Christians who wage war on Christmas
Quote:In Italy, Evangelicals Wage a Quiet War on Christmas
The charismatic Christian author from Pescara, Italy, rejects the holiday and all its trappings. To him, the traditions and celebrations associated with the birth of Jesus are actually antithetical to his faith. They have nothing to do with Jesus. They’re just empty rituals.
He’s not alone in hating the holiday. Many evangelicals in Italy are staunchly opposed to Christmas.
For the Italian Christians who identify as born again, rejecting Christmas is a way to distinguish them from Catholics.
For Vincenzo Russo, an evangelical in Naples, there are two big issues with Christmas celebrations. The first is that it invites hypocrisy. People pretend to be devoted Christians who care a lot about Christ’s birth, when they really don’t.
The second is that the traditions and celebrations are not biblical.
“Let’s ask ourselves, is this something that God likes?” Russo said. “Or is it maybe because they like to binge on panettone and swallow rivers of sparkling wine and get moved by hearing the bagpipe-playing shepherds (zampognari)?”
The church explains to potential visitors that it does not “recognize the liturgical feast of the nativity of Jesus.” It points out that the date of Jesus’ birth is not mentioned in the Bible and that modern traditions, including the Christmas tree and live Nativities, cannot be found in Scripture either.
Italian evangelicals are not the first Christians to oppose Christmas, according to historian Gerry Bowler, author of Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday. In fact, a war on Christmas is itself a Christmas tradition.
Christians in the first and second centuries debated whether the Nativity should be celebrated, Bowler said, and early Gnostics challenged the notion of the Incarnation, arguing that Jesus did not have a physical body. Since then, everyone from Catholics to Puritans to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Oneness Pentecostals have denounced the accretion of “non-Christian” elements, deeming the holiday idolatrous and unbiblical.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/1...-catholic/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
