Once upon a time long long ago …

Yep, its that time of year again folks …

Once upon a time long long ago … there existed a magical garden that had been created by a supernatural entity, and into this garden it put the first man and first woman that ever lived. Sadly the woman was tricked by a talking snake into eating some fruit, and so the magical super-entity became angry and tossed the pair out.

[roll forward in time to about 2,000 years ago]

The magical super-entity decided to sort all this out once and for all, so it impregnated itself into a human woman and was born human. Its goal was to simply kill itself as a human sacrifice to itself to appease its own anger towards all of us simply because this first ancestor had been swindled by the talking snake.

If I submitted the above to a modern publisher of children’s stories, I’d be laughed out of the office … yet we are all asked to accept this as the deepest of deep truths, so deep in fact we should not question it, nor criticize or mock it in any way. I was told the other day that I’m apparently “shallow” on the basis that I don’t accept this, so if you also don’t accept it, then I guess we are in the same shallow category together.

To be totally honest, it is indeed deep … deeply stupid and utterly insane.

Now lets put this in its proper context. Our ancestors struggled to make sense of the world, and as part of that process, they crafted poetical myths to try and make sense of the world around them, so we can applaud their efforts, and also admire the poetry of such stories which are early attempts to arrive at an understanding; my criticism is not aimed in their direction. Today we have better explanations, yet for some bizarre reason many prefer to embrace these  older  myths as the best answer – that’s the insanity here.

Now, just to make all this a bit more interesting …

• Its not a fixed date – instead the date is determined by the movements of the moon. Yes I know, its tied in with the Jewish passover, but that’s an attempt to sidestep the point that it is related to earlier more primitive forms of belief that treat the moon as a deity.
• There is no actual agreement on the date. In Western Christianity, they use the Gregorian calendar to calculate it, but Eastern Christianity bases its calculations on the Julian Calendar
• Easter eggs – this is a far older more primitive tradition that relates to the rebirth of the Earth … a celebration of spring.
• The modern English term Easter developed from the Old English word Ēastre or Ēostre, which itself developed prior to 899. The name refers to Eostur-monath (Old English “Ēostre month”), a month of the Germanic calendar named after the goddess Ēostre. There is no certain parallel to Ēostre in North Germanic languages though some speculate that the east wind, “a spirit of light” named Austri found in the 13th century Icelandic Prose Edda book Gylfaginning, might be related.
• As for the Easter bunny … yep we are back to the ancient goddess once again …customs and imagery involving hares are linked to Ēostre and the Norse goddess Freyja
• And since we are thinking about the Norse deity Freyja, this is a goddess associated with love, beauty, fertility, gold, seiðr, war, and death … and so we have one day each week that is named after her … Friday.
• Not all believers acknowledge Easter, some embrace it, some reject it, some sort of acknowledge it, but don’t deem it to be all that special.

It goes without question that all modern believers would dismiss the pagan symbols and beliefs as superstitious nonsense and would simply identify all such associations as historical baggage that now has no meaning … but then should they not also consider their beliefs to be the same, surely the belief that a supernatural deity giving birth to itself so that it could kill itself as a sacrifice to itself falls into the same category?

I do indeed think so … and so should you.