by Alexander Ferrar

Created on: December 27, 2008

Now that the Christmas season is over, I would like to answer all of the arguments I hear every year about why it is good and why it is bad and the origins of it and yadda yadda yadda. Some say we should stop commercializing the holiday and put Christ back into Christmas, and that is the crux of the problem, I think. Of that problem, and many others, and I wish to set the record straight once and for all in a roundabout way.

Following the example of Saint Columba, Maryknolls converting primitive people to their religion would integrate any of the indigenous practices they had to in order to make it stick. If the natives insisted on saying Rashumba dudda rosha while clutching people's heads and rolling their eyes up, well, they'd let them. But they'd give them a different reason to do it. Say, oh you're right to be doing what you're doing, but you are doing it for the wrong reason. THIS is what Rashumba-doodle-doo really means. Now, aren't you glad we came into your godforsaken land to tell you that? Good. Amen-amen, salvation all around. And now you can tell all these other servants of the Lord we brought with us where the gold and ivory is.

They started with folk heroes. Everybody remembers Saint George as being the one who slew a dragon, but most of us will agree that dragons didn't exist. In the Middle Ages, however, pagans did. And they believed in heroes who had slain them and deserved to be worshipped for it, after a fashion. Beowulf in Denmark and Siegfried in Germany are two notable examples. In order to incorporate those beliefs into Christianity, the worship of folk heroes and gods and goddesses became admissible by disguising them as saints. Saint George is a patron saint of Germany and England, but there wasn't squat mentioned in his canonization about dragons until that myth was needed to convert pagans. Same with St. Patrick driving snakes out of Ireland.

The Holy Trinity, for example, is not anywhere in the Bible. No implications, even. The idea of a Triune God didn't find its way into the Church formally until the fourth century, under Constantine in Rome, and it was adopted into Christianity because of politics. Mesopotamians had Anu, Ea, and Enlil. Egypt had Horus, Isis, and Osiris. Babylon had Ishtar, Sin, and Shamash. India had Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. So, we had to have them, too, if we wanted a hold over those people. That's why we changed the Sabbath to Sunday. The day of the SUN god. We took sun disks from Egypt and turned them into haloes.

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