Monday, November 5, 2012

This awful, pagan holidays!


"Poland's Catholic Church has warned that modern Halloween rituals risk promoting the occult." BBC News announced. 

Halloween is getting more and more popular, but why Christians in Poland condemn this holiday? It is considered as pagan, occultic due to its celtic origin and form.
There is one drawback in such reasoning. It is an unpopular topic but lots of Christian traditions and holidays has a pagan origin, for instance: Christmas, Easter, Semik and All Souls' Day.

Christmas- the date of this holiday 25th of December was chosen because of Roman holiday called Saturnalia. Once it was a holiday of  winter solstice. (The Christmas Encyclopedia)  

All Soul's Day - was established as a counterweight to the pagan cult of the dead. So in fact it is like a Christian equivalent. 

Easter - "The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible says that Easter was originally the spring festival in honor of the Teutonic goddess of light and spring known in Anglo-Saxon as Eastre, or Eostre. In any case, the Encyclopedia Britannica (11th Edition) states: 'There is no indication of the observance of the Easter festival in the New Testament.' " btw rabbit and eggs are pagan symbol of fertility.

Semik "is an ancient Slavic fertility festival celebrated in early June and closely linked with the cult of the dead and the spring agricultural rites." Wikipedia

It' s just a curiosity of Christian history. I suppose there must be more causes for this religion not to accept Halloween. I just hope those are better motivated. For me, as an agnostic, there is no rational cause of forbidding it.


2 comments:

  1. For all I know it comes not only to pagan orgin. The Church in Poland doesn't forbid celebrating halloween, but rather things like invoking ghosts or a divination. But you're right - most of Christians in Poland don't know about their's religion's orgin (or rather they "don't want" to know), but they still criticize halloween because of this reason.

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  2. Church doesn't forbid it, it condemn Halloween. And Halloween involve ghosts. But what is interesting there are no objections against Andrzejki... And ghosts are in fact souls... and it is all really blurry for me. I would be happy to get some explanations ;)

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