Woody's World

Christmas in America has lost most of its religious meaning.  Commercialization and gift-giving accelerated the process, but they did not start it. The result is the Christmas we know today: a holiday that can be sacred, sentimental, commercial, or purely cultural, depending on who you ask. As early as the 1870s, Christmas in America began to change from essentially a religious to a secular national holiday, a process accelerated by commercialization and the custom of gift-giving. When Americans today debate whether Christmas is “religious” or “secular,” they often assume the holiday has always been both. Historically, that assumption is wrong. In fact, Christmas in the United States underwent a deliberate and well-documented transformation, one that accelerated in the late 19th century, particularly after the 1870s. Understanding how and why this happened requires stepping back to early American attitudes toward Christmas, which were far less sentimental than what we recognize tod...

  Rabbi Akiva “From the bad I see the good. From the troubles I see the redemption.” Rabbi Akiva said: “Beloved are sufferings” – a person should appreciate troubles, because from the troubles we grow. Without troubles a person does not access the deepest recesses of his potential. A great person becomes greater from great troubles.

…..that it will pick and choose from Catholic tradition if it serves its purpose.  For instance, they would believe all the Catholic traditional     accounts as to how most of Jesus' disciplines died for their faith, and yet, when it comes from Catholic tradition about the five Marian dogmas, they will only accept one, which is the virgin birth of Jesus because that is recorded in the Christian scriptures. But they will reject the other four - Mary as the Immaculate Conception, Mary the Mother of God, Mary's perpetual virginity, and Mary's Assumption into Heaven. They pick and choose by way of convenience.

…… is that what counts as "Scripture" was completely decided by the Catholic Church. The authority of Scripture rests on the authority of the RCC. They not only chose what went in the New Testament, but they forged almost half the books in it. 13 out of 27 books in the NT are pseudepigraphical (falsely attributed work, a text whose claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past).  The Christian Bible is only the Bible because the Catholic Church said so and really only because a Roman Emperor said so