There is however a more surprising way in which the faithful can defile themselves in the eyes of their Lord. By celebrating the New Year, party goers are in fact jubilating over a purely naturalistic scientific concept: the year.
Oddly, since the sun was discovered by vertebrates several millennia ago, man has not been content merely to watch it trace its path across the sky, day after day. Early man pondered over the bizarre combination of factors that led the sun to cause parts of the globe to heat up and others to cool down, except in Singapore, where a proportion of residents are still eagerly waiting for their first snowfall.
Eventually, someone clever realized that the process was cyclical, and set about trying to decipher the period, because it would be nice to, I don’t know, grow crops or something. Hunter gatherers watched enviously as their neighbors stopped hunting and gathering, and started having more sex and going to Led Zeppelin concerts.
Finally the Romans invented a calendar which gave them years of alternately varying length, with the number of added days being determined by a round robin cock fight tournament at the public baths towards the end of December1. However this unreliable system caused the calendar to drift out of sync with the path of the sun by one day per year, arguably defeating the purpose of a solar calendar.
Remarkably it only took Roman astronomers several centuries to decide the situation was not ideal, and thus was born the Julian calendar. It kind of sucked too, but was oddly good enough for the omniscient Son of God. Finally, in 1582, an angry Jesus briefly rose from the dead demanding to know why Christians were celebrating his birthday ten days late. The Gregorian calendar was finally created to placate the displeased deity.
To make a long story short and bring an end to several paragraphs worth of useless background information, the year is a purely naturalistic, and dare I say it, pagan concept which involves nothing more than the sun’s interaction with the Earth. And they get along just great. By celebrating the cycle, Christians are glorying in naturalism.
Frodologists of course believe that Frodo is responsible for moving the Earth around the Sun, just as He once moved the Sun around the Earth until Copernicus convinced Him to change His mind. We believe the Earth’s orbit has nothing to do with gravity, which is of course a totally untestable concept. But Christians should know better.
1. Some think this is what Christmas traditionally celebrates
