It is traditional that the media be filled with pseudo historical nonsense about the pagan elements of Christmas at this time of year. But atheists who claim to be “working for a more rational world” really should be more careful than harried journalists when presenting the “real history” of the season. Unfortunately, they almost never are.

As I have noted here before, the media loves giving dubious background stories on traditions and festivals. At Christmas, it fills column inches or provides clickable online copy in what is usually a quiet news period. And the “pagan origins of Christmas” story almost writes itself, given that the poor saps who are given this thankless task each year just have to recycle elements of the dozens of previous versions from other years.

As a result, we get the same claims repeated endlessly, with the usual level of historical research put into them that we would expect for this low level journalistic chore; i.e. pretty much none. It would not be too hard for these poor journalists to work out that most of the claims about pagan origins of Christmas and its customs are nonsense – after all, there are excellent resources available on the internet which do this in some detail. But journalists assigned to this kind of task are not likely to go against the grain and debunk the standard pieces of this type and most of their readers do not like debunkings anyway. So each “pagan Christmas” article echoes the previous ones, like an endless succession of ghosts of Christmas past.

Atheist activists, on the other hand, are meant to check things carefully. For example, Seth Andrews, the atheist broadcaster who is host of the website, podcast, and online community “The Thinking Atheist”, begins his podcast and heads his website by imploring his audience to “Assume nothing. Question everything. And start thinking.” A voiceover on his podcast and YouTube channel declares their aims as “Rejecting Faith. Pursuing Knowledge. And working together for a more rational world.” Noble and stirring stuff.

Unfortunately, when Andrews recently ventured into the history behind Christmas, – in a podcast/video called “What Christians (Probably) Don’t Know About Christmas” – the result was a mangled mish-mash of confused myths, pseudo history and total nonsense. But it was driven by a burning desired to show Christians that their cherished Christmas traditions were all, in fact, wickedly pagan.

Normally I would go through each of Andrews’ claims and compare them to what the actual evidence shows, but – as I have already noted – these claims have been ably debunked elsewhere. Most usefully, Classics scholars Peter Gainsford and Spencer Alexander McDaniel have both written several articles showing how almost all of the “pagan Christmas” claims Andrews and others like him parrot are mostly nonsense. So I will simply link to their articles here and then refer back to them as I analyse Andrews’ bungled assertions.

To begin with, Spencer Alexander McDaniel’s Tales of Times Forgotten blog has a very detailed analysis on the subject which shows that, in fact, most elements of Christmas claimed as “pagan” actually are not:

Just How Pagan is Christmas Really?

Given that the claim that Christmas is essentially just the Roman festival of Saturnalia rebadged, McDaniel has recently added another useful article detailing what we know about Saturnalia and highlighting that it had little influence on Christmas:

How Was Saturnalia Celebrated in Ancient Rome?

Peter Gainsford’s always useful and thorough blog, Kiwi Hellenist, tackles the other main set of “pagan Christmas” claims: the idea that we are just celebrating pagan Yule, showing that there is little in modern Christmas that we can say is actually from Germanic paganism either:

Concerning Yule

A lot of nonsense also gets claimed about pagan origins of more specific elements, so McDaniel tackles the ones about Santa Claus:

The Long, Strange, Fascinating History of Santa Claus

and Christmas trees:

The Origins of the Christmas Tree

It should be noted for the benefit of the easily confused that neither of these gentlemen are in any way “Christian apologists”. Both are Classics scholars and both are, like me, just as happy to debunk Christian bad history as any other. Gainsford’s most recent post – The Christmas Stories: Matthew vs. Luke – is a good summary of the problems with trying to create one narrative out of the two very different stories in the gospels’ Infancy Narratives, despite the desperate efforts to do so by Biblical conservatives. Similarly, McDaniel’s articles on early Christianity are even-handed and equally hard on both Christian and non-Christian claims about history that are unfounded. Yes, many of the arguments and evidence both Gainsford and McDaniel present above can also be found on Christian sites debunking the “pagan origins of Christmas”. This does not mean these are somehow “Christian arguments”. It just means that Christians are not always wrong about absolutely everything.

This is more than can be said for Seth Andrews, who seems to be going for some kind of award for how much he can get totally wrong on this topic in just over an hour.

Andrews, like many American atheist activists, started out as a fundamentalist Christian and spent ten years as a Christian radio host. And it shows. He has the breezy self-assurance and warm but confident delivery of that kind of preacher. Unfortunately, he also has the believer-turned-unbeliever’s zeal for leaping on anything that makes his former faith look bad, with the fundamentalist’s tendency to accept anything that affirms his beliefs as true, without critical analysis or careful fact-checking. So, in this case, the result is a chaotic mess of utter pseudo historical gibberish.

Thankfully, the first half of this disaster focuses mainly on the problems with any Biblical literalist attempt at harmonising the contradictory gLuke and gMatt accounts of Jesus’ birth that Gainsford analyses with greater precision and perceptiveness in the article already noted above. But then Andrews gets onto the “pagan Christmas” stuff and the festival of nonsense begins.

He notes, correctly, that Christmas falls on what the Romans considered to be the winter solstice – December 25. The actual astronomical solstice is December 21/22, but idiosyncrasies of the Roman calendar meant it was celebrated a few days later. What Andrews proceeds to get wrong is why Christmas ended up on the same day as the Roman solstice:

Ancient Rome celebrated the solstice around the 25th of December. In fact, it said December 25th was the birthday of Mithra – this invincible Persian sun god Mithra. And it’s true that Mithraism and Christianity have a lot of suspicious commonalities.

Mithra is at least 4 000 years old. That legend has changed and shaped its way from Persia and the Greeks and the Babylonians and the Mesopotamians and beyond.

(30.39 – 31.06)

The claim that Christmas was originally the festival of the birth of Mithras is a myth beloved by atheist activists, despite the fact it is totally groundless – the esteemed Mithraic scholar Roger Beck refers to it with grumpy exasperation as “the hoariest of ‘facts’”. I have already detailed why this claim is nonsense – see The Great Myths 2: Christmas, Mithras and Paganism for full details.

As usual, Andrews is oblivious to modern Mithraic scholarship and so wrongly conflates the Roman god Mithras with his quite distinct and different Persian namesake Mithra. Apart from a name and a hat, the two have almost nothing in common with each other. Less typically, Andrews claims a remarkable and totally imaginary lineage for his Mithra, that somehow includes Greek, Babylonian and Mesopotamian Mithraic cults, despite none of these cultures worshipping Mithra/Mithras at all. More pertinently, however, the problem is he claims that December 25 was a Mithraic feast of the god’s birth, despite there being absolutely no evidence for this. But he warms to the theme of these supposed Mithras/Jesus “suspicious commonalities”:

Mithra like Jesus was considered the “light of the world”. Mithra was a heavenly father who received his minions into their heavenly mansions. Does that sound familiar?

Mithra was honoured at this great big feast that was held in the month of
December and the centrepiece of the party was a sacrifice, probably a bull. And the people ate bread and they drank holy water at some point – they think that was wine. All of this revolving around the god who was the sun. Now if that sounds a little bit like the Biblical Last Supper I think there might be some correlations to be drawn there.

(31.07- 31.47)

Any “correlations” drawn here might be useful if these claims were true, but they largely are not. There is no evidence that Mithras was ever called “the light of the world” or “heavenly father”. Mithraism did have a father figure who was a sun god, but that was Sol, not Mithras himself. The claim Mithras “received his minions into their heavenly mansions” is also baseless, as is the stuff about some “great big feast that was held in the month of December”. Mithraic cult ceremonies possibly did occasionally involve the sacrifice of bulls and sacrificed animals were usually then eaten. But Mithraic feasts seem to have more commonly involved bread and wine (not “holy water”), largely because they were staple foods at all meals in the Mediterranean world. Any “correlations” with the gospel’s last supper accounts are minimal and simply a matter of common culture.

But Andrews goes on:

The ancient Romans (especially in the upper classes) they often would celebrate the birthday of Mithra. The big party was Saturnalia, in honour of Saturn, the god of agriculture.

All right we’re tracking … I’ve thrown out a few gods we’ve got Mithra the sun, we get Saturn … agriculture. Now because the sun is bringing the warmer weather these mostly pagan people wanted to appease the god of agriculture, Saturn, so they would have a bountiful harvest.

(31.48 – 32.22)

So now, by an awkward segue about the sun and harvest, Andrews moves from the erroneous claim about “Mithra” having some feast in December to an actual Roman feast in December – Saturnalia. This clearly was a feast of Saturn and Saturn was, among other things, a god of agriculture. But, like most ancient gods, he was not just the god of agriculture and ancient religion tended not to have single gods “of” single things anyway. So Saturn was a deity of generation, dissolution, plenty, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation and of the passing of time. As McDaniel’s article shows, we can only glean a little from the sources about Saturnalia, but nothing indicates any connection between it and agriculture or anything to do with “a bountiful harvest”.

Andrews continues:

The festival of Saturnalia actually started as a one day thing and it eventually extended to a full week, which began on December the 17th ending December the 24th/25th, okay?

(32.23 – 32.34)

Unfortunately for Andrews, this is not “okay” because it is nonsense. Saturnalia was originally on December 17. By the first century AD it had become a week-long celebration, with Augustus trying to limit it to three days from December 17 to 20. But Caligula extended it again to five days, from December 17 to 22. So even if we take the longest period in which it was celebrated, that still only gets us to … December 23. This means Andrews has to add a few more days with his “December the 24th/25th” to try to weasel his way around the fact that Saturnalia does not encompass December 25 in any of its manifestations.

And during Saturnalia everything else ground to a halt nobody really did anything else. They wouldn’t work all businesses were closed down the courts of law were suspended social activities pretty much non-existent outside the big party everything and everybody revolved around the festival.

(32.35 – 32.52)

This is largely true, though also largely irrelevant. Modern Christmas does not involve a shut down of business for the duration of a week long festival – far from it, given it is a frenzy of commercial activity. The traditional Christian period of celebration was the Twelve Days of Christmas, but this went from December 25 to January 8 and, while it was punctuated with other feast days, also did not involve any cessation of all other activity.

But Andrews soon gets back to his supposed parallels:

And the Roman pagans would decorate their houses with wreaths and greenery. Green plants like the evergreen … they had a special meaning for people who lived in the harshness of winter. All the trees, the grass and everything else, all the plants, the harvest, everything died except for the evergreens. And it was believed that evergreens would keep away the forces of darkness, which is ghosts evil spirits even sickness and disease.

And so families would adorn their homes inside and outside with pine and spruce and fir trees. They’d put evergreen boughs and they’d hang them over the door. These trees and plants were very special things
they didn’t die during the coldest time of the year and they kind of served as a reminder of the green plants and all the lush greenery that would again grow when the sun god returned with the warmer weather so people would literally deck the halls with boughs of holly like the song says. By the way the plant holly that was the symbol of the pagan king of winter.

(32.53 – 33.57)

Which all sounds very significant except for the fact that it is, once again, all nonsense. Or rather, there is no evidence supporting any of this. Absolutely none of the (very scanty) references we have to Saturnalia make any mention of decorating homes with any evergreen boughs and wreaths. They may have, since decorating your home before having friends come over is fairly timeless and decorating with bare sticks did not become fashionable décor until the 1960s. But the claim the Romans did do this is based on no evidence and so the heavy implication that this is the origin of our Christmas decorations is pure nonsense. Those decorations have their origin in northern Europe, and are simply because evergreens look nice in winter rather than any deep pagan associations. As the apocryphal butcher once probably did not say to Sigmund Freud, “sometimes a sausage is just a sausage”.

But on he goes:

Saturnalia – singing, dancing, feasting, socialising, gambling. And exchange of gifts took place between family and friends. Gifts – that’s another piece of the pagan puzzle. And to signify the return of Mithra – the sun, the light of the sun – they would light these wax taper candles and they were gifted to other people who would then light the candles. The Christmas candle finds its roots among the ancient worshippers of the sun god, Mithra.

(33.58 – 34.29)

This is another jumble of nonsense. There was no December festival of Mithras and the very new god Mithras had nothing to do with the festival of the very ancient god Saturn anyway. Somehow Andrews imagines Saturnalia is also a Mithraic festival, which is totally wrong. What he does not seem to realise is Mithraism was a new religion: one that arose in Rome out of astrological speculations in the first century AD, though it adopted the name Mithras and some trappings from the earlier Persian god’s cult to avoid the charge of being an novel superstitio and make itself suitably venerable and respectable (see David Ulansey The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World on how Roman Mithraism began and why it is not the same cult as its distant Persian cousin). The cult of Saturn, on the other hand, was ancient. In fact, it is possible that it was the most ancient of all the Roman cults and was a native Italian deity, worshipped as Satre by the Etruscans, later identified with the Greek god Cronos and eventually supplanted as the chief god in Rome by Jupiter.

So the idea that the very new god Mithras was somehow an intrinsic part of the venerable festival of the very old god Saturn is total gibberish. Andrews also appears totally unaware that the Mithraic cult was a mystery religion, with its rites closely guarded secrets held in private by a small and select group of devotees. The idea that Mithras was the centre of some public spectacle shared by all is totally contrary to everything we know about Mithraism; and our knowledge is minimal precisely because Mithraism was not a large, popular, open and public cult. Nothing Andrews claims here makes the slightest bit of historical sense.

Yes, gifts were exchanged at Saturnalia – mainly votive clay figures and, as Andrews says, candles. But this custom has no connection at all with our tradition of Christmas presents. As McDaniels’ article shows, this gift giving tradition died out in Late Antiquity and was unknown for centuries. Gift giving does not come back into any midwinter festival until the fifteenth century, as part of the feast of St Nicolaus. But that’s Dec 6, not Dec 25. The St Nicolaus tradition only became subsumed into the traditions around Dec 25 in very recent times, largely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century secularisation (and commercialisation) of earlier Christmas traditions. So our gift giving is not “pagan” in origin and any earlier pagan gift giving is coincidental, not derivative.

Similarly the idea that a Roman midwinter festival involved candles and so any later Christian uses of candles at Christmas must have a pagan Roman origin is pretty obviously absurd. We may see candles as largely ceremonial or atmospheric, but that is because we have electricity. In any period where candles and lamps were the only way you could keep the party going past the very early midwinter sunset, candles are an obvious necessity. The association of Christmas and candles is due to this practicality, not some mystical “pagan” origin.

Andrews now pushes onto that great source of pseudo historical silliness – the Vikings:

The Scandinavian Vikings also had their sun god – a god named Balder – and the evergreen was the special plant of that particular deity. But around the fourth century western Christian churches were starting to settle into celebrations of their own Christmas holiday and of course they decided December 25th made a lot of sense. It’s strategic.

(34.58 – 35.19)

As I have explained in my Mithras- Christmas article, early Christians had a variety of dates for celebrations of Jesus’ birth, including April 19, May 20, Nov 17 and April 2. But in Rome they settled on December 25 and the influence of the Roman church meant this became the standard in the western Church generally. But while the fact this coincided with the Roman date of the solstice (but not Saturnalia) was likely a factor, the reasoning was actually mainly purely Christian. The idea that Jesus was executed on the same day as his conception means he was thought to have died on March 25, which means his birth must be nine months later on … Dec 25. So the date Christianity settled on has something to do with the solstice, but no, it’s not a case of straight appropriation. These things are rarely that simple.

Our first reference to this line of reasoning and December 25 as the right date for Christmas actually pre-dates the fourth century by 200 years. Hippolytus of Rome makes this case way back in c. 205. So the simplistic claim that the Christians “stole” the date simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Not that Andrews seems very interested in scrutiny of evidence. He prefers glib clichés. For example:

Now, this is a lot like what the Catholic Church did with Halloween. Halloween was essentially a Celtic tradition involving the druid priests and the people dressing up in masks and tricks and treats – very pagan. And the Church was coming in going “Well, we can’t have all this paganism, but people sure like the holiday’, so the Catholic Church sort of redressed it and made it All Saints Day, All Saints Eve or Halloween, changed the date, stamped a brand of ownership on it and said “Aha! Now we, the Catholic Church, own the holiday!’

Christianity did much of the same thing with the festival of Saturnalia in the month of December.

(35.20 – 36.02)

Just as Christmas is usually preceded by annual lazy journalism about “the pagan origins of Christmas”, Halloween is marked by similar cut-and-paste nonsense in popular media. These claims have a long pedigree, going back to nineteenth century folklorists’ obsession with “finding” supposed pagan origins for anything traditional and, originally, Puritan Christians’ similar obsession with denouncing anything deemed “unbiblical” as Papist idolatry derived ultimately from paganism and, therefore, Satan. So Andrews is reverting to his fundamentalist Christian roots here and parroting stuff that is a mainstay of Christian tracts to this day – such as this hilarious example from Jack T. Chick.

The tangle of nonsense Andrews parrots above may need a future article here to fully debunk, but suffice it to say for now that modern historians of folklore have rejected these claims comprehensively. Ronald Hutton’s excellent book Stations Of The Sun (Oxford: 1996) is a good thorough debunking by a leading scholar (Edit – I have now written a detailed debunking of Andrew’s garbled stuff about Halloween above – see “Is Halloween Pagan?”).

Andrews’ confusions continue:

Now the pagans and Christians kind of co-existed at first. They didn’t always get along, they were not always on good terms, but they mingled together and they kind of lived around each other. And then, all of a sudden, in 323 CE Rome adopts Christianity as its official religion. This is 323 CE. So all these party favours and all the traditions of Saturnalia, well, they took those and kind of changed them up and they attached them to the Christ story as the culture continued its religious evolution.

(36.03 – 36.37)

This is mainly just a summary of his earlier errors, but he stresses the date of “323 CE” as when Rome “adopts Christianity as its official religion”. As we have recently seen with Dawkins, it seems atheist activists have a remarkable ability to bungle this date. Dawkins mistakenly thinks this was done by Constantine via the Edict of Milan in 313, though he even gets the year wrong and gives it as 312. Here Andrews thinks it happened in 323, though where he gets this date from I have no idea. Did he think this adoption of Christianity happened at the Council of Nicaea? Given that this council was in 325 and not 323, it is very hard to tell. The source of his bungle aside, Christianity actually became the Roman state religion with Theodosius’ Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, which is 57 years after 323 – so his claim is a bit like asserting the American Declaration of Independence was made in 1719 or World War Two began in 1882. Why can none of these people get this simple fact right?

Onwards to the supposed pagan origins of Christmas trees:

It took a while for this particular tradition to catch on, at least in its current form. It was 16th century Germany credited with the Christmas tree tradition that we are familiar with today. A lot of people still wary of Christmas trees. Queen Victoria finally validated the Christmas tree tradition – this was 1846. She and Prince Albert were depicted in the Illustrated London News … this drawing of them and their family … they’re standing with the children and they’re standing around a Christmas
tree.

Now before this Christmas trees were still considered somewhat pagan, but Queen Victoria was really popular and after this image went out it became accepted in the public milieu. This was not the case in the early Americas; in fact even in the mid 1840s Americans were largely offended by Christmas trees for being far too pagan. The second governor of the New England Puritans, a guy named William Bradford, he called the trees “pagan mockery” and people were actually penalised. I guess this was considered a form of blasphemy if they attempted to celebrate Christmas with evergreens. But of course public perception soon gave way and the Christmas tree was popularised in the United States.

(36.38 – 38.01

Here, at least, Andrews manages to not say anything that is actually wrong. The problem here is, rather, that he implies that Bradford and later Christian conservatives were right in their claims that Christmas trees were pagan. But they were not. Christmas trees have a post-pagan and wholly Christian folk origin. Once again, the Puritans considered anything insufficiently “Biblical” to be “papist” and so ultimately “pagan”. But they were usually wrong. Andrews is simply following in their footsteps.

Next, mistletoe. Back to those Vikings:

If you’ve ever kissed under the mistletoe you might be surprised to learn that you are engaging in a tradition that dates back thousands of years. Ancient cultures used to think that mistletoe had magical healing powers the Greeks would use mistletoe for everything from menstrual cramps to ulcers they even used it to try to cure or prevent epilepsy. But around the first century CE it was the druids the Celtic priests they came to see mistletoe as a symbol of vigour and life and even reproductive potency in fact the druids would engage in treatments whatever those were for humans and animals who were having problems with fertility.

(38.04 – 38.48)

It is very clear that mistletoe was, like many plants, considered by ancient European cultures to have potential magical properties. But there is no evidence that the much later custom of kissing under mistletoe – first attested in England in the sixteenth century – has anything to do with this. Mistletoe is a traditional Christmas decoration for the same reason fir, holly and ivy are: because it is an evergreen and so more decorative than … bare sticks (see above about late 1960s décor).

Andrews then does a kind of retelling of the Norse story of the death of Baldur thanks to Loki’s trickery and a dart of mistletoe, though he adds some embroidery to try to tie it to the much later Christmas custom:

[Baldur’s] mother Frigg declared mistletoe a symbol of love and she vowed that she would kiss anybody who ever passed underneath it.

(40.41 – 40.50)

This is total garbage – nothing like this is found in any version of the Baldur story and where Andrews got this crap from I have no idea. It does not even make sense: why would Frigg declare the plant that caused the death of her son “a symbol of love”? There is no connection between the Christmas tradition about mistletoe and the Baldur story.

Next, Christmas carols get the Andrews treatment:

It’s believed that our modern day Christmas carols have nothing to do with the birth or life of Christ. Thousands of years ago throughout Europe the pagans would sing songs they would dance around these stone circles possibly to ward off evil spirits and appease the good ones. They used to sing all year: winter, spring, summer, fall – every season. But it was the December tradition that’s the one that stuck.

By the way the word carol possibly derived from a Latin word ‘choraula’ that means ‘circular dance’. But the dancing part of Christmas carols really didn’t last long – it was the singing that stuck. The origins of the Christmas carol are cloaked in a cloud of mystery but it makes sense right that Christianity would latch itself on to yet another pagan tradition. I will let you go down that rabbit hole if you feel so inclined.

(41.27 – 42.22)

There is no “rabbit hole” to go down. Christmas carols have nothing to do with pagans dancing around stone circles and are simply what the term says – carols, sung at Christmas. A carol was a song sung while dancing. Or rather, it was a way of accompanying a dance, usually a circular dance, with music if you did not have any instruments. In the Middle Ages, carols could be and were sung and danced to at any time of year. The words were adapted to the occasion, so you could have wedding carols, harvest carols, Easter carols and, of course, Christmas carols. Other forms of carolling died out, but the Christmas ones survived because of the popularity and conservatism of traditions around Christmas. Again, there is nothing pagan here. Andrews also seems to think that stone circles must have something to do with pre-Christian “paganism”. They are actually Neolithic, which means those pre-Christian pagans had nothing to do with them and had even less idea of what they were all about than we do. We have no evidence of them dancing around them singing carols.

And, finally, Santa:

Santa’s origin story actually harkens back to the land of the Vikings in Scandinavia and northern Europe, specifically the god Odin. Norse tradition says that Odin would appear during the winter solstice celebrations for something called the ‘Wild Hunt’ or the ‘Wild Ride’ and Odin would be at the front of this long line of parading gods in the sky. And they’re swooping around Odin mounted on a flying eight-legged horse; the legendary beast Sleipnir. Now this is the horse that’s arguably most famous for being the beast that Odin rode into Ragnarok, which is the great battle at the end of the world. Odin, an imposing almost terrifying spectre hooded and cloaked and boasting a big white beard, a god of the north he was, Odin, he could strike great fear among the mortals.

And yet it’s also said that Odin had a soft side – he loved a good party. And so this ghost parade – ‘Wild Hunt’ or the ‘Wild Ride’ – it would swoop over villages and homes and they would terrify people who were wandering around. But also Odin would drop toys and candy – it says that some of the children in villages would leave out straw for Sleipnir the horse and, as a reward, Odin would show his gratitude. He would slip down their chimneys and the fire holes in their roofs and he would leave gifts and rewards, according to legend. We can see how the Odin story has informed our Santa legend of today.

(42.32 – 44.11)

Almost none of this is true – see the “Appendix: Santa Claus and Odin” in McDaniel’s long article on the actual origins of Santa. None of the “wild hunt” traditions involve Odin bestowing gifts on children and there was no tradition of leaving out straw for his horse. Again, this is all speculative crap made up by a succession of journalists doing bad research from equally bad secondary sources.

But, despite his admonitions about how we should “Assume nothing. Question everything. And start thinking.” and his assurance his goal is for us all to be “working together for a more rational world”, Andrews seems to have simply cobbled together a grab-bag of nonsense he found lying around on the internet and accepted it all without the slightest question, let alone any fact-checking. An earlier video on his YouTube channel (11 Dec 2018) indicates that at least one of his “sources” for his pseudo historical gibberish is none other than … “Aron Ra” – another serial offender when it comes to garbled bad history. These people just smugly reinforce each others’ total ignorance.

Andrews thus manages to bungle pretty much every claim he makes. And he is not alone – atheists online parrot this stuff and variants of it without the slightest hint of critical analysis or fact checking. Keep in mind that this guy has 300,000+ subscribers on YouTube alone. People actually pay attention to his nonsense.

Once again, it seems anything that is sufficiently anti-Christian in tenor is accepted as dogma by these people. Which makes their (justified) scorn for Christians indulging their own confirmation bias … crisply ironic.

Happy Christmas to everyone.