Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

You sir sit on a throne of lies.

Will Ferrell's character in the movie Elf tells Santa Claus, but there are skeptics.

There are critics who would say that Jesus himself sits on a throne of lies, a bunch of pagan

copycat mythologies that have been appropriated and used for our faith.

How should we go about rebutting that?

That's what I want to get into today here on the Council of Trend Podcast.

I'm your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and Speaker, Trent Horn.

And yesterday we had a fun episode talking about whether the Catholic Church is pagan

or not.

Was is the Catholic Church the one true Church of Jesus Christ established here on Earth,

the salvation of all human beings, one holy Catholic and apostolic?

Or was there a church that Jesus established that suspiciously looks like modern Baptist

fellowships today that got poisoned in the fourth century by Emperor Constantine and

other pagan influences rushing into the church and creating artificial man-made traditions

of men, things like that.

That's what we talked about yesterday, refuting these kinds of arguments you hear from Jack

Chick and other kinds of fundamentalist Christians.

And not even that, you'll still get a lot of people who put forward these kinds of arguments,

especially here in the season of Lent.

And then as we approach the season of Easter, seeing Catholic sacraments, sacramentals,

ritual forms of worship, they'll say, hey, wait a minute, this reminds me of paganism

...