On Dec 25, 5:43 am, Grumman-581 <grumman581-rec-sc...@spambob.net>
wrote:

Until they found that torture worked even better.

True.  The church just adopted Saturnalia to help recruit pagan
members.

http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/Christmas_TheRealStory.htm

II.     How Did Christmas Come to Be Celebrated on December 25?

A.    Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week
long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25.  During
this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no
one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during
the weeklong celebration.  The festival began when Roman authorities
chose “an enemy of the Roman people” to represent the “Lord of
Misrule.”  Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to
indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week.  At
the festival’s conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed
they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this
innocent man or woman.

B.    The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his
dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival’s observance in
his time.  In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs:
widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing
naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped
biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries
during the Christmas season).

C.    In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia
festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it.  Christian
leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of
pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the
Saturnalia as Christians.[2]

D.    The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian
about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named
Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday.

E.      Christians had little success, however, refining the practices
of Saturnalia.  As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the
University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, “In return for ensuring
massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior’s birth by
assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly
agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it
had always been.”  The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by
drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor
of modern caroling), etc.

F.      The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that
“the early Christians who  first observed the Nativity on December 25
did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because
the Heathens’ Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were
willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian
ones.”[3]  Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by
the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between
1659 and 1681.[4]  However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by
most Christians.

G.    Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival
were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope
Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race
naked through the streets of the city.  An eyewitness account reports,
“Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the
race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for
spectators.  They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of
laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony
and laughed heartily.”[5]

H.     As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th
centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear
clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of
the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community
of Rome sent a petition in1836 to Pope Gregory XVI begging him to stop
the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It
is not opportune to make any innovation.”[6]  On December 25, 1881,
Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into Antisemitic frenzies
that led to riots across the country.  In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally
murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped.  Two
million rubles worth of property was destroyed

   Yeah, Merry Christmas to all, including those who cannot shut their
f.cking traps even on one day out of respect.

Curtis

The Romans called it Sol Invictus.
This weather makes me hope they were right.

Matthias