If you've been in the Neopagan community very long at all, you'll have seen at least a half a dozen essays asserting that "Christians stole/borrowed/used all these traditions/holidays/customs from the Pagans." A good number of these are historically questionable assertions; some of them have merit. But mostly, they only serve to fuel ugly fires of Christian bashing.
I'm angry that a community which is known for eclecticism and borrowing is hypocritical enough to complain that ancient Christians did the same thing. After all, here we are in the 21th century, and many of us have a theology that contains elements from many different periods and religions, possibly even Deities from several different periods and religions, and rituals and traditions that have been influenced from everything from Western occult to shamanism to modern culture and everything in between. And yet, there are complaints that Christians, who were once also a new religion, took ideas from a variety of sources and fit them together with their own ideas to form a theology, liturgy, and history that made sense to them. How is this different from what we're doing at this exact moment?
I know, there are Christians who don't believe their own history. And there are Pagans who still believe that most ancient societies were matriarchal or that their religion has an unbroken line to the past. None of these ideas is really any less silly than the other. Let's have some understanding that foolishness exists everywhere, not just in Christianity. I'd bet there are some pretty inaccurate ideas running around in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, too -- just most of us don't know about it because we don't have as much contact with them.
My pastor at my UU church once made an interesting remark about fundamentalist Christianity. He said that people leave fundamentalist Christianity because something in their "perfect and orderly world" cracks and breaks so badly that it can't be repaired. For whatever reason, people suddenly realize that the world does not revolve around them, that God does not hold them in the center of His palm, or that they are no more chosen than anyone else on this Earth. It's a terribly frightening realization, and tends to cause a great deal of anger towards this religion that they believe lied to them.
I think we have a lot of people who are still trying to deal with this anger in the Pagan community. We have a number of refugees from Christianity; people who feel betrayed by that religion, for whatever reason, and are trying to wrestle with throwing off the old theology while converting to their new religion. This "throwing off" and breaking with old thought patterns is notoriously painful and violent - much like a teenager rebelling to assert independence and freedom from parents. Since we've grown so fast, we have a much higher number of newcomers than Elders, which means that the voices of anger sometimes drown out the voices of tolerance and reason. Without many Elders, it also means that many of our newcomers are trying to get past their anger, and into a new religion, without much guidance from those who have already passed through these fires.
Sadly, this anger often manifests by either trying to prove Paganism's superiority or by railing against Christians. Often this "proof" of Paganism's superiority manifests in claims that it is older. Older isn't always better, and sometimes it's decidedly worse. Even the most Reconstructionist-oriented Pagans need to modify what they know about older religions and cultures to fit modern sensibilities and culture. The difference between Reconstructed religions and one that has a living tradition, such as Christianity, is that Reconstructionists are making all their modifications at once. Living traditions have organically grown and changed to fit the times.
While it's intellectually interesting that Christianity shares a great number of parallels with other mythology of the time, from a spiritual perspective, it doesn't matter. It just proves that there is meaning beyond the mythology; after all, we've all spoken it, each in our own religions' language. Who cares who got there first? Religion isn't a race; it's about finding and speaking your Truth. People before us have found their Truth and spoken it in their own ways; people after us will do the same. We should concentrate on joining them.