The official web site of A.H. Lloyd

In my previous post, I noted how in discussions centering on Christmas, it's often difficult to tell Protestants from evangelical atheists since they often use the same arguments.

Both regularly accuse Catholics of "borrowing" pagan elements, with the result being a semi-pagan faith.  By stripping all these elements out, the Protestants argue, their form of Christianity is more "pure."

In practice, this makes it sterile and ruptures its continuity from Judaism.  This in turn facilitates hostility to Jews (and Jewish things) in a whole new and more violent way.  Martin Luther's "reforms" further enable Jew hatred, which combined with the Enlightenment to create the "evolutionary" study of religion.

Under this view, religion (like culture) starts primitive and – as scientific knowledge grows – advances from shamanistic practices to polytheism to monotheism.  Within monotheism, the most primitive is Zoroastrianism (which informed pagan Judaism – God didn't choose the Jews, the Jews found Him in captivity).  Judaism gave way to Catholicism, which contained Christ's truth but was polluted with pagan (and Jewish) superstition. 

The highest, and most evolved form of religion was naturally 19th Century German Protestantism (and its offshoots).

This worldview is entirely divorced from any spiritual element other than a vague personal relationship with God.  There's a devil, and some angels, and that's it.  The pagan gods are imaginary, the saints are simply pagan gods repackaged to facilitate (an imperfect) conversion, and the proof for all of this is the nonsense Catholics put up with, and the similarities between their holidays and pre-existing pagan ones.  "True" Christianity has Christmas and Easter (though Puritans famously hated Christmas).  The rest of the time it's pretty much one day after the other.

This completely rejects the fact that faith has always been tied to time and place.  (It also rejects the spirit realm and the fact that the pagan gods are real.)

In addition to the Ten Commandments, Moses was also ordered to keep a calendar, and if one actually bothers to research it, it is filled with special days, including memorials and feasts.

It is also tied with planting and the harvest, and Catholicism retains these links.  The liturgical calendar tracks very closely with the Jewish one for the obvious reason that the people who drew it up were themselves Jews! 

Both Catholic and Jewish calendars contain feast days, fasting days, memorials, solemnities and so on.  This is why weekly Mass is so emphasized – it keeps one tied into the divine conception of time rather than just dreary work days and state and federal holidays.

One would therefore expect religious holidays and observances to share a link to the natural world because for most of history, humanity was intimately connected to it.  The fact that the Winter Solstice is now something of a footnote mentioned by weather forecasters merely shows how divorced we are from nature.  Blinded by electric light, held in trance by flickering screens, we fail to notice the ebb and flow of sunlight, the waxing and waning of birdsong, and become completely detached from both physical and spiritual reality.

The Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Lord being set near the solstice is not a marketing gimmick or a lazy copycat of Yule or the Saturnalia but rather a correction of those pagan ceremonies.  It is a celebration of the True Light emerging from the darkness.