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Tag: Easter

Interview – Dr. Philipp Nothaft on the Date of Christmas

Interview – Dr. Philipp Nothaft on the Date of Christmas

My guest today is Dr Philipp Nothaft. Philipp is a Fellow of All Souls Oxford and a historian specializing in astronomy, astrology and calendars in late antiquity, the Middle Ages and early modern Europe. He’s also the author of a key paper on the question of why Christmas falls on December 25th, which is our main topic today. It’s often claimed in pop history that Christians stole a pagan feast day and made it into Christmas, and this is a…

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Interview – Andrew Henry on Easter and “Pagan Origins”

Interview – Andrew Henry on Easter and “Pagan Origins”

My latest guest is Dr Andrew Henry, who is an adjunct professor at George Washington University in Washington DC and a specialist in late antique Mediterranean religion. He is also the writer and presenter of the excellent Religion for Breakfast YouTube channel, where he has several videos debunking claims about the supposed “pagan origins” of Christian festivals. In this conversation we discuss the various claims about the supposed “pagan origin” of the date of and customs surrounding Easter. We go…

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Pagan Halloween?

Pagan Halloween?

The idea that all the traditional holidays and festivals of the year are “pagan” in origin and were simply “stolen by the Church” is one that has permeated popular culture and is repeated without question in newspaper, magazine and online articles. Unfortunately, many anti-theistic polemicists cannot resist a chance to get in a jab at any aspect of Christianity being “really pagan”, so every October we see supposed rationalists parroting pseudo history about the “pagan origins of Halloween”, with no…

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Is Easter Pagan?

Is Easter Pagan?

Every year fundamentalist Christians, New Agers, neo-pagans and many atheists loudly agree that Easter was not originally a Christian feast and was a pagan fertility festival stolen by Christianity. Unfortunately, despite what endless memes and pop history articles claim, this idea is complete nonsense. So is the claim that Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny are also originally pagan. It is rather ironic that a set of false historical claims about the origin of Easter and its customs are propagated…

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Is Halloween Pagan?

Is Halloween Pagan?

The idea that all the traditional holidays and festivals of the year are “pagan” in origin and were simply “stolen by the Church” is one that has permeated popular culture and is repeated without question in newspaper, magazine and online articles. It is perhaps not surprising that harried journalists and underpaid online content writers are uncritical about these claims, but it is more strange that prominent atheists are as well, given they are meant to be sceptics who check their…

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Pagan Christmas

Pagan Christmas

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…

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2018 – The Year in Review

2018 – The Year in Review

Since we are now a few days into the new year, I have been looking at the statistics for this blog over the last twelve months and thought I would post a short summary, with a few comments. History for Atheists has been running since October 2015, and so is now into its fourth year of operation. In that time, I am happy to say, it has built up a solid following and has gone some way toward its objective…

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The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicaea and the Bible

The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicaea and the Bible

It seems the “Philosophical Atheism” group on Facebook is going to be the New Atheist bad history gift that just keeps on giving.  No anti-Christian snippet or meme seems to be able to get by this group without it being posted as factual, without any hint of checking its claims.  So the gloriously stupid (and grammatically bizarre) pastiche of nonsense above was posted to “Philosophical Atheism” yesterday, with the group’s followers reverently genuflecting to its mighty historical truth and insight.  The…

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Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs

Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs

  As I mentioned in my last post, two things we can now be sure the internet will deliver up at Easter are rehashes of the tedious “Jesus never existed” thesis and memes telling us that “Easter is actually pagan!”.  The one above has become one of the most popular in recent years, so much so that its “Ishtar = Easter” claim has taken on internet factoid status. More recently, online New Atheists seem to have finally worked out that…

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