Eostre. Do you realize that the word Easter is a variation of this name?
The notable British historian Sir James Frazer writes:

“Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life . . . which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead. In name and detail the rites varied from place to place: in substance they were the same” ( The Golden Bough, 1993, p. 325).

Alan Watts, in his book Easter: Its Story and Meaning, further explains:

“It would be tedious to describe in detail all that has been handed down to us about the various rites of Tammuz, Adonis . . . and many others . . . But their universal theme—the drama of death and resurrection—makes them the forerunners of the Christian Easter, and thus the first ‘Easter services.’ As we go on to describe the Christian observance of Easter we shall see how many of its customs and ceremonies resemble these former rites” (1950, p. 58).

Yes, history records that centuries before the death and resurrection of Christ, there were already ancient Easter celebrations—springtime fertility festivals honoring resurrection and worship of the rising sun long before Jesus’ birth! This is where we get such popular Easter symbols as rabbits and eggs, which were popular fertility symbols centuries prior to Christianity.
Long before Jesus Christ gave His life as an offering for our sins and was raised to life again, the world had already accepted Satan’s substitute—a counterfeit of how God intends us to worship!
But does it matter to God? Notice what He inspired the apostle Paul to write:

“What do right and wrong have in common? Can light and darkness be friends? How can Christ and Satan agree? . . . How can the temple of the true God and the statues of other gods agree? . . . ‘So come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord’” (2 Corinthians:6:14-17, New International Reader’s Version).

You see, God wants us to understand the difference, because one thing counterfeiters rely on is ignorance. If you’re unfamiliar with what genuine currency should look like, it’s easier to be fooled. The U.S. Secret Service has 20 Web pages under the title “Know Your Money.” It tells us, “Those who fail to carefully examine the money they receive . . . are potential victims.”
It’s no different when it comes to counterfeit holidays and religion because they also thrive on people’s ignorance—ignorance of the Bible. And that leads us to the third way to answer the question: How Christian is Easter?

How does God want us to worship?

As we have seen, the Easter holiday is unbiblical. It is a counterfeit. But a counterfeit of what? You see, God has other ways He directs us to worship.
Do you know for yourself what the Word of God actually says, or could you be fooled? Several years ago LifeWay Research surveyed American churchgoers and found that 90 percent of them “desire to please and honor Jesus” in all they do. That’s very good! But it also found that more than 80 percent don’t read their Bibles daily!
That’s an amazing disconnect. How can you honor God if you don’t know and haven’t read what actually pleases Him? You can’t honor God with the counterfeit because it’s worthless to Him. So if you’re unaware of what Jesus actually taught, you’re easy prey for an empty imitation!
By not really understanding the Bible, you could be easily distracted. That’s another tactic counterfeiters rely on— diversion. When people pass phony bills, they try to focus the cashiers on other things, hoping they don’t check the money until it’s way too late.
Most Christians aren’t on the lookout for a counterfeiter either. Most just want a church they like, so even a cheap imitation will do. Manmade holidays deflect attention and concentrate on less important issues. You see, if you feel good about what you’re doing, it doesn’t make that much difference what you’re taught. Some churches appeal to that. They appeal to your emotions by talking a lot about love and feelings.
But let me tell you why that’s dangerous: It can cause you to choose what you believe and what you practice based on how you feel rather than on God’s clear teaching in the Bible. As we’ve already seen, God warns us that a way can seem right to people but lead to death. His Word explicitly tells us not to try to honor Him with pagan religious customs (Deuteronomy:12:19-32). And it’s important that we follow exactly what He says.
That’s the issue! The devil wants you to have religion—but one that only resembles true worship so he can keep you in the dark. God, on the other hand, wants you to become an expert at identifying the counterfeits so you don’t fall for an imitation. Here’s how you can begin: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy:2:15, Revised Standard Version).
That means you should carefully examine what you believe and what you practice and make sure it agrees with the Bible. Just claiming something is Christian, or just saying it honors God, doesn’t make it acceptable to Him. Did you know that the Bible doesn’t mention the early Christians celebrating Easter? They had nothing to do with this holiday. Instead, they kept the Passover and the other festivals of the Bible (Luke:22:8, Luke:22:11, Luke:22:13, Luke:22:15; 1 Corinthians:5:7-8; Acts:18:20-21; Acts:20:16).
Passover, along with the other true biblical festivals—that’s the real thing. Easter is just a cheap imitation. Jesus Himself gave Passover even deeper meaning under the New Covenant.
And He expected His followers to continue observing the New Testament Passover. As Paul explained, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes” (1 Corinthians:11:26). The Bible nowhere tells us to have a special celebration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection—much less with a recycled pre-Christian observance. But Jesus explicitly tells us to have a specific memorial of His true Passover sacrifice—His death for our sins (1 Corinthians:11:23-28).

The big switch

So, you may ask, with such clear instruction, how did Easter replace the Passover?
Notice carefully what noted historian Will Durant wrote: “Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it”( The Story of Civilization, Caesar and Christ, Part 3, 1944, p. 595, emphasis added throughout). That’s amazing! And yes, after the original apostles passed from the scene, Christianity underwent an astounding transformation.
Sir James Frazer, quoted earlier, noted that Easter followed the pattern of Christmas (another festival of pre-Christian origin) in being accepted and promoted as the Roman church—now the center of the religion—compromised with paganism:

“Motives of the same sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in Greece, Sicily and southern Italy bear in some respects a striking resemblance to the rites of Adonis . . . The Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ” (Frazer, p. 359).

If you look into history, about 300 years after Christ the Roman Emperor Constantine became the greatest promoter of non-biblical Christianity. Expanding his empire and uniting the Roman church included the three things we’ve been talking about: disguising evil as good, accepting a substitute, and a true lack of biblical understanding.
Those early church leaders believed they could choose their own times and ways to worship. New converts from paganism didn’t need to throw away their religious traditions and rituals. Those counterfeit sacraments and artificial practices were absorbed right into this very different version of Christianity.
But God doesn’t mince words. The Bible tells us, “If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life” (Revelation:22:18).

Is Easter Christian?

The bottom line is that Easter does not and cannot represent a resurrected Jesus. Like any counterfeit, it’s hollow. It’s empty because God didn’t design it. Instead, it perpetuates the ungodly practice of honoring false gods.
Notice what Paul writes about mixing idolatrous pagan practices with true Christianity:

“What I am saying is that these sacrifices which people make are made to demons and not to God. I don’t want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the Lord’s cup and the cup of demons. You cannot participate at the table of the Lord and at the table of demons”(1 Corinthians:10:20-21, God’s Word Translation).

So remember: Easter is a product of people determining for themselves good and evil under Satan’s influence. Easter is a counterfeit of how God intends us to worship Him. And Easter is not biblical. God has other ways He directs us to worship.
So isn’t it time to take a more meaningful approach to religion than such holidays? God gives us a much more important alternative—the genuine article, which is authentic Christianity. And it’s not found in Easter or any manmade holiday, but instead by worshipping God in spirit and in truth—on the days He commands!

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Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Treasure Digest: The Pulls of Babylon

An interesting article from http://www.ucg.org/ about Babylon. This follows this post about Pearl Harbor. This follows this post about the season called Advent. For a free magazine subscription or to get this book for free click HERE! or call 1-888-886-8632.

Treasure Digest: The Pulls of Babylon

article by William (Skip) Miller

We in God's Church made a decision at some point not to live in Babylon.

In antiquity Judah was assaulted, defeated and taken captive. But after 70 years the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem and begin again the rites of the temple. Many returned, but more did not. They had found a home that worked for them. They stayed in Babylon by choice. Many remained observant, but probably some were enveloped and sucked right into that maelstrom of frenetic life in the Babylonian system. As Christians, the choice is still ours, but in my opinion, it is even harder to remain true to God's way of doing things today. Although ancient Babylon was worldly, wise and wealthy, modern Babylon operates by a steady stream of reverberating and unremitting requests for our attention. Even if you don't "shop till you drop," it is hard to avoid the materialistic impulse that is inherent in every ad that says, "You need this; you deserve this!" We must candidly admit that, were it not for God's Sabbath, we too—God's own people—would have no time for anything else except servicing our "labor saving" devices. We may possess more stuff than any people of the past ever imagined, but we have virtually no time at all. This fact would be simply ironic except that that loss of time (to reflect and pray and study) has been part of Satan's plan ever since the Eternal created the Sabbath. We all are free to choose how we spend the 24 hours that come to us each day. Many say that they must spend unseemly amounts of time at work or on the road or on the freeway so that they may enjoy a modicum of what others call the "good life." In fact, they are reaping exactly what they have sown. Choices were made before and the results could have been foreseen as the natural consequence of those choices. You can always do Bible study. You can always pray. But too often we don't because we have previously chosen amiss. Everything, both good and bad, in Satan's world can and will be used against us so that prayer and Bible study won't happen—unless we treasure them and give them the highest priority.

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Friday, August 10, 2012

Why shouldn't we wear a cross as a sign of being a Christian?

An interesting article from http://www.ucg.org/ about Christian adornment. This follows this post about overcoming addictions. For a free magazine subscription or to get this book for free click HERE! or call 1-888-886-8632.

Why shouldn't we wear a cross as a sign of being a Christian?

Is there a Biblically sound reason not to?

Answer:

Having a desire to let our light shine and to share our faith are positive goals! In order to answer this specific question, though, we must also consider the background of the cross, the New Testament record and Jesus' teaching about how to display our Christianity.

One of the first questions we might ask is, Who decided that the cross was to be the sign of Christianity? This tradition of wearing a cross does not come from the Bible or the practices of the New Testament Church. Though there are at least seven different types of crosses, we are not even certain that Jesus was crucified on a cross-like apparatus. Though crucifixion on a cross was common at the time, the Bible allows that Jesus may have been put to death on an upright pole (rendered "tree" in 1 Peter 2:24Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.

See All... from the Greek word stauros, which primarily means an upright stake).

A study of history shows that the cross symbol predates Christianity. According to author Ralph Woodrow, "Centuries before the Christian era, the cross was honored as a religious symbol by the people of Babylon. It is seen on their oldest monuments. Historians say that it was a symbol associated with Tammuz" ( Babylonian Mystery Religion , p. 51). From Babylon, the cross spread to other nations and was associated with paganism long before Jesus' crucifixion in A.D. 31.

Woodrow further explains, "It was not until Christianity began to be paganized that the cross came to be thought of as a Christian symbol. It was in 431 A.D. that crosses in churches and chambers were introduced, while the use of crosses on steeples did not come until about 586 A.D." (p. 50).

While most people today connect the cross with Christianity rather than paganism, we must also ask if the cross is something to be worshipped or honored. While the apostles preached "the cross [stauros]" as part of the history of Christ's ministry for our sakes (1 Corinthians 1:17-18 [17] For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.

[18] For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

See All...), it was not something they idolized. It was a shameful instrument of death (Hebrews 12:2Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

See All...). In His crucifixion, Jesus took on Himself our shameful sins. Having our sins forgiven is a wonderful blessing, but there is no need to glorify the instrument used.

Finally, consider what the Bible teaches about wearing any religious symbol. Under the Old Covenant that God made with ancient Israel, God instructed them to wear reminders of their faith upon their hands (Deuteronomy 6:8And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.

See All...; 11:18). In fulfillment of this command, phylacteries, small leather boxes containing scriptural passages, were traditionally worn by Jewish men during their morning weekday prayers. Many did this to appear righteous to others (Matthew 23:5But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,

See All...).

During His New Testament ministry, Jesus taught His followers to display their spirituality through their actions and deeds (Matthew 5:16Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

See All...). Under the New Covenant, ushered in by Christ, God's laws are to be written on our hearts—that is, in our minds (Hebrews 8:10For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people:

See All...; 10:16). People who truly practice the Christianity of the Bible stand out as beacons of light in a spiritually darkened society because of the way they live. They have no need to wear external signs like a cross to identify themselves as Christian.

If you would like to learn more about the history of the cross and how this pagan symbol entered Christianity, read chapters 6 and 7 of Ralph Woodrow's book, Babylon Mystery Religion . These two chapters are respectively titled "Is the Cross a Christian Symbol?" and "Constantine and the Cross."

.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Christmas: Accommodating a pagan populace

An interesting article from www.ucg.org on the pagan populace which influenced Christmas. This follows this previous post on the origins of Christmas. For a free magazine subscription or to get this book for free click HERE! or call 1-888-886-8632!

Accommodating a pagan populace

How, we should ask, did these pagan customs become a widely accepted part of Christianity? We should first understand what a strong hold these celebrations and customs had on the people of those early centuries. Tertullian, a Catholic writer of the late second and early third century, lamented the fact that the pagans of his day were far more faithful to their beliefs than were the compromising Christians who were happily joining in the Roman midwinter festival that eventually evolved into what is now Christmas:

"By us [Christians], ...the Saturnalia, the feasts of January, the Brumalia, and Matronalia are now frequented; gifts are carried to and fro, new year's day presents are made with din, and banquets are celebrated with uproar; oh, how much more faithful are the heathen to their religion, who take special care to adopt no solemnity from the Christians" (Tertullian in De Idolatria, quoted by Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons, 1959, p. 93).

It wasn't long before such non-Christian rites and practices were assimilated into a new church religious holiday supposedly celebrating Christ's birth. William Walsh describes this process and the rationalization behind it: "This was no mere accident. It was a necessary measure at a time when the new religion [Christianity] was forcing itself upon a deeply superstitious people. In order to reconcile fresh converts to the new faith, and to make the breaking of old ties as painless as possible, these relics of paganism were retained under modified forms ...

"Thus we find that when Pope Gregory [540-604] sent Saint Augustine as a missionary to convert Anglo-Saxon England he directed that so far as possible the saint should accommodate the new and strange Christian rites to the heathen ones with which the natives had been familiar from their birth.

"For example, he advised Saint Augustine to allow his converts on certain festivals to eat and kill a great number of oxen to the glory of God the Father, as formerly they had done this in honor of [their gods] ... On the very Christmas after his arrival in England Saint Augustine baptized many thousands of converts and permitted their usual December celebration under the new name and with the new meaning" (p. 61).

Gregory permitted such importation of pagan religious practices on the grounds that when dealing with "obdurate minds it is impossible to cut off everything at once" (Sansom, p. 30).

Tragically, Christianity never accomplished the task of cutting off everything pagan. According to Owen Chadwick, former professor of history at Cambridge University, the Romans "kept the winter solstice with a feast of drunkenness and riot. The Christians thought that they could bring a better meaning into that feast. They tried to persuade their flocks not to drink or eat too much, and to keep the feast more austerely —but without success " (A History of Christianity, 1995, p. 24).

brianlee

Friday, May 8, 2015

Nimrod and Semiramis

Bible Story - Chapter 6

Friday, March 20, 2015

How Christian Is Easter?

How Christian Is Easter?