Speaking as a former Catholic, I honestly believe being more conservative will make the church more relevant. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, to be clear, but we see what is happening to more liberal Christian denominations universally–they’re rapidly declining. There are a number of reasons why that is, but liberal theology failing to retain members is a component there.

I think the most relevant issue the Church can bring to bear today is one that conservative and liberal Catholics alike tend to agree on. Even the most hard-line trad priests and laity I knew had a visceral hatred for laizez-faire capitalism (and often capitalism at large) and the commodification of the human experience. Pope Francis gave voice to it, and the next pope must follow suit. If he doesn’t, regardless of theology, the church is doomed.

My first rec would be Rod Bennett’s The Early Church in Her Own Words. It’s a good starting point that grounds you in what the early authors of Christianity were thinking and discussing.

Yeah, more or less. Spitballing, but it’s probably still more related to the Sun. The 25th would’ve been on of the first days studious Romans could tell the daytime was growing longer.

This whole period in Roman History is extremely cool. Maybe not to live in though lol.

I’m sorry, but your first claim, that Christmas is a co-opting of a pagan holiday (Sol Invictus) is just plain wrong. It predates Sol Invictus. Emperor Aurelian established Sol Invictus as a holiday in 274 AD.

Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235 AD) claimed Jesus was born 8 days before the Kalends of January, which corresponds to Dec. 25. It is vastly more likely, and much more widely accepted at this point, that Dec. 25 was chosen because Africanus (author of Chronographiae, an early attempt at a Christian timeline) and other early Christians believed the Annunciation was March 25. They just added 9 months to that and bam, December 25.

If anything was intentional about the 25th in particular, it would’ve been due to contemporary Jewish beliefs that Prohpets died on the same day they are born or conceived. Believing that Jesus was conceived on the 25th of March, the parallel 25th of December would not only have been chronologically accurate, but spiritually significant.

These early Christians existed well before the establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion. There was a substantial desire to distance themselves from Pagan practice at the time. Virtually all sources that it relates to Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, outside of a single margin note in the 12th century, are post-enlightenment.

Edit to address Easter eggs, in particular: Undeniably the symbology of the egg as representing life and death predates Christianity. Frankly, it predates the Roman religion too. It’s more likely that eggs came from Persian cultural practices, spread to middle eastern churches, then gradually migrated west.

That’s just how culture works and I honestly don’t see what the point of bringing it up is. Only the most simple-minded evangelicals would be scared of what amounts to adiaphora.

Are we obliged to belive that every religious practice from every religion ought to have been instituted specifically by its God? Religion is for us, even most religious people will tell you that. Islamic prayer forms are derived from Coptic Christians, Jewish and Christian thought intermingled; Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist thought has at various points cross-pollinated in fascinating ways.

I truly believe more non-religious people should read David Bentley Hart’s Experience of God. I think, if you can put up with his snark and dense prose, it would help a lot to understand what it actually means to believe in a God, rather than bottom dollar examples like rural evangelicals and Islamic extremists.

As far as Christmas trees go, the fact that we do not see a single example of one until the 15th century, leaves me confident that their adoption wasn’t related to co-opting ppaganism. European Paganism was dead and buried by then. Any practices that remained would’ve been perceived as cultural. The Christmas Tree probably had more to do with wealthy Protestants trying to distinguish themselves from Catholic Christmas traditions more than anything else.

Heck, the Vatican refused to put up a tree until the 1980s. That rivalry runs deep.

I haven’t set up the VPN yet. I am getting as much info as I can before I start any work. For the sake of this discussion, it would be a box on my network.

So I should just host it with an IP address instead of using the domain?

I hadn’t thought to do that, at least not for anything other than short lived internal-network-only projects and tests. An IT guy in the company I work for advised me to just get a domain and host with it/subdomains to make it easier to manage if I wanted to host multiple services.

I will need it to be available via a VPN or other means, but it’s not going to be any more public-facing than it has to be.

I think you meant to reply to me! I actually do need it to be accessible externally, via a VPN or other means.

I am fairly new to self hosting and just wanted to know if this was a big enough deal that I should just get a domain that doesn’t require HSTS preload. It’s one thing to tinker with an IP address on a local network for some unimportant project; it’s just intimidating to try it for real using a domain and hosting my own data.

I’m just a little nervous tbh. Thanks for the help!

Google requires HSTS preload for all of their domains. Charleston Road Registry (their subsidiary), enforces this by adding the TLD to the HSTS preload list.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the TLD. It’s at the bottom.

Google is the registry that owns the rights to the TLD. They require all of the domains they control to have HSTS preload enabled.