If You Don't Celebrate Christmas, Why Not?

So you really see the December religious celebratory event in Scripture, and the observance of the season commanded?

Paul Yohannan said:

Yes

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Like you see believers in Scripture praying to created beings in Heaven. Dream on.

jamespyles said:

I'm still sleepy so I may be missing something, but when did Jesus command his disciples to celebrate his death?

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I take it the objection is to "celebrate" versus remember=show?

PeaceByJesus said:

So you really see the December religious celebratory event in Scripture, and the observance of the season commanded?

Like you see believers in Scripture praying to created beings in Heaven. Dream on.

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Yes, in 2 Maccabees 15:12-16

Paul Yohannan said:

Yes, in 2 Maccabees 15:12-16

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Like i said, in Scripture, not a late book written in Greek that teachings making offerings for souls who died due to idolatry. (2 Maccabees 12:40-44).

PeaceByJesus said:

Like i said, in Scripture, not a book that teachings making offerings for souls who died due to idolatry. (2Ma 12:40 - 2Ma 12:44)

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The LXX contains Maccabees; that the MT doesn't does not concern me as I regard the LXX as authoritative.

PeaceByJesus said:

You seems to believe liberalism. This may help you on the copycat premise:Pagan Copycat Hub - Tekton Apologetics Ministries

None of these were distinctively pagan religious celebratory events or practices that were later converted by the people of God without Him commanding them or recording it in His word as sanctioned. Turning pagan high places into places of Jehovistic worship was a another case (1Kings 15:14; 2 Chronicles 33:17 ) despite the command, "Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees near unto the altar of the Lord thy God, which thou shalt make thee. (Deuteronomy 16:21)

As rightly motivated and commendable as the conversion of these high places may seem to be, yet to be fully consistent with the Lord's decrees, they should have destroyed them (Exodus 23:24; Deuteronomy 7:5), and which sometimes they accomplished (2 Chronicles 17:6; 31:1; 34:3). The failure to do so mean that the attempts to reform such idolatrous places served to keep such alive, and thus facilitated their return back to their former state. (1 Kings 12:31; 13:33; 14:23; 2 Kings 15:35; 16:4; 17:10-19, 31-34; 2 Chronicles 21:11; 28:4; Isaiah 57:5).

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Liberalism? No. But obviously you and many others have given yourselves to reading anti-Christ literature that compares Church feast days (However, I am positive you know absolutely nothing about the way that Orthodox Christians commemorate things on feast days) with pagan cult practices and customs.

Do yourselves a huge favor: if you are going to read such anti-Christ rubbish, then at least get your information from professionals who make it their life's calling to learn the truth about these similarities between religions in their beliefs and symbol-isms. Atheists investigate the facts behind their anti-Christ propoganda far more authentically than do the anti-Christ attackers of the Church who profess to be followers of Christ but are really not. Here are a couple of books that might be a good place to start if you ever really get even more serious about protesting the Holy Church of Christ:



If anyone of you wishes to repent rather than protest, we have many much better spiritual commentaries to offer. It would really be much better for your hearts, minds, and souls if you were to read some of those instead.

PeaceByJesus said:

Another bare argument by assertion, contrary to what history documents. And the issue is really not about whether the day is correct or not, but the devilopment of the annual seasonal practice and its absence from Scripture, yet basically obligatory nature of it.

However, your fallacious argumentation, including your question-begging nonsense, excludes meaningful debate.

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Ah another lie believer, I have no use for people who believe such stupid nonsense as you all. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Paul Yohannan said:

The LXX contains Maccabees; that the MT doesn't does not concern me as I regard the LXX as authoritative.

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Which means you must be ignorant of the problems with the "LXX contains" argument due to the problems with the dire lack of uniformity in what books the early LXX contained, and the fact that they contained varying numbers of of books (and since the Rome makes a big deal about about her canon alone being authorative, you can fight it out with her over the couple books or so you differ on).

Edward Earle Ellis writes, “No two Septuagint codices contain the same apocrypha, and no uniform Septuagint ‘Bible’ was ever the subject of discussion in the patristic church. In view of these facts the Septuagint codices appear to have been originally intended more as service books than as a defined and normative canon of Scripture,” (E. E. Ellis, The Old Testament in Early Christianity [Baker 1992], 34-35.

British scholar R. T. Beckwith states, Philo of Alexandria's writings show it to have been the same as the Palestinian. He refers to the three familiar sections, and he ascribes inspiration to many books in all three, but never to any of the Apocrypha....The Apocrypha were known in the church from the start, but the further back one goes, the more rarely are they treated as inspired. (Roger T. Beckwith, "The Canon of the Old Testament" in Phillip Comfort, The Origin of the Bible [Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2003] pp. 57-64)

Manuscripts of anything like the capacity of Codex Alexandrinus were not used in the first centuries of the Christian era, and since in the second century AD the Jews seem largely to have discarded the Septuagint…there can be no real doubt that the comprehensive codices of the Septuagint, which start appearing in the fourth century AD, are all of Christian origin.

Nor is there agreement between the codices which the Apocrypha include...Moreover, all three codices [Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus], according to Kenyon, were produced in Egypt, yet the contemporary Christian lists of the biblical books drawn up in Egypt by Athanasius and (very likely) pseudo-Athanasius are much more critical, excluding all apocryphal books from the canon, and putting them in a separate appendix. (Roger Beckwith, [Anglican priest, Oxford BD and Lambeth DD], The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church [Eerdmans 1986], p. 382, 383; Triablogue: The legendary Alexandrian canon)

The Codex Vaticanus lacks 1 - 4 Maccabees while Codex Sinaiticus includes it along with 4 Maccabees but omits Baruch, which is one of the evidences of a lack of uniformity in the lists of books in early manuscripts of the Septuagint. Neither were 1st or 2nd Maccabees found among the Dead Sea Scrolls

Thus if your argument is that the early (since this wrongly presumes it was that of the 1st C. Christians) LXX defines what is canonical, then you must reduce your canon. But evidence testifies to the apocryphal books being added to the LXX after the Jews penned them, while the legend of them doing so is a fable.

But once again we can be censored for going off topic if we pursue this, so see here for more on this.

truefiction1 said:

Liberalism? No. But obviously you and many others have given yourselves to reading anti-Christ literature that compares Church feast days (However, I am positive you know absolutely nothing about the way that Orthodox Christians commemorate things on feast days) with pagan cult practices and customs.

Do yourselves a huge favor: if you are going to read such anti-Christ rubbish, then at least get your information from professionals who make it their life's calling to learn the truth about these similarities between religions in their beliefs and symbol-isms. Atheists investigate the facts behind their anti-Christ propoganda far more authentically than do the anti-Christ attackers of the Church who profess to be followers of Christ but are really not. Here are a couple of books that might be a good place to start if you ever really get even more serious about protesting the Holy Church of Christ:

If anyone of you wishes to repent rather than protest, we have many much better spiritual commentaries to offer. It would really be much better for your hearts, minds, and souls if you were to read some of those instead.

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So this is supposed to refute my charge of liberalism? I need not read all these to know that the idea that the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, the story of the flood, Moses being placed in a basket, of Joseph, of Christ, of the virgin birth is pagan etc. are all from paganism is liberal, atheistic propaganda, that critically fail to stand the test.

But lets see via some descriptions what manner of literature you are promoting:

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero by by Otto Rank (1914) proffers such as nonsense "An entire series of Christian legends have been elaborated on the pattern of the Oedipus myth." and is the manner of copycat theories my link (which is safe to read because he does not attack Christmas) provides refutation of, says of Otto, "Sceptics sometimes appeal to the work of the amateur British scholar Lord Raglan in an attempt to discredit the accounts of the life of Jesus with which the Gospels furnish us...."

Then we have "Myths to Live By," by Joseph Campbell:

"Jung was a favorite because of his concept of Universal Mind. Contrary to what might be thought, the book is not anti-religious, but it does explode particular Christian beliefs." review by Kenneth G. Ramey

...this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked. (Campbell, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers. Doubleday and Co, 1988, p. 120).

You sure can put your faith in that rock.

Finally is "Man and His Symbols" by Carl Gustav Jun, a close associate and friend of Freud, but actually an anthology of essays by several authors. At least Jung affirmed belief in God, but,

"the real business of religion, as Jung maintained, is to keep men in touch with this level of reality, and this is done largely through the use of myths." (Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VII)

And not the God of the Bible:

When we assume God to be a guiding principle—well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God. (Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40)

With friends like these who needs enemies? Making all these stories as coming from paganism is what happens when the say so of the "one true church" (take your pick) itself becomes the basis for veracity under the presume of ensured protection of any error, thus supplanting supremacy of Scripture.

PeaceByJesus said:

So this is supposed to refute my charge of liberalism? I need not read all these to know that the idea that the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, the story of the flood, Moses being placed in a basket, of Joseph, of Christ, of the virgin birth is pagan etc. are all from paganism is liberal, atheistic propaganda, that critically fail to stand the test.

But lets see via some descriptions what manner of literature you are promoting:

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero by by Otto Rank (1914) proffers such as nonsense "An entire series of Christian legends have been elaborated on the pattern of the Oedipus myth." and is the manner of copycat theories my link (which is safe to read because he does not attack Christmas) provides refutation of, says of Otto, "Sceptics sometimes appeal to the work of the amateur British scholar Lord Raglan in an attempt to discredit the accounts of the life of Jesus with which the Gospels furnish us...."

Then we have "Myths to Live By," by Joseph Campbell:

"Jung was a favorite because of his concept of Universal Mind. Contrary to what might be thought, the book is not anti-religious, but it does explode particular Christian beliefs." review by Kenneth G. Ramey

...this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked. (Campbell, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers. Doubleday and Co, 1988, p. 120).

You sure can put your faith in that rock.

Finally is "Man and His Symbols" by Carl Gustav Jun, a close associate and friend of Freud, but actually an anthology of essays by several authors. At least Jung affirmed belief in God, but,

"the real business of religion, as Jung maintained, is to keep men in touch with this level of reality, and this is done largely through the use of myths." (Morton Kelsey, Myth, History & Faith: The Mysteries of Christian Myth & Imagination (1974) Ch.VII)

And not the God of the Bible:

When we assume God to be a guiding principle—well, sure enough, a god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God. (Nietzsche's Zarathustra (1988), p. 40)

With friends like these who needs enemies? Making all these stories as coming from paganism is what happens when the say so of the "one true church" (take your pick) itself becomes the basis for veracity under the presume of ensured protection of any error, thus supplanting supremacy of Scripture.

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I don't get the impression that you know anything at all about the truth of the matter. Why don't you study for yourself instead of taking the word of anti-Christ propagandists who profess to follow Christ but who really don't know Him, or He them?

What is your attitude toward the crucifix? Do you acknowledge that the Lord was put to death upon the Cross?

truefiction1 said:

What is your attitude toward the crucifix? Do you acknowledge that the Lord was put to death upon the Cross?

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Yes, Lord was put to death upon the Cross, but understand what the argument is. It is not that we cannot use things unbelievers invented, from nails to crosses, but the issue is the attempt to Christianize distinctively pagan religious celebrations.

Or are you asking an unrelated question as to whether crucifixes versus wearing a cross is wrong?

PeaceByJesus said:

Yes, Lord was put to death upon the Cross, but understand what the argument is. It is not that we cannot use things unbelievers invented, from nails to crosses, but the issue is the attempt to Christianize distinctively pagan religious celebrations.

Or are you asking an unrelated question as to whether crucifixes versus wearing a cross is wrong?

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The cross is clearly a pagan symbol, besides being the instrument of torturous execution used by the Roman empire. It existed as a prominent symbol in pagan cult practices from the earliest records in human history.
Jehovah's Witnesses reject it simply for this reason. The premise upon which those who accuse Christians of having corrupted Christianity by wedding themselves to the world of paganism is that same premise upon which Jehovah's Witnesses reject the very Cross of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. There are others who hate the cross too: we call these Satan and his immense band of demons.

Pagan symbols or not, they now belong to the Church, and serve to praise God.

jamespyles said:

The best I can come up with is Luke 22:19 (NASB): And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me."

However, he's directly linking his statement back to the New Covenant, so it's not so much about his death, but about inaugurating the very beginning of the New Covenant entering the world. His death isn't meaningful without the resurrection and the promise of life in the world to come.

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Well James, you do not have a New Covenant without the death of the testator (Hebrews 9:16,17) and Lord's supper, with its representative bread and wine is to be done "in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. (1 Corinthians 11:25-26)

Thus it is remembrance of the Lord, most specifically of His death for us, who under the New Covenant are themselves one body and "one bread."

The Lord's real body was "bruised [dâkâ'=broken] for our iniquities" and the Lord "poured out his soul unto death." (Isaiah 53:5,10,12) Ps. 22:14 prophetically bur metaphorically says, "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels."

And by which sinless shed blood (though being for all) He purchased the church, (Acts 20;28) and which in the Lord's supper is to show [kataggellō=preach/declare] the Lord's death till he comes.

Some of the Corinthians were not doing so by selfishly going ahead and eating independently, which was to "shame them that have not," and utterly failed to effectually recognize others as members of the body of Christ, which is the nature of the church. And which lack of love was completely contrary to the sacrificial death in love that they were to remember and thus show by that inclusive communal meal of blood-bought brethren.

And thus Paul told them that they actually were not coming together to eat the Lord's supper, with the solution therefore being to not come hungry and to wait for each other so as to actually partake of the Lord's supper = have "communion." (1 Corinthians 11:17-34) Being "For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread" like as pagans have "fellowship with devils" by taking part in their dedicatory religious feast, which Christians would be doing if they did so. (1 Corinthians 10:17-22)

truefiction1 said:

The cross is clearly a pagan symbol, besides being the instrument of torturous execution used by the Roman empire. It existed as a prominent symbol in pagan cult practices from the earliest records in human history.
Jehovah's Witnesses reject it simply for this reason. The premise upon which those who accuse Christians of having corrupted Christianity by wedding themselves to the world of paganism is that same premise upon which Jehovah's Witnesses reject the very Cross of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. There are others who hate the cross too: we call these Satan and his immense band of demons.

Pagan symbols or not, they now belong to the Church, and serve to praise God.

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Dude, surely the use of the cross in various forms existed in pre-Christian times, but the reason Christians can wear crosses is not because it is a neat symbol from pagans that we can convert, but because the very Son of God was nailed to two beams in the shape of a cross, and not as part of a pagan ceremonial use of one! Yet wearing a cross should not be mandated

This is simply not the same thing as having a distinctive annual pagan celebration which you counter by mandating a Christianized version of it which God nowhere commanded or exampled, or recorded the date for or even made the season very evident.

If the Lord happened to be born on a pagan holy day and the Lord chose to have that date recorded and commanded the church to henceforth commemorate that specific day, then it would be analogous to at least your celebration on Christmas day.

"Jehovah's Witnesses reject it simply for this reason. "

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Wrong. They also erroneously believe the Lord (but to them a created being) was impaled on a stake (poor Thomas). But in cults the leadership is beyond being subject to objective testing by evidence.

PeaceByJesus said:

Well James, you do not have a New Covenant without the death of the testator (Hebrews 9:16,17) and Lord's supper, with its representative bread and wine is to be done "in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. (1 Corinthians 11:25-26)

Thus it is remembrance of the Lord, most specifically of His death for us, who under the New Covenant are themselves one body and "one bread."

The Lord's real body was "bruised [dâkâ'=broken] for our iniquities" and the Lord "poured out his soul unto death." (Isaiah 53:5,10,12) Ps. 22:14 prophetically bur metaphorically says, "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels."

And by which sinless shed blood (though being for all) He purchased the church, (Acts 20;28) and which in the Lord's supper is to show [kataggellō=preach/declare] the Lord's death till he comes.

Some of the Corinthians were not doing so by selfishly going ahead and eating independently, which was to "shame them that have not," and utterly failed to effectually recognize others as members of the body of Christ, which is the nature of the church. And which lack of love was completely contrary to the sacrificial death in love that they were to remember and thus show by that inclusive communal meal of blood-bought brethren.

And thus Paul told them that they actually were not coming together to eat the Lord's supper, with the solution therefore being to not come hungry and to wait for each other so as to actually partake of the Lord's supper. (1 Corinthians 11:17-34)

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Dude, we have got to fight against the demons who inundate us with evil thoughts, images, and fantasies which find a place in us via our own sinful passions, not against the Church that, by the direction of the Holy Spirit, provides us with the means to succeed in staying on this narrow path. Denying the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a horrible place to start. In fact, it is blasphemy.

There were many followers who broke it off with Christ because He said that His flesh is food and His blood is drink, because their brand of faith was as such that they couldn't accept this. You're one of them. This is a matter of psychological makeup. You will protest this by saying that the Lord didn't mean that we would have to eat His real flesh and drink His real blood, but that He only meant that the bread and wine are meant to "represent" His body and blood in a ritual by which He is remembered. But what is really going on is that since you cannot accept Christ's words the way that He meant them, you have to alter the meaning. By altering His meaning you have falsified His words and thereby have broken off your potential relationship with the True Christ and have replaced it with a relationship with a false one. There are many versions of Christ out there. Yours is not the True one. It shows in your strongly legalistic approach to the Faith, in which you refuse to participate in various things which, in themselves are in no way related to passions of the flesh, but merely because they are not depicted in the Bible and have a lot in common with pagan practices (and so on and so forth) and therefor it is displeasing to God on that basis alone. We are not made righteous by works of the Law, either by doing the things in it or refraining to do things that aren't.

Tell me, are you more righteous and pleasing to God than people who put up a Christmas tree in their home and sing hymns of praise to God honoring the Nativity of Christ on December 24th and 25th? Are you more righteous because you refuse to believe that the bread and wine used in Communion are truly, and really the body and blood of Christ? (I'm sure you're aware that this is also the belief of the rules based salvation theology of Jehovah's Witnesses). They are more righteous than all Christians, because they are the only ones who know that all of conventional Christianity is corrupted by the subtle yet rampant infusion of paganism (sarcasm). This belief of theirs is due to the invisible activity of demonic spirits combined with evil human passions. Most of them will be forever among the lost if they aren't brought to their senses somehow, because as long as they remain in this lie they cannot know the True God, or be known by Him. And for the rest of their natural lives they will refuse blood transfusions and abstain from participating in holidays, in order to be acceptable to Jehovah for having known and obeyed the right rules. But in the end if they do not repent of the hidden sins by which they gladly accept this lie as their truth, they will not be able to be with the Lord.

I stated in the beginning that most people who profess Christ yet abstain from celebrating holidays do so because theirs is a rules based salvation theology. I said that underneath this theology is the activity of demons who work with sinful passions in people to produce this theology of demons, which is idolatry. All schism and heresy is the result of this sort of activity. The Church, from the time of the Apostles, has wrestled with it from the beginning. The Church is still here, and the saints are still repenting: fighting demons and their own passions. They are not fighting the Church. I don't want to either. I want to repent so that I will come to know the only True God, for this we know is Eternal Life.

.

PeaceByJesus said:

Dude, surely the use of the cross in various forms existed in pre-Christian times, but the reason Christians can wear crosses is not because it is a neat symbol from pagans that we can convert, but because the very Son of God was nailed to two beams in the shape of a cross, and not as part of a pagan ceremonial use of one! Yet wearing a cross should not be mandated

This is simply not the same thing as having a distinctive annual pagan celebration which you counter by mandating a Christianized version of it which God nowhere commanded or exampled, or recorded the date for or even made the season very evident.

If the Lord happened to be born on a pagan holy day and the Lord chose to have that date recorded and commanded the church to henceforth commemorate that specific day, then it would be analogous to at least your celebration on Christmas day.

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The feast day was instituted by the leaders of the Church, who received their authority to represent the Church by the laying on of hands. It was these same leaders who worked to determine which Christian writings were to be included in the canon of Scripture and who called councils to define core beliefs regarding the nature of Christ, and who instituted the recitation of the Nicene Creed by the faithful and who regulated the format of ecclesiastical forms of worship, who wrote and instituted the hymns to be sung during worship gatherings.

When we continue to repent (i.e wrestle against demons and our own sinful passions) we may receive the gifts of grace from the Holy Spirit. This grace purifies our hearts more and more as our repentance carries us forward into deeper and fuller communion with God. The Lord says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they are those who see God." Those who see God are those who understand what this saying means: "To the pure, all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Indeed, both their minds and their consciences are defiled" (Titus 1:15).

What does this mean then? "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." (Acts 11:9) Since we live by faith and are no longer under the law, replacing distinctly pagan festivals with a Church feast day is quite alright. For we do not worship false gods or demons. We worship the One True God, gathering to pray, with thanksgiving, to the Holy Trinity on the days the leaders of the Church have appointed in God's honor and to His Glory, the Glory of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

truefiction1 said:

Dude, we have got to fight against the demons who inundate us with evil thoughts, images, and fantasies which find a place in us via our own sinful passions, not against the Church that, by the direction of the Holy Spirit, provides us with the means to succeed in staying on this narrow path. Denying the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is a horrible place to start. In fact, it is blasphemy.

There were many followers who broke it off with Christ because He said that His flesh is food and His blood is drink, because their brand of faith was as such that they couldn't accept this. You're one of them. This is a matter of psychological makeup. You will protest this by saying that the Lord didn't mean that we would have to eat His real flesh and drink His real blood, but that He only meant that the bread and wine are meant to "represent" His body and blood in a ritual by which He is remembered. But what is really going on is that since you cannot accept Christ's words the way that He meant them, you have to alter the meaning. By altering His meaning you have falsified His words and thereby have broken off your potential relationship with the True Christ and have replaced it with a relationship with a false one. There are many versions of Christ out there. Yours is not the True one. It shows in your strongly legalistic approach to the Faith, in which you refuse to participate in various things which, in themselves are in no way related to passions of the flesh, but merely because they are not depicted in the Bible and have a lot in common with pagan practices (and so on and so forth) and therefor it is displeasing to God on that basis alone. We are not made righteous by works of the Law, either by doing the things in it or refraining to do things that aren't.

Tell me, are you more righteous and pleasing to God than people who put up a Christmas tree in their home and sing hymns of praise to God honoring the Nativity of Christ on December 24th and 25th? Are you more righteous because you refuse to believe that the bread and wine used in Communion are truly, and really the body and blood of Christ? (I'm sure you're aware that this is also the belief of the rules based salvation theology of Jehovah's Witnesses). They are more righteous than all Christians, because they are the only ones who know that all of conventional Christianity is corrupted by the subtle yet rampant infusion of paganism (sarcasm). This belief of theirs is due to the invisible activity of demonic spirits combined with evil human passions. Most of them will be forever among the lost if they aren't brought to their senses somehow, because as long as they remain in this lie they cannot know the True God, or be known by Him. And for the rest of their natural lives they will refuse blood transfusions and abstain from participating in holidays, in order to be acceptable to Jehovah for having known and obeyed the right rules. But in the end if they do not repent of the hidden sins by which they gladly accept this lie as their truth, they will not be able to be with the Lord..

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Once again all this is simply bare bombastic blather, which now resorts to psychological mind-reading, and in addition to past assertions relegating me to being a lying Scrooge, now charges me with demonic blasphemy as a lost soul.

None of which is impressive at all, except for its absurdity in lieu of an actual argument, while in light of what the totality of Scripture actually teaches then the reality is that it is you who are grossly deceived, and rather than show you point by point and contribute more to going off topic, take this home to read by the grace of God (based on Roman theology but at least largely applicable to Orthodox):

The Lord's Supper: memorialist symbolism or the "real" body and blood of the Lord Jesus?

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Catholic teaching on the Eucharist

2. Metaphorical versus literal language

3. Supper accounts and John 6: Conformity to Scripture, and consequences of the literalistic interpretation.

4. 1Cor. 10,11

5. The Lord's Supper in the record and descriptions of the New Testament church

6. Purely literal versus the contrived Catholic interpretation

7. The nature of the Catholic metaphysical explanation

8. The Lord's Supper is not a sacrifice for sins

9. Absence of the sacerdotal Eucharistic priesthood

10. Metaphorical view of Jn. 6 is not new.

11. Endocannibalism

12. Conclusion

truefiction1 said:

The feast day was instituted by the leaders of the Church, who received their authority to represent the Church by the laying on of hands. It was these same leaders who worked to determine which Christian writings were to be included in the canon of Scripture and who called councils to define core beliefs regarding the nature of Christ, and who instituted the recitation of the Nicene Creed by the faithful and who regulated the format of ecclesiastical forms of worship, who wrote and instituted the hymns to be sung during worship gatherings.

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Which is the same claim as your "one true church" competitor, while neither of which are true based on Scripture. We do not even have any inspired record of any apostolic successors being chosen after Matthias was chosen for Judas, even though James was martyred: Acts 12:1,2, which was in order to maintain the foundational number of apostles (cf. Rv. 21:14) and which was by Scriptural means of casting lots. (cf. Prov. 16:33)


Furthermore, your so-called apostolic successors fail of the qualifications and credentials of manifest Biblical apostles. (Acts 1:21,22; 1Cor. 9:1; Gal. 1:11,12; 2Cor. 6:4-10; 12:12) (And I fail of the degree of holiness and faith the prima NT church overall exampled.)

In addition, the validity of a church and ministers is not based upon formal descent, anymore than that of a true Jews does, (Romans 2:28,29) but in both cases it rests upon Biblical faith, and as God is able to raise up believers from rocks, (Mt. 3:9) so He can raise up souls who have the faith in the Rock to continue to build His church. Which church actually began because common people rightly discerned both men and writings of God as being so, even in dissent from the historical magisterium, (Mk. 11:28-33) who sat in the seat of Moses over Israel, (Mt. 23:2) who were the historical instruments and stewards of Scripture, "because that unto them were committed the oracles of God," (Rm. 3:2) to whom pertaineth" the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises" (Rm. 9:4) of Divine guidance, presence and perpetuation as they believed, (Gn. 12:2,3; 17:4,7,8; Ex. 19:5; Lv. 10:11; Dt. 4:31; 17:8-13; Ps, 11:4,9; Is. 41:10, Ps. 89:33,34; Jer. 7:23) </p>

And instead these common people (Mark 12:37) followed prophets and an itinerant Preacher whom the magisterium rejected, and whom the Messiah reproved by Scripture as being supreme, (Mk. 7:2-16) and established His Truth claims upon scriptural substantiation in word and in power, as did the early church as it began upon this basis. (Mt. 22:23-45; Lk. 24:27,44; Jn. 5:36,39; Acts 2:14-35; 4:33; 5:12; 15:6-21;17:2,11; 18:28; 28:23; Rm. 15:19; 2Cor. 12:12, etc.)

Thus to be consistent with how the church began is to be as the common people who did not simply follow leadership, but rightly discerned both men and writings of God as being so in dissent from them, due to their manifest Scriptural substantiation in word and in power. And be like those noble men who loved Truth and thus "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." (Acts 17:11) And which disallows both Rome and your Orthodox group as being one true church (and the rest of elitists)

When we continue to repent (i.e wrestle against demons and our own sinful passions) we may receive the gifts of grace from the Holy Spirit. This grace purifies our hearts more and more as our repentance carries us forward into deeper and fuller communion with God. The Lord says, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they are those who see God." Those who see God are those who understand what this saying means: "To the pure, all things are pure; but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Indeed, both their minds and their consciences are defiled" (Titus 1:15).
What does this mean then? "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." (Acts 11:9) Since we live by faith and are no longer under the law, replacing distinctly pagan festivals with a Church feast day is quite alright.

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What? It is you who essentially call those "unclean" who enjoy liberty from your mandate annual observance which is not in Scripture, but which time was that of distinctly pagan annual festivals, which God nowhere said He made clean. The Lord engages in new creations, not reformations of paganism, which He needs no help from.