But as long as the name Christ is attached to it, we won’t be able to celebrate it in public, (as in public land, public buildings).  The smarmy BS will continue, and it will slip further and further into nothing more then an exercise in crash commercialism.

HOW DOES THE TORTUROUS DEATH OF ONE PERSON REDEEM THE OTHER.

Well, obviously you’d also need quite a few books of S&H Green Stamps.

Holidays like Christmas and Easter are people continuing with their old traditions and plastering on their new religion so that nobody can call them on it. The old religions died a long time ago, in families like mine the new one has also died, but that’s no reason to throw away perfectly good traditions and customs.

I’m really getting tired of the halfism a number of cities are trying to do, (have christmas traditions and decorations without the christmas part, like having christmas lights in every colour but red and green, mossy animals, polar bears, etc).

Bethlehem likely didn’t have an ‘inn’ as in a first century version of a hotel. Rather, Joseph would ordinarily have expected to stay in the guest room (or general purpose living area) at cousin Jacob’s. The KJV translated this word as ‘inn’ and everyone else has followed suit since.

Also, the manger wouldn’t have been a stall in the stable out the back. Rather, it would have been a raised floor in a room of the house reserved for animals, and where humans probably would have slept in the colder winter months. If there were a lot of guests (if, for instance, the whole family had come home for the census) it would have made perfect sense to put Mary and Joseph in that part of the house.

The passage says “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition.”

First we can’t ignore that he directly called this torture account “a superstition”. Not the son of God claims, but the actual death. You can of course interpret it to mean that only the supernatural parts are superstition, but that’s not confirmed in the plain language. Even if he believed it happened, he is describing the beliefs of Christians, not confirming what actually happened. The defense of this passage is usually that Tacitus wouldn’t have written even that brief note without confirming it true. But this is a false assumption propagated by apologists and historians used to defending the historicity of Christ. Tacitus makes other similarly confident but wrong claims based on rumor in his work. It’s hard to claim him a perfect fact-checker, when even in that passage he gets the rank of Pontious Pilatus, a well know prefect, incorrect.

Again, it’s always possible that Tacitus had reason to know Jesus was a real historical figure, but that’s not confirmed in the passage, and it raises questions as to how all the Hebrew and other writers of the time covering religious movements and messiahs in Jerusalem could have missed Jesus, and early Christians like Origen could debate and defend the claims without being able to cite evidence, while a Roman who was born long after his life has reliable evidence. Far more likely is that Tacitus is simply describing their beliefs with contempt, not confirming it through records. 

That early Christians believed he was real and magic isn’t disputed, only to correctly note that we can’t say with certainty any details of his life, when the only sources we have are unreliable, make outlandish and provably false claims, and were written by people who never met Jesus but based on oral tradition. At best we can look at the parts the Gospels are consistent about, don’t reflect the Greek beliefs of the later Gospel writers, and aren’t disproven, and suggest that’s more likely to be what he was like.