My retarded neighbors

So in the apartment down the way there's a man and woman. not sure if they are married or siblings but they are really fucking weird. Just retardish, can drive, but just really slow and uncouth.

This was in their window when I got home.

That doesn't seem very strange. Aren't we about to celebrate in a very secular fashion a holiday that misrepresents the timing of Jesus' birth for the purpose of tricking pagans by adopting their symbology? A simple birthday card seems like the least strange statement a person can make about Christmas.

Vinyl siding?

My neighbors were cleaning the snow off their car and setting off the alarm at 2:30AM Monday morning, right outside our bedroom window. I win.

Also, when I got home from work Monday, the other neighbor was standing in the snow on his front lawn taking pictures of his Christmas display - wearing a wool hat, a parka... slippers (with socks) and short pants. It was 23 degrees F.

Whose the retard? The people putting something harmless up in their window or the person whose stupid enough to get riled up enough to take a picture of said something and post it on the internet?

Living so close to Mr. Lesbian Shoes doesn't say a lot about their mental capacity.

So what were the early Christians tricking pagans into? Were they tricking them into converting or were tricking them into not feeding them to lions?

Here's another thought...a lot of the earliest Christians were converted pagans themselves. Maybe these converts brought their symbols and traditions along with them instead of the other way around?

^ Mithraists agree !

[Dayton fucks pigs]

All other comments aside, they did misspell "Birthday".

They also misspelled "King" twice, and in two different ways. That takes creativity.

I took that as extremely poor handwriting, I can see your point though.

The guy who can't distinguish pronouns?

Can you not see why religion, especially one with a promise of a heaven, would be especially appealing to those with physical and mental handicaps?

Let them have their hope, no need to mock or scorn.

This.

The importation of pagan symbolism, holidays and beliefs, though it was always there to a certain extent, became widespread after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and people had to "convert" whether they wanted to or not. "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." No one should ever be forced to accept a religious belief or its practices, but that is especially true of Christianity which is all about the personal choice to let God deliver you from sin. The religion that resulted from the forced conversions (even more than from the imported paganism, which was the result rather than the root) is not the Christianity of Jesus Christ.

And too bad for those who don't like hearing that some people who claim to be Christians aren't "true Christians." Jesus said it himself, long before I or anyone in modern times ever did.

Mocking and scorning are the preferred behavior of small minds, of people who are so unsure of themselves that it gives them a slight glimmer of self-worth to be able to look down on someone, even if it has to be a handicapped person.

Now stop bothering me, and let me get back to mocking and scorning you...

And? So what? The point is the holiday is a bastardized version of what it claims to represent, and Skrain's neighbors actually get it, which says to me that he might be wrong about their mental status.

What it claims to represent is mythological. It doesn't need to make sense in order to have meaning.

Additionally, your claim that the Christianity's pagan symbolism is only there to "trick" pagans seems a little loaded to me.

Well, regardless of how the pagan stuff got there, doesn't it distort the celebration of Christ's birth? That's really what I'm getting at. Maybe I'm wrong, and that stuff is core to the holiday, but I'd want to see somebody argue that point.

When I lived in Ohio, there was a schizophrenic man that lived at the end of our building who would come out onto his patio in his underwear (no matter the weather) every time I passed his apartment to yell at me and call me a stupid stuck up bitch.

On one occasion when bringing home groceries late one night, he was on his patio stumbling around trying to pull his bicycle (which he rode everywhere) backwards onto his 3'x3' patio. When he saw us coming he asked us if we were aliens.

After filing a police report, he made it a point, every time I passed his place from then on, to swing his patio door open and stand in his doorway in his underwear staring me down.
Unless he was just too lazy and then he would just open his door and flash his patio light at me from the inside of his apartment.

I win.

I tried that argument when I worked at a Southern Baptist book store when I was 20.

It didn't go over very well.

When did the idea of celebrating Christ's birth even start? Does it predate that adoption of pagan rites? After all, he said to break bread in his memory, not to put up amngers, right?

I'm not going to argue that Christmas hasn't been secularized, but by distorting the celebration of Christ's birth, do you mean everyone's doing it on the wrong day? If so, then I don't see that it matters all that much. from a mythological perspective, it actually makes a certain amount of sense..for the same reasons it made sense to the pagans...being right when the days start getting longer and the nights shorter. With regards to some of the pagan trappings, evergreens and wreathes can be (and certainly are) seen as symbolic of everlasting life, which is central to Christianity. Santa Clause, Yule logs, and wassailing? No idea. I don't even know what wassailing is.

But if you want to talk about the celebration being disconnected from the meaning, I give you Easter. What a bunch of pagan fecundity symbols have to do with Christ's resurrection, I have no idea.

I don't believe so. That why, when people finally started paying attention to celebrating his birth, no one had any idea any more when it actually was. (There is even a slight chance -- approximately one chance in 365.24 -- that it was on December 25...)

One of the first Christmas feasts was initially promoted as part of the revival of Catholicism in late 300AD. Anything further than that, if I recall, wasn't actually established until around 900AD.

And I believe that early Christians initially adopted alot of the pagan rituals because essentially, it's what they were familiar with.

I'm a little rusty on my facts. There's a lot of history there to dig through.

In the centuries during which Christianity was paganized, Christ's resurrection was seen as a more or less legendary event, a parable of new life coming from what seems to be death. Since it occurred in the spring, that was associated with the fertility rights of spring in Celtic druidism (which had a lot of influence in making Christianity into what it later became).

They simply show how little the "Christians" of the time understood of what Christianity actually teaches about the resurrection of Christ.

I don't know, but my guess is that it came some time after the first Council of Nicea.

I don't think it was there to "trick" pagans so much as it was embarrassing that the church forbade things but the people just went on celebrating Saturnalia and all the other pagan festivals anyway. So, eventually, the church just stopped trying to stop these events and instead tried to repurpose them with new meaning. The same thing happened to Dayton's Christmas Tree which is now in his living room but which he would never suspect is actually a pagan symbol.

You know, a paint gun shot to the crunch berries would have solved that problem quite quickly and easily.

Captain Crunch Approves!

When did mocking the mentally ill become part of the festivities?