Remind me again where's the part of the bible with the pagan spring festival fertility symbols of bunnies and eggs?

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Could you elaborate on Christmas and Easter a bit? Maybe I misread your post because I thought it was well established that those are Christianized pagan winter and spring festivals. If not, then why does Santa look like Odin and they both fly around at the end of December? And why eggs and bunnies, as are common among spring festivals?

Vast and prolific human stupidity; the same way every other religion started.

we do not worship pagan holidays.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrillbillyPodcast/

Before it is lost yeah. Ive been doing the same. Talking to my dad a lot and recording it. He doesnt have much time left.

My feeling was granddad moved camps a lot from fighting so much but I’m not 100% sure. We do have a photo from Black Wolf WV when my dad was about 1 year old. I only have one living uncle who could answer this stuff so I better get to asking.

Where is this Harlan County?

Popular culture has the unfortunate habit of presenting Richard as an overall good king BECAUSE he was an effective military leader. However, this presentation is inaccurate because if you take his entire reign into consideration it becomes patently obvious that he greatly struggled in non-military governance, thus making him a poor king.

My original comment was directed at the issues surrounding popular culture because they often present their work as factually accurate or 'based off true events' and as a result the audience will go 'okay so now I have an accurate idea of *insert topic*'

Just in response to your second sentence: Partial truths are still inaccurate. No one is going to be happy with "Well its mostly correct." If you're learning about something you're going to want a full understanding of the subject, not bits and pieces that give you a partial understanding. As a professor once told me, "The devil is in the details, if you don't address the details he'll make an ass out of you and I."

Chevrolet coal camp for us. Do you know which was for him?

It should be noted that "pagan" religions copied Christianity also. Loki for example

My dad was born there too in the 40’s. Around 49 my grandfather moved the family to quiet valley near Abington while he stayed behind to work. Coal is all he knew. He was a mean mf. I always suspected he moved them out of there to stay clear of the danger.

Something you failed to mention is that the earliest mass disease deaths didn't occur in isolated native villages. The started in the relatively large urban areas of Central Mexico.

There is typically a top-down political component to cultural shifts like you're asking about where governments chose the religion for the people. Additionally, times of political chaos make people more willing to accept new belief systems. The many civil wars of Rome facilitated the adoption of Christianity before it became the state religion. Similarly the political instability at the collapse of the Han Dynasty helped Buddhism gain acceptance. A happy afterlife is especially inviting in such tough times. Otherwise, when empires or kingdoms actively patronized a different faith than they had before, they did so for political reasons. In ancient Egypt, Akhenaten promoted a small time cult over the traditional religious figures to weaken their priesthoods. Even the Protestant Reformation's success was due to the patronization of local leaders in the Holy Roman Empire. Henry VIII of England couldn't get the pope's approval for an annulment so he made a new church. I'm sure there are counter-examples of bottom to top religious changes, but prior to religious toleration, the church and the state were typically hand in hand.

Once the mines closing and the rerouting if the river were done, there wasnt much left, and it descended into what it is today. It needs a renaissance

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Is there another William the Conquerer?

Almost all the towns were. Benham, lynch, evarts, brookside, eac of those hollers had a coal tipple in it when I was a kid

We dug coal together

Christianity as an independent religion took several hundred years to evolve from a Messianic cult of Judaism. Its structure and dynamics of conversion were significantly different after it became the preferred and then official religion of the Roman Empire.

Outside of the Empire conversion became intertwined with conquest: a major shift from it being a communal religion of the dispossessed as mentioned in other comments

Secondly most of the comments relate to the experience within the core of the empire. The situation outside of the Empire such as Ireland, never conquered by Rome, is different. What little evidence we have suggests an introduction of early Christianity (before Constantine) through farm monastic settlements that were superseded by later post Constantine Christianity based on church territories, politically allied with secular powers.

However the dynamics as to how and why the early introductions happened is speculative because of lack of any definitive evidence. Attempts have been made to associate it with the cultural character of the peoples of Ireland but these are unconvincing

Hinduism, as far as my limited understanding goes, with its background and status of Vedic literature was successful through the slow absorption of fragmented local beliefs. For instance local deities were claimed to be avatars of Shiva and thus became part of the Hindu religious family

When it comes to religion, there is an easy term for how they spread, "Intolerance wins". Combine that with a healthy dose of class warfare.

It's pretty complicated to try to explain the concept because it happens in different ways depending on the region, culture, and any other factor you can imagine. A very general explanation is that if a religion doesn't tolerate other religions existing it will eventually overtake and wipe out that religion. Rome's traditional thought of Pantheon of Gods actually functioned more like multiple religions. But those religions never held serious sway over one another, worst yet they were relaxed and allowed other religions to exist alongside their own. It wasn't a situation where the followers of Jupiter intentionally wiped out the followers of the other Gods saying you can't exist. Christianity stepped into this scenario and swept up quite a lot of people, mainly the poor outcasts of society, as the polytheistic temples catered mainly to the rich. Eventually through the years Christianity came to dominate, when Constantine converted a huge chunk of the country was already Christian.

Similar situation that many are familiar with is the Vikings and how the wiping out of Asatro came because the Vikings didn't care what religion people followed, but the Christians certainly did.

Other examples from Asia come to mind Burma had an early form of Buddhism I believe that was very loose and all about partying and getting drunk, one of the kings wasn't a fan of this and on a campaign came across a very devout version of Buddhism (I believe Theravada) and converted and brought it back to Burma with him and through some law making and the situation of these Monks aren't trying to rob me and get drunk and have orgys all the time, converted large portions of the population.

Thats the gist of it.

Sometimes religions and spiritual practices evolve through exchange whether it happens naturally or forcefully. Sometimes if you want religion to catch on, you have to package it so it is appealing. Christian holidays are established to correspond with pagan holidays or certain Christian figures reflect the loa in voodoo.

Christianity spread quickly because it was applicable for everyone at the time. Martyrs willing to die going against the Roman Empire as well as question some of the Jewish laws. It accepted everyone and anyone can become part of the religion. It really became more mainstream when Constantine, became the first Christian emperor as mentioned in other posts.

I’ve got family from Harlan. It really is as bad as the songs make it out to be.

Did you know that the Norman’s were basically vikings that moved south.

The French were a bit surprised to find them on their north coast and weren’t strong enough to throw them off.

Anyway the Vikings decided to learn French and English, learn the French way of life, and settled in.

They then came up with creative ways to raise tax revenue, and started upgrading their patch of what is now Normandy. They had good education, top shelf healthcare, lots of trade, all the trimmings of the good life.