[plug] Some Christmas cheer! Hooray!

[Steve Baker]

Leon Brooks wrote:

> 
>  * the evergreen Christmas tree (in Oz?) is derived from the Norse
>    world-tree and even more directly from assorted tree-worship
>    cultures who believed that their deities really inhabited a
>    specific tree; when they won a battle they would typically
>    bring the heads and bodies of the vanquished to their god's
>    tree, hanging the former from the branches and laying the
>    latter against the trunk as sacrifices - the origin of the red
>    baubles and presents on/at today's trees;

Another possible source of the baubles is that Dec 21/22 is the 
(northern) winter solstice, and some cultures had a traditional 3-day 
festival to celebrate.  The red/yellow balls represented the Sun which 
was undergoing it's annual 'rebirth'.

The Sun as the Father and the Earth (Nature) as the Mother (her birthday 
was at Easter) is a recurring theme in many old cultures.

> I think the point is that symbols can be kind of misleading, whether 
> someone is a Christan or not is not exactly independent of the symbols 
> or the professed affiliation but really you can never be sure until the 
> rubber meets the road and desperate situations arise.

Certain Christian faiths (Jehovah's Witnesses may be one, but I'm not 
sure) do NOT follow the regular Christmas / Easter rituals for reasons 
mentioned by Leon (most snipped).  The Bible specifically says 
(somewhere) 'Follow not the way of the pagan', so those archaic rituals 
are definitely OUT.  Many Christians like to conveniently ignore this 
when putting up the tree.

> Back in the land of computers [bet you didn't think *any* of this was 
> going to be on topic!], Open Source is terrifying to the "established 
> religions" precisely because we're more prone to judging people and 
> companies by what they actually do than by their advertising, company 
> reports, stock performance or regular messages from random CXOs. This 
> is why we're still willing to give Sun a chance even with Scott at the 
> helm and after badmouthing Red Hat and caving in to MS on patents: 
> they've written and contributed a lot of code to our community.

I can't think of any way to get my post back on topic with quoting this 
bit of Leon's post, and saying...'Yeah!'.

Happy festive season!

Steve.