It kinda blows your mind, doesn't it?
But it's true. I know a lady who believes that there is too much pagan symbology associated with the Easter Holy Day so she refuses to celebrate it at all.
Now, I can understand objecting to the over commercialization of Holy Days, particularly Christmas, but this just seems silly to me, especially since the merging of pagan and Christian holidays was a deliberate tactic on the part of the early Christian church to replace the pagan traditions with Christian ones. That's why Christmas is celebrated in the middle of winter and Easter is in the spring.
The cool thing to me is that it works, especially for Easter. It's Spring; the world is being reborn. What better time to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ? And if a little bunny, and eggs come along with it, so much the better, particularly since they do reinforce the whole notion of salvation through rebirth.
Some folks just get way too serious about this stuff, like the folks Frank mentions here. Apparently, there's a movement to secularize the Easter Holy Day by deleting all references to the word Easter. It's hard to say which side is sillier, those trying to erase the word Easter because it's too Christian, or the Christians trying to save it, given that it derives from the name of a pagan goddess.
On the other hand, given that Christians co-opted the holiday for their own use, it seems to fulfil an almost karmic sense of justice that souless heathens are now trying to purge all religious aspects from the day.
Posted by Rich at April 18, 2006 10:56 PM | TrackBack