[Iscool]

Criticism, refutation, and replacement are also the principles behind modern holidays being celebrated to a limited extent around the same time as former pagan holidays. In actuality, reports of Christian holidays coinciding with pagan ones are often inaccurate (Christmas does not occur on Saturnalia, for example). However, to the extent the phenomenon occurs at all, Christian holidays were introduced to provide a wholesome, non-pagan alternative celebration, which thus critiques and rejects the pagan holiday.

Think so, huh??? And Catholics countered that Pagan winter celebration with Christmas trees and decorations???

Your article does not refute Hislop...All it does, numerous times, is claim 'it is not necessarily so, if'....

[bronxville]

Do you agree fully with Hislop’s myths?

[Campion]

And Catholics countered that Pagan winter celebration with Christmas trees

Not much evidence for Christmas trees in Catholic Europe before the Reformation. Martin Luther thought they were cool, and helped to popularize them in Germany.

The have no religious significance in Catholicism anyway. Most Catholic churches do not have Christmas trees at Christmastime; they have manger scenes.

[Cronos]

Catholics countered that Pagan winter celebration with Christmas trees

Aren't you tired of being shown that your posts are wrong over and over again? A simple reading before typing would help

The Christmas tree started and was kept in the upper Rhineland of Germany only, until the 18th century. This practice remained confined to the upper Rhineland of Germany and was regarded as a Protestant custom by the Roman Catholic majority along the lower Rhine and was spread there only by Prussian officials who were moved there in the wake of the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

[Rashputin]

http://newprotestants.com/2babylons.htm

http://www.ralphwoodrow.org/books/pages/babylon-mystery.html

There is plenty of information available that proves Hislop misinterpreted and made up everything in his book, “The Two Babylons”, and that almost every anti-Catholic book published since then, especially Davy Hunt's “A Woman Rides The Beast”, is based on the work of Hislop. Anyone who wants to know the truth will have no problem finding the facts, and the facts are that more than 99% of what is passed off as "the truth about" the Catholic Church having adopted anything pagan is nothing but pure bunk and hokum.

Since the Catholic Church worked very hard to eradicate pagan gods, holidays, and practices, it's not at all unreasonable for them to replace a pagan holiday with a feast day or something similar in order to deprive those inclined to remain pagan of that day for their holiday. Bunk and hokum sell very well, but they're still nothing more than lies told, retold, repackaged as little comic books or as “studious” works that rely on a reference to someone, who refers to someone else, and so on through multiple references, trying to hide the fact that all of the works referred to are based on Hislop' lies. That degree of misdirection is deliberate, not accidental, and by itself is enough to indict the majority of anti-Catholic works as frauds based on nothing but Hislop. The vast majority of those authors who write anti-Catholic books and articles don't care if it's all lies, as long as there are people who will pay good money to lap up those lies most authors are quite happy to retell them.

Not only that, but some of the authors are especially happy to have the opportunity to attack His One True Church because they are in reality, Gnostic anti-Christians. Slandering His Church and selling, the “Whoomp, there it is” version of salvation is their trade, not telling Christians the truth about Christ and His Church or anything else for that matter. Such authors and their followers believe that only the select few will be saved and so any lies they tell those who are lost anyway don't make a bit of difference. If they can package lies and make money selling them to misguided people, they're more than happy to do so.