No it is not in the Catholic bible. The Catholic bible, the Protestant Bible and the Eastern Orthodox bible are essentially identical and none include the Maccabees, which is a myth.

Jennifer A. Burdo wrote: "Judaism still exists today primarily because it is exclusive. Not only does it not actively seek converts, it deliberately makes it difficult for others to actually convert when they want to. The dietary laws and many other elements isolate Judaism, and this isolation has allowed it to survive the population explosion that would otherwise have subsumed it into a greater whole."

Um no. Judaism grew through conversions. It was once very amendable to conversion including forced conversion. That is how it grew like heck in the time of Abraham, and again in the time of Moses, and again around the Roman Period.

In terms of percentage of world population Judaism is declining and has been for hundreds of years and would have ben doing so even without the genocide of the 1940s.

In terms of dietary laws, most classical historians believe these arose to anathematize others, make it acceptable to be displaced as unbelievers or taboo breakers. Monotheism generally does this (polytheism was more tolerant) and dietary laws are a specific mechanism. We know that Canaan and Palestine urban settled culture includes pig bones and evidence of shell fish eating as the primary proteins from thousands of years until the arrival of the Jews. What better way of justifying displacement than to claim that the indigenous people are breaking "gods laws." Missionaries used to do this even concerning the sexual positions of natives.

The mythological events that inspired it aren't even in the Bible proper, but in the apocryphal books of Maccabees.

Maccabees is not in Protestant versions of the Bible, but it is in Catholic versions.

Judaism still exists today primarily because it is exclusive...The dietary laws and many other elements isolate Judaism, and this isolation has allowed it to survive the population explosion that would otherwise have subsumed it into a greater whole.

So true. Holding on to the ethnic religion and customs has prevented many other peoples from assimilation into oblivion. e.g. Native Americans who maintain their traditions, the Hazara of Afghanistan under the Taliban, the Armenians in the Ottoman empire, The Chechens in the Russian empire, the Irish in the English empire, the Saami (AKA Lapps) in Scandinavia and Finnland.

Those who didn't have or hold to their own culture/religion were assimilated and disappeared. How many people speak Cornish, Ainu, or Votic? Not that many. And it's only due to great effort that these languages are not already extinct.

It's the old Germanic name, and Scandinavians continue to use cognates of it.

And the Roman name for it was Saturnalia, a time of great merriment.

I mean, even in the Christian religious tradition, Christmas isn't the most important holiday. Theologically speaking, Easter is. By far. But Easter gets relatively short shrift in U.S. culture. If Christmas/ Hanukkah hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent them.

the religious right's incredibly ironic campaign to demand that retailers use their most sacred holiday to sell things.

Seriously. I hadn't thought about it in quite those terms... but you're right. If anything, I'd think that hard-core religious people would push for Christmas to be less commercialized, not more. But then, the religious right isn't really about theology -- it's about theocracy.

Only just noticed this sentence. Judaism still exists today primarily because it is exclusive. Not only does it not actively seek converts, it deliberately makes it difficult for others to actually convert when they want to. The dietary laws and many other elements isolate Judaism, and this isolation has allowed it to survive the population explosion that would otherwise have subsumed it into a greater whole. Perhaps that occurrence would have been for the best, but perhaps not. Even the most assimilated Jews (and Germany had probably the most assimilated community) did not escape persecution.

And also of HumanLight, invented by members of the New Jersey Humanist Network back in 2001, so that those members could celebrate a winter-solstice holiday while not having to hide their identities.