For a fact, the Christians stole Christmas. We don't mind sharing it with them, but we don't like this pretense of theirs that it is the birthday of Jesus. It is the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun - Dies Natalis Invicti Solis. Christmas is a relic of sun worship.
The customs of this time of year endure because they are pleasant customs. It's fun to hear from distant family and friends, to gather, to feast, to sing. Gifts, as Robert Ingersoll once said, are evidences of friendship, of remembrance, of love.
The evergreens displayed now as in centuries past flourish when all else seems dead, and are symbols, as is the returning sun, of enduring life.
In celebrating the Winter Solstice, we celebrate reality. - Anne Nicol Gaylor
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So, what lessons did we learn? And what does the future hold?
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Amid the all the hand-wringing, or wailing jeremiads, or triumphant op-eds
out there, *I’ll offer in this election post-mortem some perspectives that
you...
4 days ago
4 comments:
Concisely put, Bill. One step further, that you may or may not have made, is to consider that source of life energy as alive itself; as a conscious being. It's not that strange a thought, not as strange as to think it strange. It was the Church that burned it out of our culture, not science. Take a little peep at my webpage http://www.sunofgod.net
btw, my Mom came from Homer, Nebraska - the Doxtads, and I went back a lot when I was a kid.
Thanks, Greg, but note that those aren't my words. And it's only an excerpt from a longer speech. For both of those reasons, your praise might not be justified. (As you can see if you look around here, I don't do "concise" very well.)
Re. your suggestion that the sun is a conscious being, that suffers from the same problem as most religious beliefs: no evidence. An extraordinary claim like that would require truly extraordinary evidence backing it up.
The fact is, modern scientists know a great deal about our sun. True, they don't know everything, but we've come a long way since people believed it was a god riding a golden chariot across the sky. If there were any evidence at all that the sun is conscious, scientists would be the first to discover it.
Pretty much everyone really wants to believe that death isn't permanent, that their "spirit" will live on forever. And we generally find it very easy to believe what we want to believe. But this is why religions never come to a consensus, while scientists worldwide do - because they can show real evidence backing up their beliefs.
And note that it's a person making a claim who must provide evidence backing it up. See Russell's Teapot.
And let's face it, without relying on evidence, we have no way to tell when we're wrong. Again, this is why there's such a huge variety of religious belief in the world. Since believers rely on faith, not evidence, they can believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of the truth.
Bill, I see you've done your own alternative Christmas blog, or quote. I like the Peanuts cartoon too, but are the words from Shultz?
Heh, heh. No, Jim. Calamities of Nature is drawn (and written) by Tony Piro.
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