I don’t really have a dog in this fight either way but I was just struck by this today. As most of us know the names of the days of the week have pagan origins, Woden’s Day for Wednesday, Thors Day for Thursday, Saturns day for Saturday and so on.
I was just wondering why fundementalist Christians don’t have a problem with this, some of them get upset over Halloween because of its pagan origins for example.
Is it the name Halloween or the practices associated with the holiday that they object to? Rituals do not equal names, and no such practices are associated with the days of the week.
You should see a 7th Day Adventist get going on the subject of Sunday worship – it is singularly amazing what they claim are other people’s motivations.
Didn’t Quakers do this at one time?
There’s only so many cows you can have at once. As it is, they’ve got a limitless supply.
Beats me. They also roll on the Sabbath.
I’ll throw out a few idea,s which I would guess all have a little impact, and, with others, collectively keep it from being an issue:
I heard a fundamentalist preacher on a late night AM station ranting pretty hard about Sunday being the day of worship for Christians when it was clearly meant to be Saturday. He debated with himself for a long time over whether we were all going Hell for it and then took some rather strange callers. The names of the week didn’t seem to be an issue but the order was even if the order has been disrupted by calendar adjustments over time.
When has THIS ever stopped a Fundie?
Look, I am one, and we get our undies in a bundle about “homos ‘n’ guns”, when, if we looked at what Jesus cared about, we’d be spending that time feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless.
And we’d be carrying signs about Widow and Orphan rights, not “God hates Obama” and “Fags Are Beasts”.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Fred Phelps is considered a HERETIC AND BLASPHMER by virtually every other Christian in America. This sort of ignorant crap is even more ridiculous than considering Bin Laden representative of Islam considering he has more supporters than Phelps.
Even if they don’t realize Wednesday is really Odin’s Day, you’d think Sunday would be straightforward. Sun’s Day. The day worshipping the Sun happens. Like the Inca or Romans worshipping Sol Invictus.
A propos of nothing (but it might give a “huh” moment to some), while the French days of the week also have their roots in pagan worship, they’re not the same gods as the English/German ones.
Monday is still Lundi - that’s the same, day of the moon but
Your Tyr’s day/ is our mardi, the day of Mars.
Your Wotan’s day is our mercredi, the day of Mercury
Your Thunor’s day is our jeudi, the day of Jovis (Jupiter)
Your Freya’s day is our vendredi, the day of Venus
Your Saturn’s day is our samedi, the day of the Sabbath
Finally, your Sunday is our dimanche, the day of the Lord.
So there’s an odd mixture of Roman and Christian influences going on there. Nor are the aspects of the name-dropped gods or the symbol they represent quite the same. Neat, huh ?
Also of note, the anti-religious fundies who spearheaded the French revolution *did *get worked up over the names of the days and months of the year, and made their own that were more tied with the cycles of nature. They also took the opportunity to set the calendar on the metric system while they were at it.
It didn’t catch. I always thought it was a shame - Germinal, Floréal, Thermidor, Frimaire… they really were quite poetic.
Similar to the French ones, the days of the week in Spanish are:
lunes
Monday
martes
Tuesday
miércoles
Wednesday
jueves
Thursday
viernes
Friday
sábado
Saturday
domingo
SundayWell, of course, but all Protestants are heretics by definition 
There’s also the names of the months, named after pagan gods like Janus (or emperors worshiped as gods, like Julius, and Augustus).
For most conservative christians it’s more about the conservatism than anything else. They’d probably get worked up if someone did try to change the names of the days to drop the Norse mythology references since they’ve always been that way* and are therefore good and properly American and anyone who suggests changing anything is a godless atheistic liberal muslim socialist.
ETA: Same thing for the names of the months
I don’t get the argument over Sunday or Saturday being the sabbath- it’s still one day a week, or once every seven days. Are we really sure that Saturday is really the seventh day and Sunday the first? It’s been a long time since Genesis- have we really kept track that well?
Depends. To my mom’s friends, if Obama wanted to change it, they’d be against it. If Rush or Glenn championed it, they’d be all for it.
Well, the Jews have always been quite careful in their counting since the beginning, and Jesus attended synagogue and participated in Jewish rituals—you would think that He would have made some mention of a slight error in the day of the week while overturning the tables of the moneychangers and tossing the dove-sellers out on their ear.
Of course, if you are not a Christian, then this particular argument is not as persuasive. Nevertheless, the Jewish Sabbath has been kept with diligent accuracy for a long long time.
A little off topic, but have we kept good track of what day it is ever since God rested on the seventh day? Did Naoh meticulously mark off each of the 40 days of rain and then the 150 days of the flood? Did somebody at Babel remember the word for Sunday?
I know there are days when I have to check the date on my computer.
Interpretatio graeca/romana/germanica. Some of these are pretty straightforward–Frigg or Freya for Venus, Tyr for Mars. Thor for Jupiter is more of a stretch, since while both are “thunder gods”, Thor was not the All-Father and King of the Gods in Northern pantheons. Wotan or Odin for Mercury is just kind of weird.
Incidentally, I’ve never heard of any Christian church claiming that the reason why they worship on Sunday is because somebody lost track of the days of the week somewhere since the Exodus, or that the day of rest and worship referred to in the Ten Commandments was really supposed to have been Sunday all along and the Jews had been keeping the wrong day of the week the entire time. Rather, the official Christian position I’ve always seen is that the day of worship has been changed from Saturday to Sunday–see (for example) the Westminster Confession of Faith or the Baltimore Catechism (questions 353-357).