DeepShadow
White Crow
yea---i get convicted about being stupid---and being a hypocrite
Stupidity and hypocrisy can be in the eye of the beholder. To me, I find it stupid to say that a Christian who practices common Christmas traditions is corrupted by the pagan roots of those traditions, even without any knowledge of these roots. If I see a Christmas tree as a symbol of Christ's gift of life, it's not a pagan symbol to me.
We all continually assign new meanings to our symbols, by conscious choice. To claim that another person hasn't made the choice they claim to is to claim to know their heart, which you can't. To claim that their chosen meaning is overruled by the meaning someone gave it a thousand years ago is to claim that the dead are more powerful than the living. To claim that the meaning you put on it is the only true one is prideful. To possess any of these traits while accusing others of being unChristian is hypocritical.
LDS get similar accusations all the time from people who claim that our leaders use secret meanings to all the vocabulary we use, to disguise us as true Christians. If Brigham Young wanted us to think "God made flesh" when we said "Adam," well then the joke's on him, because he disguised the term so well that it lost the hidden meaning! The same goes for all the supposedly hidden meanings we have for "saved," "virgin," "Christian," "Christ," and so on. What someone said about it a hundred or a thousand years ago does not change what I think of it.
we serve different Gods perhaps?
My God can redeem a holiday from paganism as easily as He can a person from sinful living.