I love Christianity partly because Christians celebrate stolen holidays.
Easter and Christmas are perfect examples. Christmas celebrates Jesus' birth on December 25th of every year, even though most Biblical scholars will tell you they have no idea when Jesus was born. You know what else is celebrated around then? The winter solstice, when the nights start getting longer. The harvest is done for the year and it's time to hunker down for the cold winter ahead. A common practice in the olden days was to burn a Yule log. Sound familiar? So should the fact that Germanic pagans decorated their houses with evergreen, holly and mistletoe.
Easter has a similar story. While Jesus' death is given a definite time frame (the Friday after Passover), it still has a lot of stolen symbology. Easter gets it's name from Ostara, which is the name of the neopagan celebration of the vernal equinox. Ostara gets it's name from the Germanic pagan goddess Ēostre. They are pretty much used interchangebly. If you dig a little to find out who she is, you'd find that she is the goddess of spring and fertility. Symbols associated with her are rabbits and eggs, symbols of fertility. Again, sound familiar?
There are westernized versions of most of the 8 Wiccan sabbats if you think about it. Halloween = Samhain, a celebration of your ancestors. It's no coincidence that the Catholic All Saint's Day is Nov. 1st and subsquently the Hispanic Día de los Muertos is Nov. 2nd. Imbolc = Groundhog's Day, the longest day of the winter. The days will always start to get shorter after that, so no matter what Punxsutawney Phil tells you, spring will always be a few weeks away. Beltane = May Day, the beginning of of the planting season. Litha, Lammas and Mabon don't have any modern day holidays that have been commandeered by Christianity.
The reason there are so many parallels between these pagan celebrations and Christian/Western holidays is because they wanted to ease the converted pagans into their new religion.
There's your history lesson for the day.
People always wonder why I have a problem with Christianity. I don't have a problem with the religion at all. It's the Christians that I have a problem with. I think at the heart of it all, Christianity is about wanting to make people better and have them act kindly towards others. It gives them morals and values to believe in and for you to use to guide your life. That's a good thing. I just don't like the way Christians behave with people who think differently from them. Religious intolerance led us to the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust. I can't claim to be a Christian when I believe that Jesus would not want his followers to have this "our way or the highway" mentality that I feel they currently have. To me, it was stiffling going to church towards the end. I'm a woman of science and reason. I was tired of them trying to convince me to abandon my belief in evolution, which is based on evidence that I can see, for blind faith. To quote Robert Langdon in "Angels and Demons," "Faith is a gift I have yet to receive." And I refuse to associate myself with a religion that is so intolerate of homosexuality and base this intolerance on a few Bible verses, when these verses can plainly be seen as outdated when read in context. I mean, there's one where homosexual behavior is condemned because the writer was in an area still heavily under the spell of Greco-Roman gods and near temples for fertility gods and goddesses. These people he was condemning were simply worshipping their gods, and since they weren't his god he condemned them and their behavior to sway people towards his religion. Long story short, religion in general has evolved with us and everyone in the past has been pretty sure that their religion is the right one, so what makes me so sure that Christianity is the right one for me? Nothing.
Happy Easter/Ēostre/Fertility Symbols Day!
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