"Silly Christian!" Said The Trendy Neo-Pagan

This was on Facebook; he proceeded to list pagan meanings of day-names, and the various instances of Catholic-established holidays coinciding with prior pagan festivals. Pretending that this invalidated the CONTENT of the Christian faith, he concluded with a smirking, "Happy Samhain." So I took up the gauntlet he had flung.
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Silly pagan. We already knew the origins of the names of days of the week; they no more determine the content of our beliefs than the name of a street you build on determines what the interior of the house will be like. As for the timing of the listed holidays, none of that was called for by the Bible, but was done for someone's convenience. Basic Biblical truth is about particular events, independently from what time of the year somebody had a fertility festival or whatever. Neither Osiris nor Balder ACTUALLY rose to literal life after a literal death; we have cause to believe that Yeshua the Messiah DID. (That, by the way, is something which I did not blindly accept as a child, but rather became convinced of as an inquiring agnostic in college years.)

Real-world information is particularly helpful in dispelling the big deal that is made of saying, "The resurrection story is only about flowers blooming in the spring, tra la." In Israel, where the events of the Gospels took place, the cycle of nature is quite different from the European environment where people "brilliantly discovered" that the resurrection story was only about springtime renewal. In Israel, the "dead" season of the year is precisely the SUMMER, when it is so hot and dry. Crops were anciently planted in AUTUMN, were helped to grow by rain rather than snow in winter, and matured for harvest in spring. Thus, at the time when Yeshua/Jesus died AND rose again, the life cycle for THAT locality was at the DYING time, equivalent in significance to a European autumn. So those who first told their testimony of the Messiah's resurrection WERE NOT "really" just praising the renewal of vegetation. They actually MEANT what they said: that they had SEEN Yeshua walking around alive again after His death. And if you know the circumstances, you know that THEY knew that they could not possibly GAIN anything but trouble if they were only making this up.