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LiberalEsto
(22,845 posts)Eggs and bunnies are all about fertility.
Happy Eostre!
Yup.
Easter is about organized religion hijacking someone else's celebration in order to gain converts.
Starboard Tack
(11,181 posts)I realized it had nothing to do with Christianity when visiting Turkey in my youth and seeing Easter eggs everywhere. It's about whatever you want it to be about.
canuckledragger
(1,636 posts)...& not the only celebration (or festival/etc.) that has been 'borrowed'
http://godkind.org/pagan-holidays.html
dickthegrouch
(3,172 posts)and GOP KKKristians? Haters. No clue what Christianity is about.
If they really believed, 'God' (for the third, and last (!) time) absolved 'man' of 'his' sins.
All this ridiculous talk of the 'sin' of abortion or homosexuality or others means nothing to the fairy man in the sky in any longer. 'He' has moved beyond it. It's about time 'his' followers did too.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)that's for the best so people can see this kind of bigotry in all it's splendor.
I still wish no one had to see it.
Starboard Tack
(11,181 posts)Have a good bowel movement, you'll feel much better.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)The Moan'n'Groan forum is all upset about this.
dickthegrouch
(3,172 posts)But Easter is usually another opportunity for that gay hating idiot in Rome to pontificate again about all sorts of things that only members of his club really care about.
The church has done untold harm to me and I'll hate it and the people who continue to support it by their silence.
Silence = Death
rug
(82,333 posts)The more common non-English names stem from the Hebrew "pasàch", or passover.
The word Easter has more to do with etymology than theology.
dmallind
(10,437 posts)no connection at all to have a new/regain life festival when the crops start growing.
So since we do speak English, why was the etymological link there in the first place. They didn't call it Samhain or Saturnalia - why pick Easter?
rug
(82,333 posts)It takes a large dose of ignorance to overlook the connection betwee Easter and Passover, which occurs in the spring.
Adopting the term Ēostre, a contemporaneous indigenous observation, was a common enough practice.
Saturnalia was a Roman winter, not a spring, celebration. Maybe Sahain adopted that.
There's no doubt there's a lot of ignorance over Easter, the Paschal celebration.
Leontius
(2,270 posts)Last edited Fri Apr 6, 2012, 12:24 PM - Edit history (1)
But they never mention that the whole issue of "Easter" is sheer speculation and conjecture. the only reference to a Germanic festival to this alleged goddess is by Bede in the eighth century, a Christian historian. So why would they even give his story legitimacy since all things Christian must be of dubious truth anyway, right?
rug
(82,333 posts)Leontius
(2,270 posts)The reason the New Testament can't be used as a "history" of Jesus and his life and ministry is it was written by Christians years after it "supposedly" occurred and there is no non-christian confirmation of it. However the existence of an "Easter/Estore-festival" has its source in the writing of a Christian and has no confirmation for any non-christian source but is considered "historical" enough to prove the stolen from pagans theme they promote. How do they make the two arguments without being ashamed of the intellectual dishonesty holding the two positions entails?
harmonicon
(12,008 posts)I'm not weighting in on the larger discussion, but I think you need to reason through what you've written here and see that your argument falls apart very easily because of this false equivalency.
dmallind
(10,437 posts)dmallind
(10,437 posts)So it's probably coincidence to you then that ethnic Han parents keep having Han children?
What ignorance could there be over just one more syncretic celebration of new life being promoted at the same time as the others?
Samhain by the way is a harvest festival and the forerunner of All Souls' - another coincidence no doubt. Kind of like the completely dateless event of the nativity is coincidentally celebrated at the start of lengthening daylight I guess.
But all are true and original of course - just.....coincidences, right?
rug
(82,333 posts)Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
What is not a coincidence is that the term Ēostre was adopted from an already existing observance and applied, for many reasons, to another, independently developed, observance.
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)A rebirth myth in spring is 'just coinkydink'. OK.
rug
(82,333 posts)
Marrah_G
(28,581 posts)Samhain is more then a harvest festival, it is the day we remember those we have lost in the previous year. It was switched to the Catholic "all souls day" so that people could retain the traditions and still abide by church rules. People were converted by force and it was made easier by allowing them their traditional "fun" days.
Goblinmonger
(22,340 posts)Although that is far from the main theme.
Next question.
Goblinmonger
(22,340 posts)Seemed like you were saying that it is just coincidence and that the Christian holiday was about passover and not spring when I think it is pretty clear that all of the holidays right now are about rebirth and are at this time of year because of spring.
TahitiNut
(71,611 posts)... touring the gravesites of my ancestors to see if they've been resurrected ... I'll choose the former.
rug
(82,333 posts)
... them grave-sites has their rules. "No spilling seed" is one of the more common. 
AlbertCat
(17,505 posts)Everything, any subject at all, has more to do with etymology than theology.
rug
(82,333 posts)
dynasaw
(998 posts)dynasaw
(998 posts)"Easter” was likely derived from Eostre, the name of the Anglo-Saxon lunar goddess, as was as the name for the female hormone estrogen. Eostre’s feast day was held on the first full moon following the vernal equinox — a similar calculation as is used for Easter among Western Christians. On this date the goddess Eostre is believed by her followers to mate with the solar god, conceiving a child who would be born 9 months later on Yule, the winter solstice which falls on December 21st.
Two of Eostre’s most important symbols were the hare (both because of its fertility and because ancient people saw a hare in the full moon) and the egg, which symbolized the growing possibility of new life. Each of these symbols continues to play an important role in modern celebrations of Easter."
http://atheism.about.com/od/easterholidayseason/p/PaganChristian.htm
Also the Sumerian goddess Ishtar who descended into hell and arose from the dead.
Joseph8th
(228 posts)... Astarte... Asher (Asherim, anyone?)...
Old as dirt.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,294 posts)Eostre is only mentioned, by the Christian historian Bede, as the Anglo-Saxon pagan name for the month around that time of year, named after a goddess. In German, it's Ostara. And that is it, for what we know. Everything else has been made up later, by neopagans.
"lunar goddess" - no; Norse mythology has Mani (male) as the personification of the moon.
"the name for the female hormone estrogen" - no; that comes from the Greek for 'gadfly' - http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/estrogen
"first full moon following the vernal equinox" - no; the Roman Catholic church set the date used in western and northern Europe, based (with slight disagreements with the Orthodox church) on the date for the Jewish Passover. The Roman Empire did not pay much attention in 325 to the dates of northern European pagan festivals.
"On this date the goddess Eostre is believed by her followers to mate with the solar god" - that's modern paganism. As noted earlier, back in the time before Bede, the northern European pagan customs personified the moon as male, and the sun as female.
"conceiving a child who would be born 9 months later on Yule" - now, this is interesting. There is a theory that the date for Christmas was chosen to make it a whole number of years between Jesus's conception and death (and then it appropriates the existing Roman festical of Saturnalia, at about that date). But there's no association of Yule with the birth of a child of the Sun and the Moon - even another About page fails to mention it.
Here's a modern pagan who points out how little is actually known about 'Eostre' from ancient times, and who cheerfully admits they have made up the customs they now observe because they feel right to them.
Ishtar was an Akkadian name, ie Semitic, not Indo-European, and so unrelated to a Germanic name. There are many gods in religions that go to the world of the dead and then return; Ishtar is just one. She has little in common with Jesus apart from this.
provis99
(13,062 posts)the Christians have never been able to come up with an explanation.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,294 posts)Here's the Oxford English Dictionary:
Bede ( De Temporum Ratione 15. 9: see quot. below) derives the word < Eostre (a Northumbrian spelling; also Eastre in a variant reading), according to him, the name of a goddess whose festival was celebrated by the pagan Anglo-Saxons around the time of the vernal equinox (presumably in origin a goddess of the dawn, as the name is to be derived from the same Germanic base as east adv. : see above). This explanation is not confirmed by any other source, and the goddess has been suspected by some scholars to be an invention of Bede's. However, it seems unlikely that Bede would have invented a fictitious pagan festival in order to account for a Christian one. For further discussion and alternative derivations see D. H. Green Lang. & Hist. Early Germanic World (1998) 351–3, J. Udolph & K. Schäferdieck in J. Hoops's Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde (ed. 2, 2003) XXII. 331–8, and for a parallel development compare yule n. Bede's etymology comes in a passage explaining the origin of the Old English names of the months:
a735 Bede De Temporum Ratione xv, Eostur-monath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cujus nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo gaudia novae solemnitatis vocantes.
Compare Old English Ēastermōnað April, cognate with or formed similarly to Old Dutch ōstermānōth (in a translation from German), Old High German ōstarmānōd (Middle High German ōstermānōt , German Ostermonat , now archaic) < the Germanic base of Easter n.1 + the Germanic base of month n.1
A borrowing of the Old English word into West Slavonic (during the time of the Anglo-Saxon mission to Germany) perhaps underlies Polabian jostråi , Lower Sorbian jatšy , (regional) jastry , Kashubian jastrë , all in sense ‘Easter’; however, it has been argued that these are rather to be derived from a native base meaning ‘clear, bright’, and thus (via a connection with the coming of spring) show a parallel development to the Germanic word.
Igel
(35,293 posts)We take names for things and recycle them.
I always think of the robin as a sign of spring. However, the robin that the word referred to 600 years ago is emphatically *not* the bird I look for. The first referent was in Britain. I live in Houston and there's not a lot of commonality in bird species between here and London, apart from a few invasive species.
Of more interest are the rituals and traditions that are country/culture-specific and accompany Easter, and their origins. I personally can't tell if they're late incrustations or hold-overs from pagan times. Most of them are spring-festival features--bunnies, eggs, lilies. Not much in keeping with Passover. The growing seasons are all wrong. (Even the traditional egg at Passover seders is late--other bird eggs are small and hard to get to, and 600 BC Jerusalem didn't have chickens.)
In Russian folklore it's often fairly clear where the holdovers are. The things that aren't Byzantine and which were local and preserved in 19th century folklore expeditions were typically old or modified old rituals and traditionals.
The usual "Two Babylons" rhetoric draws a parallel not between Ishtar/Isis and Jesus traditions but between Tammuz/Horus and Jesus traditions.
immoderate
(20,885 posts)And chocolate!
--imm
d_r
(6,907 posts)niyad
(113,213 posts)
GoneOffShore
(17,339 posts)Six more weeks of Lent!
struggle4progress
(118,270 posts)of this claim that Christendom stole its major holiday from some Germanic or Nordic spring celebration relating to Oestre or Ostara
My own initial guess would be that the claim originated with nineteenth century German crackpots like Guido von List (who apparently believed ancient Germanic rituals could be recovered intact from Christian rituals by removing some superficial overlay) and was then propagated or rebroadcast in modified form by early twentieth century disciples such as Adolf Josef Lanz (who published the anti-semitic volkish magazine Ostara) or later by persons such as Karl Maria Wiligut (who taught that the original Bible had been written in some Germanic tongue)
The exact cluster of ideas is somewhat ill-formed, since by the early twentieth century there were quite a number of German crackpots pushing versions of this claptrap, but usually the theories involved many of the following ideas: the intrinsic superiority of Germans and Germany, stretching back to ancient Germany's glorious paganism; the destruction of glorious ancient Germanic paganism by Christianity; the continuing evil role of Judaic foreigners in Germany's defeats and humiliations; the better world that would result if inferior races were enslaved and castrated to serve as workhorses for glorious German overlords; and so on
In the end, politically, of course, the differences were irrelevant: what mattered was that the various movements could all be brought together in the Third Reich to agree that any good in German Christianity came from its pre-Christian German influences, and that the evils of Christianity could be ascribed to the non-Germanic Jewish influences: in the end, of course, the Reich was publishing "Bibles" from which all suspected "Jewish influences" had been removed
This attempt to eliminate the Jewish Passover -- a religious celebration that substantially predates Christianity and that is historically critical to the Christian Resurrection story -- from the Christian Resurrection story, and to replace it with a supposed Germanic festival, has the odor of such crackpot Germanic volkish propaganda
darkstar3
(8,763 posts)struggle4progress
(118,270 posts)by providing whatever you might know about the history of the claim (so often made in this forum, and so often crushingly refuted) that Christianity stole its highest festival from Germanic tribes, and I feel sure that everyone else awaits your contribution on this point, with at least as much anticipation as I do
darkstar3
(8,763 posts)1. You haven't refuted shit. You have provided one of the worst examples of supposition I've read from you.
2. Stuff your condescension.
3. You've built a straw man. No on is saying that Christianity "stole" Easter. I don't see that here. I do see repeated claims that Christianity did with Easter what it did with Saturnalia: Morphed their tradition and grafted it onto current Pagan ritual in order to ensure its continued existence and spread. It wasn't the first time, and wouldn't be the last.
struggle4progress
(118,270 posts)Judaea to concern themselves mainly with Germanic equinox festivals and the pressing problem, Can we find some Germanic equinox festival and disguise it as a story about the Jerusalem establishment collaborating with the Roman occupation forces to brutally lynch an innocent man at the beginning of the great Jewish holiday celebrating deliverance from enslavement by a foreign empire?
I myself can understand why first century Jewish peasants might be interested in tales involving traditional Jewish themes of deliverance from cruel empires -- but (due to my slow wit, perhaps) I cannot understand why first century Jewish peasants would bother to go find themselves some Germanic equinox festival (of which no historic record now remains) and to dress it up in disguise
darkstar3
(8,763 posts)Leontius
(2,270 posts)since most missionaries to northern Europe (Germanic) originated there the word was probably reintroduced to continental Europe by them, if Bede is considered a good source for its origin in Anglo-Saxon use. As to the purpose behind the modern revisionism on the origin of the holiday several groups have different agendas that cause them to push the "stolen pagan holiday" line none of which are any less disgusting than the other.