...THAT SOME CHURCHES STILL BELIEVE TO THIS DAY
The belief of both Jack Chick and Jehovah's Witnesses that all pagan gods and goddesses (even all deities within the same faiths) worldwide hail from a single cultural hearth that spread worldwide, and that holidays and festivals, as well as rituals (especially Catholic ones) hail from pagan festivals and rituals, can be traced to a Victorian Presbyterian Scottish preacher called Alexander Hislop. His doctrine is called hyperdiffusionism and is wrong. All deities, if they have a common origin, it is humanity, not a common cultural hearth, be it Egyptian, Assyrian, Hellenistic Greece, from a sunken civilization (Muvian or Atlantean), or even from outer space. It would be preposterous to say, for instance, that Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia stem from one and the same source, not to mention Isis, Amaterasu, and the White Buffalo Woman. Still there are archetypes (queen goddesses, mother goddesses, love goddesses, king gods, storm gods, war gods, ocean deities, etc.) that reoccur across cultures worldwide.
As for holidays and festivals, they commonly coincide with the change of seasons (Easter/Ostara with the spring equinox, Yule/Christmas/Sol Invictus with the winter equinox, Halloween/Samhain with mid-autumn, Saint Patrick also takes place slightly before the spring equinox, etc.).
Alexander Hislop's hyperdiffusionism was used as a doctrine as a canard against Catholics. Nowadays, although hyperdiffusionism has been relegated to pseudohistory by serious historians, some religious fundamentalists like Jehovah's Witnesses or Jack Chick, or The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord repeat Hislop's ideas ad nauseam, often claiming that Satan himself is the power behind paganism.
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