Cultish: Debunking Pagan Holiday Myths w/ Michael Jones

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We hope to see you there. Now back to the episode. This is

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David who says, we have friends who do not celebrate Christmas because they say December 25th is really a pagan holiday.

01:10

While I agree that Jesus may not have been born on December 25th, he certainly was born as described in the

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Bible. How do I respond to them? Well in a sense, tell them they're right. You see, the winter solstice a couple days later was the shortest day of the year and the pagans had something called

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Saturnalia and it was a time of lawlessness because all the laws were suspended and people, a bunch of singers actually wandered the streets naked singing and then they had orgies, sexual orgies.

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It was a mass thing. Well, when the Catholic church came along in Italy, the

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Romans and others didn't want to give up their holidays so they said, okay, we'll Christianize it. And so they said, okay, we'll say the birth of Jesus was the 25th of December.

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Then there was a monk who began to add it up. You see, if you read in Luke, it says there's a census taken when

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Quirinius was governor and so forth and so on. And they could take those leaders and figure the exact time dating from the foundation of Rome and that's when the dates were established and so they get pretty close to the date.

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But to say it's the 25th, shepherds were out abiding in the field, it gets a little cold at night.

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I mean, were they out there in the middle of winter? I don't know. I've been out there on the shepherd's field on Christmas Eve, it's very nice, but it's cold.

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And nevertheless, I mean, what was going on? So all this business about mistletoe, pagan.

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Christmas trees, pagan. Giving out gifts, pagan. Every bit of it is pagan.

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Every single bit of it is pagan. We've Christianized it all. And so that's good. And so we have time, we celebrate for Jesus and everybody gets all misty -eyed.

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But the truth is, they're all pagan. But the birth of Jesus.

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But the intent of the heart is what it's about. Exactly. So we have Christianized all these things.

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We give gifts in the name of Jesus. We celebrate his birthday. And it's a nice thing.

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Yes, it's a very nice thing. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish. This is part two, a continuation of our conversation with Michael Jones from Spiraling Philosophy.

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Appreciate you hanging around with us a little more. We know we got maybe a little under an hour to conch out of you before we head back to Tucson.

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Head down to Tucson. I was probably going to practice anywhere Tucson is, like, where's that? So Andrew, I appreciate you joining us here, man.

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So let's go ahead and jump into it. This is a clip from Pat Robinson, who's always been very infamous for always putting the fun back into fundamentalism, as always.

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And I thought it was interesting, man, let's just jump into it. So it's this clip, just typing this in, this has been posted and reposted.

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There's literally 10 different versions of this clip, all by people who are very

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Hebrew roots oriented, usually backing some sort of agenda where it comes to the idea that pagan holidays are evil, really kind of dealing with what you address specifically around pagan holidays.

04:30

Yeah. So let's just jump into that. What's stuck to you out about this clip? And from your perspective, how do we address this whole topic of other holidays as well too, under other pseudo claims?

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Well, the first thing you need to know about a fundamentalist is it basically means no fun, too much damn, and no mental.

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And that's generally what we get here in this clip. Everything he said is practically wrong. For one thing,

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Saturnalia was on December 17th. It was never on December 25th. Never according to early authors like Macrobius or the

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Julio -Claudian fast inscriptions. It started on December 17th and may have lasted for three days to a week.

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So the longest it would have gone is to December 24th. Never on the 25th. We've no records of Christians ever wanting to Christianize Saturnalia.

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Laws were not suspended on Saturnalia. You couldn't murder the emperor. Okay. It would still have been illegal.

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What happened on Saturnalia is sort of like a role reversal. Like they would take a slave and they'd prance him around as like the king for the day kind of thing.

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And so masters would also serve slaves. It was like a big role reversal thing. But yeah, no, nothing to do with Christmas trees or any sort of modern

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Christmas customs. The reason why December 25th is the day we celebrate Jesus's birth is because early

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Christians actually thought that was the date. We see this in works like the chronology of 354, a later work on solstices and equinoxes.

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There's a scholar named Thomas Schmidt who worked with Hippolytus of Rome's work, the

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Chronicon, and said, based on the calculations in here, they would have calculated Jesus's birth to be December 25th.

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So this is just why we pick the date. It had nothing to do with a pagan holiday. And then ironically, they picked the day for which we have no evidence there was a pagan holiday on that day prior to Constantine.

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After Constantine, the philokalian calendar, chronology of 354, mentions Sol Invictus on December 25th.

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Here's what you've got to keep in mind, which is sort of weird, is we have no references to Sol Invictus being on December 25th in the 3rd century, 2nd century, prior to Constantine.

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All of a sudden after Constantine, we have references to a pagan holiday on December 25th in this work, that work,

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Macrobius mentioned something, Epiphanius mentioned something, we have Julian the apostate mentioning stuff.

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All of a sudden, numerous references to Sol Invictus being on the 25th, but prior to Constantine, absolutely nothing.

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Odd change. Well, it's just as equally likely, I would say probably more plausible, that when

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Constantine took over and Christianized the empire and they started celebrating the incarnation on the 25th, according to Christian traditions, pagans just started competing and they placed a

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Sol holiday on that date because it was the winter solstice, according to the Julian calendar, so why not?

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So it seems just as likely that this was once a pagan appropriation of a Christian date. Very interesting.

07:21

And Andrew, what questions, because you've done a little research and a lot of times you see, you know, the claims being made about the certain types of, we're going to talk just for example, a little bit about Christmas, about very similar argumentation to Easter.

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Like what have you seen in your research about maybe questions that you have about the specific claims about Christmas traditions that are utilized, that are pagan and maybe what questions do you have for Michael?

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Yeah. Yeah. I want to know what is Sol Invictus? How is that celebrated? And yeah,

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I'm just curious on that. Yeah. So Sol Invictus is basically, it means the, it was basically a celebration of the unconquered sun.

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So there was a Roman deity that was Sol, basically the sun deity, wasn't Mithra. Okay. Sol and Mithra were two entirely different deities, despite what people today will tell you.

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And so in the Philokalian calendar, all it says is 30 games ordered for the birthday of the unconquered one.

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So it was a day where they would play sort of games, chariot races, perhaps honoring the sun.

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Prior to that, the Emperor Aurelian is said to have established Sol Invictus around 274

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AD. But again, we have no record he ever did this. The Philokalian calendar actually says that Aurelian worshiped the sun with chariot races in October every four years.

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No evidence of ever establishing Sol Invictus on December 25th. So it's basically just a game to honor the sun.

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And again, it seems to have come about around 350 sometime around post -Constantine, probably to compete with the

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Christians. Wow. So it's similar to Easter in some of the appropriation made from modern pagans, let's say from the hyssop that you talked about with the mythology, where they will go back and say, well, actually, this was something that pagans were doing in terms of Easter, but really it's the actual opposite.

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It seems that they're trying to take the holidays from Christians when it wasn't their holiday to begin with. We'll see this with modern pagans that celebrate

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Yule. So they'll be like, we put up a Yule tree because that's what it originally was. And I did a response to them back in December, pagans making this claim, utter nonsense.

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For example, Snorri Sturluson in the Heimskringa, he was an Icelandic chronicler. He mentions that King Håkan the

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Good of Norway converted to Christianity and then moved Yule to December 25th to coincide with Christmas.

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So that tells us Yule was not on that date until Christians moved into that region.

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Thightmar the chronicler mentions the Danes sacrificing after January 6th in his work. So we're not really sure where Yule was.

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Some said it was around December 15th, maybe even on the 17th, maybe mid -December sometime, but it probably moved from year to year because they had more of a lunar based calendar.

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And so we have no evidence of Yule trees, the origin of the Christmas tree, not pagan at all as far as we can tell.

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There are some legends it came from St. Boniface or Martin Luther even. The most likely explanation, scholar

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Tanya Gulevich lists, is that it probably morphed from these things called paradise trees. So in the

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Middle Ages, they would do a lot of plays because they didn't have YouTube back then. And so they would always do an

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Adam and Eve play on the feast day of Adam and Eve, which was and still is December 24th. Now how do you do an

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Adam and Eve play in Germany when all the trees are dead? Well, you get a pine tree and you decorate it with apples or cakes to perform the

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Adam and Eve play. And then on Christmas Eve, you'd gather around the paradise tree and take part of the apples that were placed on it.

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So the Christmas tree is just sort of most likely morphed from these paradise trees used in Adam and Eve plays on December 24th.

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Mistletoe, active kissing under the mistletoe seems to have happened de novo from the servant class in Britain around the end of the 1700s.

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We have evidence of people decorating with mistletoe as far back as the 1600s. No evidence that goes back to any sort of pagan custom.

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Even yule logs. Everyone thinks yule logs have to come from paganism. Yule is in the name. Well, no.

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Yule is a Norse word that was brought into English. And when it came into English, it just meant a midwinter period.

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And no longer referred to the yule holiday necessarily, just used for any midwinter period. So people started burning midwinter logs or yule logs.

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The first reference we have to any log being burned around Christmas is in Robert Herrick's poetry collection of the 1600s.

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And ironically, he calls it a Christmas log. It's not until about 50 years later or so when

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John Aubrey calls it a yule log. So again, 1600s doesn't go back to paganism.

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I can find no evidence of any major Christmas, Easter, Halloween custom that goes back to paganism.

11:57

What about the gifts? Because he was saying in that little clip there about the gifts. Yes, because we all know no one ever gave gifts until pagans.

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The first person to ever give a gift was a pagan and he immediately went to his local patent office. And then from there on, it was a pagan custom.

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We really have to say gift giving. Gift giving is so popular in human customs and cultures all over the world.

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Every custom, like every culture, every place ever since the beginning of time would give gifts. It's in the

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Odyssey. Jesus said that the pagans know how to give good gifts. Yeah, they do. Well, here's the thing.

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The ironic thing is that, yeah, gift giving was a custom at Saturnalia, but Christmas custom of gift giving really is fairly new, only about a couple hundred years old.

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Before the 1800s, adults would exchange gifts on New Year's. Children would get gifts on St.

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Nicholas Day, which was in early December. And then in the 1800s, there was a lot of Dutch immigrants in New York.

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They still honored Sinterklaas, St. Nicholas. And so there was this revamping of Christmas to try to make it a more family oriented holiday.

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St. Nicholas celebrations were moved to December 25th. They stopped dressing him to look like a Catholic priest and they dressed him in the traditional attire of a

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Dutchman of the day, which was a big red suit. And so people started exchanging gifts on Christmas instead of St.

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Nicholas Day or New Year's. Lo and behold, eventually the marketing companies in America picked up on it and it made it a global phenomenon.

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Yes. Capitalism mishmashed everything. You see a similarity between even capitalism in comparison to Halloween, Valentine's Day, in this case

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Easter. You just see a bunch of selling of candy is just huge on all three of those days.

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And now it's become a very commercialized thing as well, too. But all but everything that's commercialized now, like they all had origins, like literally like everything that we have and do is synchrotized from like ancient culture, like even the names of the week.

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So like if you're going to say you don't participate in this because it's pagan, like why are we calling something a

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Thursday? Why are you keeping the Sabbath on the day of Saturn, you pagan? How dare you?

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And just so anyone may be clear, if you want to fact check me on this, do it. I'll give you my sources. Tanya Gullivich, Encyclopedia of Christmas and New Year's, Ronald Hutton, Stations of the

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Sun and Dictionary of English Folklore by Jacqueline Simpson and Stephen Rode.

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15:13

Very interesting. Another one, because I'm trying to think of the arguments that are typically used because I'm so I'm usually too busy just preoccupied like celebrating

15:23

Christmas to really pay attention to stuff. And Merry Christmas to those who don't celebrate. God bless you. But honestly,

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I know that there's the argument. And it was in the passage in Jeremiah where they try and talk about how this specifically is a tree.

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What how do you I'm sure you've gotten people slip into your DMs talking about that. What's what's the argumentation you've seen?

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What are the problems with that argument? First of all, no one's signed into my DMs. I'm married. But second of all, there is not a scholar alive who thinks

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Jeremiah 10 is about a Christmas tree, let alone decorating a tree. The only people who make these claims are illiterate legalists online who don't know what they're talking about.

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Every scholarly commentary on Jeremiah 10, every scholar who mentions Jeremiah 10 says it's about crafting of an idols.

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They go into the forest, they cut down a tree and they craft it into an idol. This is why Jeremiah says in the verse that it's like a scarecrow, but it cannot speak or move.

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Why? Because idols look like scarecrows and they cannot speak or move. They're not decorating pine trees. So people who look at this are really quote mining the passage.

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They're cherry picking. They're not looking at what the Hebrew says and they're running wild with this nonsense. What's always interesting to I was just thinking about too, when it comes to the idea of like accepting gifts, you shouldn't do this because somehow pagans once gave gifts.

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I just thought of a narrative of biblical King Solomon. There's this moment where there he creates sort of a relationship, friendship with this popular queen.

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I can't forget her name and she brings Solomon all of these gifts. And as an exchange for all these gifts, she wants to just sit down with him and just bask in his wisdom and understanding.

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And so like if that's the case, we should never accept gifts. What was, what was Solomon doing? Yeah. That's what comes to mind for me.

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I mean, yeah, Jesus accepted gifts at his birth from the wise men. They brought him frankincense, golden myrrh.

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Okay. This, that narrative alone debunks a lot of their claims. Look, it's okay to celebrate someone's birthday.

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The Magi did it. It's okay to give gifts. The Magi did it. And this is all talked about as good and holy.

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Okay. It's okay to want to celebrate the incarnation, which we, which we call Christmas. The Magi did it.

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All of this is talked about in a good thing. So St. Matthew debunked all this tech without him even trying.

17:40

Yeah. Real quick, real quick for you, Mike, without that, since we're on the Magi topic. So what do you say to the people who were like, well, the

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Magi were, um, you know, let's say they're Eastern religion specialists, things like that, that these are

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Pagans that actually went to see Jesus. What are your, uh, arguments for that? Well, they're not

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Pagans anymore if they're worshiping Jesus. Like they may have started out that way, but they're worshiping

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Jesus. And there's, there's debate about who the Magi were. Some think they were, uh, Jews that were still living in Babylon because we know

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Jews were still living in Babylon at this point. Uh, some think they were the Assyrian exiles, uh, some of those descendants, excuse me.

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Some think they were Nebateans because earlier, uh, I think the Hasmonean empire or the Hasmonean Jewish dynasty forcibly converted the, uh,

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Nebateans to Judaism. So they could have been from that group, but to deposit their Pagans is just very unlikely.

18:33

There's much more better candidates than some sort of Pagan group. Hmm. No, very interesting. So let's, let's go ahead and do this.

18:39

Another example, and this is similar argumentation and I, it's funny because, I mean, you kind of delve in this world and I didn't realize just how far this goes with different argumentation, especially now with Tik Tok, just wanting to say everything's

18:51

Pagan. Uh, so Valentine's day, um, this is, this is another one that's

18:57

Pagan. You did a recent response, incoming video on that I remember seeing, but what's the typical arguments that you see, uh, people saying, no, this is, this is a bad day.

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This isn't something, this is like a distorted version of love or whatever it is. And like, what's, what's the story behind that?

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It's weird that Christians just can't have holidays. They all have to, everyone has a mask to be stolen. So the claim is that St.

19:19

Valentine's day is a Christianized version of an ancient Roman holiday called Lupercalia. There's just one teeny little bit of problem.

19:26

Lupercalia was never on this, on February 14th. It was on February 15th.

19:31

So we're already, we have the wrong day. Uh, so Lupercalia was also not even a celebration of love. It was more of like a celebration for farmers, uh, honoring like, you know, the protecting of flocks, this kind of stuff, uh, and not really had anything associated with Cupid or Aphrodite, uh,

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Roman Venus, none of that kind of stuff. Uh, and it seems to have died out in the first millennium, you know, and then what happens is in the 1300s, uh, as we have some

19:59

Christian authors start talking about St. Valentine's and writing poetry about him and St.

20:04

Valentine's day seem to come about, it's not even a thousand years old. Right. And then it was just Americanized, modernized, become this celebration of love over the past couple of hundreds of years.

20:13

Right. Uh, but I got a video on my channel, St. Valentine's day or Valentine's day is not pagan. Right. Just going through into bunk.

20:18

There's no evidence. It comes from Lupercalia. There's no evidence that it was started to overtake a pagan holiday. Again, you have this time gap where Lupercalia dies out in the first millennia and then

20:28

Valentine's day starts showing up after the 1300s AD. Right. What if they were overtaking a pagan holiday, what was going on in that, that, that middle time where there was no holiday.

20:36

Right. Is there anything? Cause the only thing I can remember, Andrew, I know what members you have of like Valentine's day growing up. I mean,

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I know times where people just like, you just write cards and say, Oh, be my Valentine. Or, you know, we have that, that heart candy, which still to this day tastes, it tastes like chalk.

20:51

It's just cool. Um, but that's, if anything's pagan, it might be that candy. But, uh, is there any idea, is there any aspect of, um, like, okay, well, if you say be my

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Valentine, somehow that's putting a spell on someone else or we're, we're sort of participating in some sort of worship ritual.

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Cause that seems to be kind of like the argumentation. Is there anything congruent with that? Cause that's the only thing

21:13

I remember doing as a kid when it comes to Valentine's day. That is crazy.

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Uh, I'm just trying to imagine what the tick tock verse might be saying and what I remember if anyone tries to make that claim, they're not using their brain.

21:26

Okay. I mean, there's no other way to put it. I mean, you're not, you're, you're, you have an agenda. If you're trying to make this argument that giving someone a card that says be my

21:33

Valentine is means you're putting a spell on them. You have an agenda and you're just trying to make anything fit to fit the narrative you want to tell.

21:41

You're not being reasonable. And there's nothing else to say to that person other than start acting like an adult, grow up a little bit and start using your brain.

21:49

Right. Well, if anything, I remember of like Valentine's day is just, uh, that one custom I'm very familiar with cause

21:54

I worked at Costco for three years is watching husbands panicking like the day of and like rushing to buy like flowers and steaks and like crab legs at very last minute.

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Like, ah, I gotta get this. I almost forgot it was Valentine's day and wife is going to kill if I don't get it. You get to marry a very analytical wife like mine because she doesn't demand any of that.

22:11

In fact, one of my, our first Valentine's, she said, can you get me a new kitchen knife? And I thought it was a trap.

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It wasn't. She actually wanted a new kitchen knife. So I, I got it for her and she's like, thanks anyway, here's dinner.

22:23

And I didn't get hurt or anything. So you know, get yourself an analytical wife. Awesome.

22:28

Awesome. You know what I like Mike is I'm hearing you talk about the history of these holidays. The actual history is so much more fascinating than what these people are saying about this pseudo history, the way things come to be.

22:41

And then what I, what I start thinking about since we're doing like a greatest hits compilation here is Samhain and Halloween.

22:46

Can you give us a brief explanation of Samhain, Halloween, how Halloween came to be and things of that nature?

22:52

So we're not really sure when Samhain was okay. So Samhain, and we're not even really sure what was really going on during Samhain.

22:59

We have no evidence. It was like some sort of ritual to honor the dead, anything like that. We know it was probably sometime

23:05

November, October time, probably sometime in November because St. Bede says November was blood month.

23:10

Maybe there was some sort of blood sacrifice happening there. Like maybe they killed an animal for something, but, and from what we can gather from the limited data on Samhain is that maybe they thought that the, the realm between the spirit and the physical cause sort of thinned a little bit.

23:24

But again, this is all speculative. Some of the early sources don't even talk about Samhain having any sort of spiritual significance.

23:31

They just talk about it being like a time for feasting and games. So again, we're not really sure. So such little data is out there.

23:38

The argument you see from people like James Fraser was, is that they, the Christians put All Saints Day on November 1st because in Celtic regions, that's when

23:46

Samhain was and they wanted to overtake it. So they took, they sort of just placed it on there to overtake it. Problem.

23:52

The early sources like the Flair of Angus mentions All Saints Day on April 20th.

24:01

Now the Flair of Angus is a Celtic document. If they were putting All Saints Day to sort of overtake

24:07

Samhain, then what are they doing it on April 20th? Okay. It makes non, Ronald Hutton says it makes nonsense of Fraser's notion that All Saints Day was placed on that date because Celts, that was the

24:18

Celtic day of Samhain. What we actually see is that was just a day that most likely the day that the

24:24

Pope at the time rededicated the Pantheon in Rome, the big building to all the pagan deities, rededicated to Christian saints.

24:33

And so it became All Saints Day. We're not entirely sure, but that's the most likely explanation. And so it'd be also be kind of weird to say, okay, the entire

24:39

Christian world is now going to keep All Saints Day on this one day because some Christians in this one region have encountered pagans that have a special day on that day.

24:47

That'd be like today, someone coming down and saying, hey guys, the Inuits want to convert to Christianity, but I think we should move

24:54

Christmas to their holiday on January 17th. Everybody in? No one would go along with that because our entire culture revolves around this whole

25:02

Christmas celebration in December. They're not going to set up an entire hall or move an entire holiday to November 1st just because one obscure group in Ireland is upset about it.

25:11

So All Saints Day most likely was just entirely placed there for Christian reasons. In fact, the first people to be,

25:17

Ronald Hutton will know it, the first people to really celebrate All Saints Day on November 1st actually came from Germanic regions, not even from Celtic regions.

25:26

So, you know, Rome, and he says Rome and the Celtic regions actually followed a Germanic idea, not the idea that it came from Celtic reasons.

25:34

So again, the idea that it was overtaking a pagan holiday, Samhain, is again utter nonsense because in the

25:40

Celtic regions, All Saints Day was April 20th originally until the Germanic date overtook them all.

25:46

So just to recap, we're not even really sure what was going on with Samhain. The earliest sources talk about feasting games, not really giving us a specific date.

25:53

Probably happened sometime in November, but probably moved from year to year because again, it was a solar lunar calendar.

26:01

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and check out all the awesome merch back to the show. And just, you know, it's very interesting, man, because I remember my parents came out of kind of like the like sexual revolution, like sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

26:56

And just, I think they had a heart where they just wanted to kind of like protect us from the world. So I remember for the longest time having no idea what

27:02

Halloween even was. I remember the first time we moved from this town up in the mountains in California, Forest Hill, up to Sacramento.

27:10

I remember these kids were going to go door to door and celebrate something called Halloween and they would dress up. That's all I knew.

27:15

And I knew the stories of the Bible and I didn't know anything about Halloween. By this memory, we weren't allowed to celebrate it. And we put a sign in front of our door that said, we do not celebrate

27:25

Halloween because of our belief in Jesus Christ. The very next day we got egged, I remember getting egged.

27:30

But then I remember the next year we couldn't celebrate it, but we were allowed to have nut candy. And I was just like, my friends are just like dressing up like whatever.

27:39

I can't remember what it was. I think if someone came to my door dressed up as Alf from that show, like that's roughly the era that I'm from.

27:46

But yeah, it's just, it's very, very interesting. Like one of the things I want to be wanting to get your thoughts on is that when you think about Christian documentation, we look at like manuscript evidence, you're looking at copying from one document to another where it's documented where that came from.

28:02

You can trace it. What is kind of the issue with a lot of the Nordic history, maybe you studied this, is that what you really have is just hearsay, what one person told to another.

28:13

So even the accounts that we have today, and I was just talking to our researchers for it, it's almost more like fan fiction because we don't have a primary source or what are your thoughts on that?

28:22

Yeah, a lot of what we know about the ancient Norse beliefs, Celtic beliefs come from Christian monks writing about it.

28:28

And they're kind of biased sometimes, like they don't really have good, they're writing from a Christian spin.

28:34

So they're not maybe even giving us accurate information on a lot of these beliefs. But just to add a little bit to Halloween, Halloween is really an

28:42

American holiday. I mean, it really did not come about until a bunch of European traditions from like the

28:48

Irish and the French and the Germans and the British started blending in America. And then once again, the candy companies took up with it in the past 100 years and ran wild with it.

28:56

It was just originally the Eve of All Saints Day, All Hallows Eve. And so,

29:02

I mean, you know, we have no, and then what happened is in the past 100 years, people were starting to think, well, where did these weird holiday come from?

29:08

I bet there was an ancient pagan holiday that honored the dead. And that's where all this stuff comes from.

29:14

But again, no sources, as we were just talking about, mentioned any of this kind of stuff. Everything we know about Samhain is just very limited to just, yeah, they celebrated something.

29:22

Maybe there was no religious significance at all either. And so, but, you know, people see it, you know, kind of it's kind of a day of the dead now.

29:31

But again, this becomes from Christians honoring martyrs, honoring souls, honoring people that have died.

29:37

That's where it comes from. Right. It's Christian in origin entirely. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this, because I, we did a lot of study and I, my favorite part of honestly how like understanding

29:45

Halloween, when I looked at the history of it, which is the American history part of it, because I think my favorite niche of history is just American history, is that when you look at like the, it's the great pumpkin,

29:53

Charlie Brown, people who argue that you shouldn't celebrate Halloween never use it's the great pumpkin.

29:58

Charlie Brown is their source of argumentation. They look at a lot of the blood and gore and kind of the John Carpenter version of Halloween.

30:05

Like how, how do you think we got there to where, like even like the darker aspect of like the slasher films and stuff like that and how it's depicted now, because it wasn't that way to begin with.

30:16

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, again, it's about honoring dead saints. So people were honoring the dead. And so people, it just became associated with death and dead things and graves and people honoring the great, the graves of saints.

30:29

I mean, eventually over time, you can see how that can slowly morph into just a celebration of the dead, especially in, for example,

30:34

Mexican culture, for example, very much that in France, for example, they did something called the dance macabre, which, you know, is sort of like an early precursor to, you know, the all souls procession kind of thing.

30:50

And so again, they've dressed in weird skull masks and they'd wear, you know, sort of black on that day kind of thing.

30:55

So again, when a lot of these European customs came into America, just sort of blending together, I mean, eventually they just sort of the modern

31:02

American holiday just sort of grew out of it. And again, candy companies picked up on this, you know, spooky candy, ghosts are out, you know, come get these special Halloween edition

31:12

Reese's pieces kind of thing. I mean, really, again, the modern understanding of Halloween being this day where we go out and get candy and we dress up as dead things.

31:21

We can thank American candy and marketing companies for this kind of stuff because they're the ones who really went wild with it.

31:27

Also a hundred years ago, there was a lot of like vandalism happening on Halloween night that we got from like Guy Fawkes celebrations as well that came over from Britain as well.

31:37

And so to kind of get people away from that, there was a community effort to part to convince people to go to Halloween parties or go trick or treating.

31:45

We'll give you candy. Don't, you know, egg our house kind of thing. So again, totally American, just warping these earlier

31:51

Christian ideas around All Saints Day. Yeah. I thought it was really interesting too. When you talk about primary sources, Andrew, the one,

31:58

I can't remember the name of the book that we read that was very well cited historian, very, very well sourced, but when he's talking about the ancient, well,

32:06

I got a 1930s for us, what might be ancient history given I'm an eighties kid, but yeah, when he was talking about, you know, kids doing pranks and that being an issue everywhere, like he actually had pictures in his book of newspapers from the 1930s showing kids and the youth doing these pranks.

32:23

And it's like, this is a problem. We need to do something about this. What I found also interesting too, is that like in the 1930s is that there, you think about all the monster movies that were like very, very popular, like the

32:36

Dracula movies and like the Frankenstein movies, the 1930s. This is when the American version of Halloween is sort of forming and before it becomes an official holiday.

32:45

And what's very interesting is that there's literally no carryover, like they're completely separate from each other.

32:51

So the, even the idea of like these Hollywood monsters is very different than what it is versus now, because Halloween's always like syncretistic.

32:59

So let me ask you this, because I, I noticed that when we were on with LA Best Stucky and we just wanted to, you know,

33:07

I just, I typically just my own conviction, someone just has to do just for people with me in close proximity is like,

33:13

I usually don't, I usually don't participate in the modern day celebration of Halloween one, cause I feel like I'm just too old to dress up.

33:19

That's part of it. But you know, it's just, I think it's, it's a matter of self -government, like what you do or don't celebrate.

33:24

Like if someone dresses up or trick or treating, frankly, I don't care. But I think that a lot of times people tend to be very, this is a very emotionally charged conversation.

33:33

I mean, even the, there's one of the top comments in the comment section on our episode with LA Best Stucky said, tell me you didn't listen to what they actually taught the host talked about in the podcast without telling me because everyone emotionally near jerk reacting.

33:48

So like one of the argumentation that people would bring out, they would say, well, would Jesus celebrate

33:53

Halloween? And it's very like, all of a sudden you feel like you're pushing to a conundrum, like, oh no. Cause they're trying to say that looking at, you know, people who do things like practice in the occult, which you shouldn't do and now say, well,

34:05

Jesus wouldn't celebrate what that's about. Argumentation. Like how do you typically, how do you work through that? How do you respond to that?

34:11

Look, the answer to that is go is they're trying to make a false dichotomy. Like would Jesus, Jesus either would completely ignore the holiday or would he go into all these weird, like celebrating of dead and death and gore and blood and decorate his yard with like gravestones and like these, you know, these monstrous things.

34:29

Okay. Those are two extremes. Okay. There are other options. So my answer is why wouldn't

34:34

Jesus celebrate it in a better and more a holy type way? Like I don't think

34:40

Jesus would be against giving out candy to children coming to his door dressed as superheroes.

34:45

I mean, for crying out loud, he went to a wedding in Cana and gave them extra alcohol to get drunk with.

34:52

I mean, like I, like, I mean, sure, he didn't, he didn't want them to get drunk, but he made them wine so they could keep partying and going on grape juice.

35:02

The actual verb used in there, it refers to being intoxicated. So the actual host says, you know, you know, we're drinking and we're getting, we're getting intoxicated from this wine that Jesus made for them.

35:13

So we got to stop going with these full extremes. Like either Jesus would partake in all the evil that is now associated with Halloween or he would totally abstain or maybe he could find a nice medium where he's okay with handing out candy to children and attending a

35:27

Halloween party and, you know, maybe even bringing some alcohol there for the adults to enjoy kind of thing.

35:33

Because you know, Jesus was not against fun. Why are we, why is some, for some people,

35:38

Jesus is this anti -fun guy who just wants people to only worship him or only read the Bible?

35:44

Yeah, definitely. And so one of the things I want to just bring up here real quickly, and this is just a critique of this man's claims here.

35:50

This has nothing to say about his character, his motive, his heart. I think he has malicious intent.

35:56

But really to kind of really bring into question what he's talking about in regards to the role of the devil in regards to Halloween.

36:02

So this is something that when we did our episode last year in Halloween, we made some posts about it. We got quite a few messages from somebody by the name of John Ramirez.

36:11

You got messages from John Ramirez? No, just people who shared his content. This is the ex -Satanist who talks about Halloween.

36:18

So I just want to play just a quick clip. This is a clip of John Ramirez being interviewed on CBN. And again, I'm not going to judge that he has sort of malicious intent, but I think

36:26

I, you know, just want to maybe just have a quick conversation just about maybe some of the things we should analyze about what the role of Christ is in regards to what

36:34

Christ has done on the cross and how we should, how should we actually view evil?

36:39

How should we view, you know, paganism? How should we view just, I think we should really ask, like, what's a proper way to view this idea of how the world, how these things can externally influence me?

36:51

I think that should be good to analyze. Let's take a look at this clip. Let's see what he says here. And then we'll do some quick analysis of it.

36:58

Well, should Christians celebrate Halloween? Some believe it can be taken back like other holidays.

37:04

But a former Satanist who is now a pastor says no, Christians should not celebrate it.

37:09

I recently caught up with John Ramirez and he had a strong warning for believers. Tell us a little bit about where you were in relation to Satanism and worshipping the devil.

37:22

Well, 25 years, eight years old, boy, little boy, eight years old, demon church, learned being trained by a high ranked devil worshipper, warlock and spiritual witches, training me to know how to take over territory, demonic, different demon territory, demon principalities, first, second heaven.

37:40

I was being trained all the way to the age of 35, sold my soul to the devil, got married in Halloween, had a demonic wedding in Halloween.

37:46

I baptized my daughter to the dark side at the age of 11. So that was my whole entire life. I mean,

37:51

I breathed, ate and slept witchcraft, astral projecting. I would astral project over region, leave my body, astral project, curse the region, because if I can curse the region,

38:01

I can capture the people. Knowing what you came from and what you used to do, you're pretty discouraged that you see

38:08

Christians celebrating Halloween. Why? I don't know how you can cheat on God. I don't know how you can cheat on the

38:14

Lord Jesus Christ, because I don't see Satan is coming on Good Friday and coming and hanging out with us. Right. You know,

38:20

I got married in Halloween. I had a demonic wedding. Why would you put your kids, your family? What would you put your purpose, your destiny?

38:28

What would you put your whole eternity in a demonic altar? Well, people say it's just fun.

38:33

Candy. Kids are having costumes on it. But you said it's much more. The candy, you know,

38:38

I never shared this before, but this candy, people from different walks of life pray over these candies, witchcraft.

38:46

They pray over the candies. You knock on people's door. You don't know the person that you're knocking on, she's a witch. OK, you don't know she's a witch.

38:52

She's doing Wicca. She's practicing New Age. And you knock on their door and you come in and you come in in legal rights of this witch or this person's practicing this stuff, giving you this kind of candy.

39:02

Now you're taking that stuff home. You put that stuff into your body. OK, so there's a couple of this is a close five minutes.

39:11

There's moments where he talks about not only the candy, but if you dress up as a aerial from Little Mermaid, you are also giving into legal rights of whatever, whatever, whatever, like the spiritual origins of where mermaids come from.

39:25

So that's all this yielding all of this. So I know I want to be as gracious as possible. I mean, there's some things

39:30

I would agree with them on. The cold is bad. You shouldn't practice these things like God condemns that. Deuteronomy 18 for sure.

39:37

But what do you say with this type of talking about which I'm just saying you address this on his YouTube channel. What's problematic from your perspective with this type of thinking?

39:45

Yeah, well, I'll be a lot harder on him. I did a bunch of short little Instagram tick tock videos on him back in October and I was not happy.

39:51

This is what I talked about in part one about supplementing the scriptures for your own traditions. And then you go to the point so far where your own traditions become more valuable than what the scriptures actually say.

40:01

OK, just because a witch may go to a candy store and put a curse on a bag of candy, that doesn't mean it affects us.

40:10

Why? Because Paul literally lays down a teaching in First Corinthians eight that debunks this nonsense.

40:16

Look, guys, just even if meat was sacrificed to some pagan idol and that it's being sold in the market later, that doesn't mean it's going to hurt you.

40:23

OK, so the scriptures are literally debunking John Ramirez. Paul is literally arguing against what he's saying.

40:29

John is trying to say, oh, if someone places a curse on a candy, it's going to hurt you. It's going to harm you. You're going to get possessed or the demons are going to attack you.

40:35

Paul says literally the opposite. Someone could sacrifice, take their meat and sacrifice it as a Zeus and then sell to you in the market.

40:41

It's not going to hurt you. So his own traditions of like, oh, we can't we have to stay away from Halloween because it's unholy.

40:46

It's going to hurt you or have now become his center focus. And they have now supplemented the scripture.

40:52

They've superseded the scriptures to the point now where he's now forsaking what Paul taught for his own teachings.

40:58

And that is why this legalism is. That is why this anti holiday stuff is dangerous, because look at what it takes us to.

41:04

It takes us to exactly what the Pharisees were doing. It takes us exactly to what Paul's opponents were doing.

41:10

And this is we got to reject this stuff. There is nothing in the Bible which says if someone places a curse on a piece of food, it's going to hurt you somehow.

41:18

That's not at all what the scriptures taught. So, I mean, I don't know where he's getting this stuff from, but none of this kind of stuff is taught in the

41:26

Bible. There's nothing wrong with handing out candy. There's nothing wrong with dressing up as a superhero and collecting candy. What is important, what

41:33

Christ taught or what what John Ramirez taught? And a lot of people who are following John Ramirez are going against what the

41:38

Bible taught, actually. Hey, everyone, if you are watching this right now on Apology of Studios YouTube channel, you need to know that cultish would not be possible if it wasn't for this studio.

41:49

So if you want to support Apology of Studios, which also makes cultish a possibility for you to enjoy every single week here on YouTube, go to Apology of Studios dot com.

41:59

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42:11

So we thank you all for watching us. And now back to the episode. Yeah. What are your kind of thoughts on this,

42:17

Andrew? Like this, like some of the things that he's saying here. What do you find? What are problematic just from your perspective?

42:23

I'd ask what legal right and from whom was the right given, right? Like Jesus Christ, it says in Colossians two, it says he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in him.

42:33

Also in Matthew 28, it says all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me. All legal rights belong to Christ.

42:39

And even if we look at the book of Job, when Satan comes to to bother Job and ruin his life,

42:45

God allows these things to happen. So how can someone speaking a curse over pieces of candy set aside the legal rights of the sovereign

42:52

God of the universe? You know, it doesn't it doesn't make sense to me. And it can be damaging for us as Christians because it takes away the dominion that Christ has over the earth.

43:03

Like in terms of us celebrating Halloween as Christians, I think we should be involved into an extent to where the involvement of Christians in holidays would, let's say, part of the problem that I would see in Halloween today, if we're going to get to the gory aspects and like the the straight intensities of things that are going on is probably because the lack of involvement of Christians within a holiday and allowing these things to start taking place.

43:30

So that's that's my personal opinion on that. But like Mike was saying, what he's doing is for he has traditions that he holds to and he's holding that over what the scriptures actually say.

43:41

And we should not be allowed to do that as Christians. We should be subservient to the scriptures and to the sovereign

43:46

God of the universe. Yeah, it's pretty much straightforward. Two things about that. I think you're absolutely right. Christians need to be involved in this holidays because the reason why it's become so gory in death is because Christians are afraid of it.

43:57

We cannot give the devil ground. He never had to begin with. So I love it when I see churches doing things like trunk retreat events.

44:03

Come to the church and get candy from us. Don't go through your neighborhood where it's not that necessarily that safe in today's day and age.

44:10

Come to a church where your kids are going to be much safer. When I lived in Illinois, the church I attended, we did these big trunk retreat events.

44:15

And I mean, they had a whole Avengers set up. They had games. I mean, it was a whole big party thing.

44:20

And it was it was the whole community came out. And that I was like, this is what Christians need to be doing.

44:26

And I don't even like dressing up for Halloween. But I did that because I knew how important it was for the community. The other thing I'll add is there's a book by a guy named

44:33

Jordan Paper. He was raised Jewish, but now he's a pagan. And he wrote a book called The Deities Are Many.

44:39

And basically what he says is if he wants to contact one of these deities, we know they're demons. But if he wants to contact one of these deities, he needs to open himself.

44:48

He needs to be actually his intention needs to be actually going out and opening himself to one of them. So again, unless you give the demons any sort of ground, they don't have it.

44:59

Demons cannot steal ground from you taking candy because a witch may have placed a curse on or something unless you're actually open to them.

45:06

They're not going to do it. And the pagan like Jordan Paper will tell you himself. The only way that you can actually make contact with them is if you willingly go out and seek them.

45:14

If you have no intention of doing that just by getting candy, they can't touch you because, as you said, all Jesus has all authority.

45:20

They have no power unless we give them power. Right. And also, I think one of the problems, too, is that I think that a lot of new agers who love

45:27

Jesus, who are born again or find themselves doing this, even if they don't realize it, is that they take their old worldview, their old presuppositions, and they bring that into their

45:36

Christian walk. I think a lot of times they still sort of have an idea of one ism where there's sort of a blending between the material and the immaterial.

45:42

And so the only way for what John Ramirez is saying to be true about spells residing in candy and somehow this ingesting a bag of Twix, you know, is somehow going to incorporate a spell on you is the idea that the material and the immaterial are somehow blended together.

46:03

It's the only reason why a witch has that idea is because they have a worldview where there's of one ism. But that's obviously satanic deception.

46:09

So it's literally you're you're assuming pagan. He's assuming a pagan worldview with his argument.

46:15

Like there's no that's the only way for that to be substantiated. You can't do that with an altruistic worldview where there's a complete distinction between the triune

46:24

God and his creation, which is how we should view through this. And I think one of the main concerns that I have when it comes to this as we wrap up here is it really you're looking at that, you know, there's a devil lurking around every single corner and a devil can always and demons, whatever, can always get legal grounds on you.

46:42

And I think one of the biggest reputations of that is what the Apostle Paul said in Colossians 2 verse 13.

46:48

It says, And you who are dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made us alive together in him, having forgiven us of all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt, the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.

47:03

He set aside, nailing it to the cross. And in the process, he disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by a triumphing over them, over them in the in him.

47:14

So it's like you're trying to talk about all these like legal legalities that can be put against you or all these like legal grounds when it's already saying like the transaction has already been completed if you're in Christ.

47:26

So I think people need to really what's very helpful for people is to focus on the priest as victor.

47:33

Like, what is Christ actually victoriously done versus worrying about his minions? You know, we shouldn't be ignorant of his devices, but I think you need to not have the cart before the horse.

47:43

Yeah. If you notice, Satan really doesn't come up a lot in the Bible. I mean, quite honestly, he's mentioned a couple of places here and there in the

47:49

Old Testament. The word for Satan is Satan. And it's really never actually used as a proper name.

47:55

Like even in the book of Job, it's the Satan, the adversary came kind of thing. Most of this is most of the

48:01

Bible focuses on Christ, on God and his love for us. We know the devil's there. He's a presence.

48:06

We can't ignore him. But the main focus is always on Christ, God and what he's done for us. I think a lot of these people like John Ramirez, they have reversed that.

48:14

They focus so much on the devil. They have forgotten what God has done for us and has given us absolute authority over the devil.

48:20

And so this is a problem here. They need to focus more on the power we have in Christ, not on the the nonexistent power the devil has now.

48:29

No, definitely. Well, I think that's a that's definitely a lot to cover. I mean, this is sort of the greatest compilation. And I was going to do we could go a whole lot more.

48:38

I want there's a whole much more. There's there's a plethora of stuff we could do, but you've got to get back. We've got to get him back on to talk about is

48:46

Yahweh like a copy of El or like some of the. Oh, I have done a lot of I've done a lot of research on that.

48:51

I could talk for hours on that. So I would. And again, I'm only about an hour and 45 minutes away.

48:56

So you guys want me to come back up from Phoenix? I'll do another one. Sure. Yeah, definitely. All right. And so just tell them real quickly what the home address for you, where can people find you at?

49:03

You can find me on YouTube dot com slash Inspiring Philosophy. I'm on TikTok as Inspiring Philosophy, Instagram, Inspiring Philosophy, Twitter, Facebook.

49:11

I have a Patreon, Patreon dot com slash Inspiring Philosophy. So my website, Inspiring Philosophy dot org, basically just Inspiring Philosophy.

49:18

You Google it, you'll get all my hits. Yes. Yes. Very inspiring indeed. And again, my I am very prejudiced, though, towards your

49:25

Instagram response incoming. So definitely came up with the good work. We're working on doing our own kind of doing our own version of it as well, too.

49:32

No shortage. I mean, trying to it's like going to the ocean with a spoon. Like there's so much in the world to respond and to refute.

49:38

Yeah, definitely a good time for sure. All right. Well, thank you so much for for taking the time to come in here. Godspeed.

49:44

Your safe travels back to Tucson, down to Tucson. And that being said, I appreciate you all listening in.

49:51

And if you haven't already, which I'm sure you're going to do a comment on our social media, let us know what you thought about these two episodes.

49:56

And all that being said, we'll talk to you all next time on Cultist where we enter into the kingdom of the cults.