Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Easter is not a Pagan Holiday

Here is an Easter essay from a banned web site:
Many stupid lies are spread by the Jews about the Christian faith.

Likely the most insidious lie is that Christianity is based on Judaism. This is stupid on its face, as the Jewish religion is fundamentally based on the rejection and hatred of Christ, and therefore it could only have existed after Christ. Moreover, it is simply an accepted historical fact that rabbinical Judaism – i.e., Judaism* – was invented in the first and second century. Not even the Jews themselves actually claim to be practicing the religion of the Old Testament, unless they are lying to Christians to try to get favor or money.

*You can refer to the religion of the Ancient Israelites as “Judaism” if you want, but it’s not the same religion. This is unnecessarily confusing, and not really even accurate. But people do refer to “ancient Judaism,” and that’s fine, as long as you recognize that this is not the same thing as rabbinical Judaism, and not even the rabbis themselves make that claim.

In reality, Christians are the inheritors of the faith of Abraham and the people of ancient Palestine. Most of the people living in the Holy Land at that time became Christians, and moved into Europe and married and reproduced, so we Europeans also share the blood of the people of ancient Palestine and the Levant. The Jews were a small secret of Israelite priests who rejected Christ, fled the Holy Land, and created a new religion based on rejecting Christ. If you study the Jew religion, you will find that it has virtually nothing to do with the religion of ancient Palestine, even though some of the Jews have maintained a form of the language.

There are many, many lies that are spread by these Jews about our Holy Faith, and one of the most ridiculous is that the Easter holiday is actually secretly a pagan holiday. This is very dumb and easily disproved, and yet it persists, because we live in a world of lies where lies are regularly taken as truth, even when they are disproved.

You may not believe a banned site, but Encyclopedia Britannica agrees and defines:
Rabbinic Judaism, the normative form of Judaism that developed after the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem (AD 70). Originating in the work of the Pharisaic rabbis, it was based on the legal and commentative literature in the Talmud, and it set up a mode of worship and a life discipline that were to be practiced by Jews worldwide down to modern times.
Wikipedia says:
Thus, some scholars have begun to propose a model which envisions a twin birth of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, rather than an evolution and separation of Christianity from Rabbinic Judaism. It is increasingly accepted among scholars that "at the end of the 1st century CE there were not yet two separate religions called 'Judaism' and 'Christianity'".
So it is not really correct to say that Jesus was a Jew, and that Christianity developed from Judaism. It is more accurate to say that Judaism is a religion based on rejecting Christ.

Orthodox Jews do not necessarily agree with any of this, and are not necessarily so anti-Christian. They claim their religion goes back to Moses and Abraham.

6 comments:

Vatsmith said...

Easter certainly is a pagan holiday in my house!

Roger said...

That's great! All these holidays are fun, even if you are not a believer.

CFT said...

Um Roger,
The Jews and their religious beliefs go way back before the elite ruling classes of Sadducees and Pharisees and predate Christianity by quite a measure (thousands of years). You don't have to like it, or even feel comfortable with the fact, but don't gaslight the history please.

You can have whatever beef with Judaism you like, I can't dictate your feelings to you, it would be silly to try, but I can call you out when you are spouting gobble-de-gook. I would also add that if Jesus had run around Nazareth spouting off he was 'God', he wouldn't have had the support he did from many Jews, and would have been lynched or stoned most likely long before Pontius Pilate ever caught wind of his name, as claiming to be god was treated as blasphemy in the time and place in which he lived. Jesus's own followers were actually quite uncertain of his exact relation to the divine, and early sects of Christianity reflect this. The holy trinity and its various highly ambiguous metaphorical interpretations were formulated centuries after Jesus and his disciples were long dead and were never a part of the original Christian doctrines.

If you want to play games of historical revelation, please be aware that what you call present day Christianity is no where near what Jesus had in mind, much less practiced. Jesus was outrageously anti-authoritarian for the time in which he lived, he openly mocked power and wealth as being the arbiter of truth, justice, or spiritual matters through his many parables (this contradiction of teachings vs. church practices nearly tore the Catholic Church apart many times throughout antiquity as various sects of priests began to question the Churches very outright materialism and earthly power-grubbing). Jesus's initial followers later founded many sects of Christianity which were quite definitively snuffed out (hunted down and murdered) by Roman Emperor Constantine, who wanted an incredibly authoritative monopolistic national religion which didn't tolerate anything including many of Jesus's own teachings if it remotely contradicted his own power politics. Constantine didn't get baptised until he was on his deathbed, and had his own wife and eldest son murdered. He wasn't a nice guy, or holy man, much less a practicing Christian by any stretch, he was actually far more into sol worship according to historical records. To Constantine, Christianity was merely a tool of power, a means to an purely material end, the last ditch preservation of the collapsing Roman Empire.

Easter itself is named after the ancient Germanic goddess Eostre, thus the fertility symbols of rabbits and eggs, and was mapped over like many such holidays by Christianity which desired to either co-opt or map over previous pagan beliefs. This is nothing historically new or scandalous, since every aspiring religion since the dawn of humanity has done much the same thing to consolidate their doctrines over competing beliefs and deities.

Yes, Easter is unique unto the fact it is based on the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, but no it was not initially practiced on the date it is now. You should also read up on the dates of pagan holidays, which were far more astronomically based than anything else concerning their timing.

If you want to nit-pick about the Jews and their heritage changing through the rabbinic traditions over thousands of years, go right ahead, but remember you then have to submit your own religion to the same scrutiny and considerations of spiritual purity, in which case you are most likely further from your religion's original spiritual foundations than the Orthodox Jews are from theirs.

Roger said...

Are you saying that Wikipedia and Britannica are wrong about Rabbinical Judaism?

I am no expert on the history of Judaism, but Christianity is quite different from Judaism, and always has been.

CFT said...

Roger,
To put it politely in french, Wikipedia is pleine de merde. Stop using it to demonstrate or prove anything, it's a piss poor source that says all kinds of ridiculous things, and is quite selectively edited to favor rather particular political positions almost exclusively. The very man who invented the damn thing (please don't believe me, research to confirm what I say) often speaks of how corrupted it has become, so from the horses mouth to your ears

I am saying much of what you call Christianity for the most part really isn't. It's the end product of a tyrant trying to prop up his dying empire using a small religion which gave its adherents great fortitude in resisting adversity and overcoming fear (a la the severe persecution of Christians in certain Roman entertainment venues).

Constantine corrupted much of the sayings of Jesus into a narrative which is designed to back up obedience to earthly ensconced power politics and endlessly obsess over an afterlife, which isn't even remotely what Jesus was talking about at all. Entering The kingdom of God/Heaven isn't about dying and going to heaven, it's about living on the earth in the parousia, which originally meant 'alongside the presence of God', You know, 'the fields of the lord' the earth being the kingdom under heaven's rule, 'all of creation', that's the world we actually live in, not some Greek Elyssian afterlife.
****

Saying the Jews are about 'denying Christ' is ridiculous, why should they advocate a religion that clearly isn't even theirs? Or even call a Jewish man god? You really need to see things outside your own perspective sometimes...not saying you need to agree with others, just see what their perspective is before you make such declaratives.

I also don't imagine you would be keen on singing the praises of how Joseph Smith and the Mormon Church are the successor to Christianity. The Mormons strongly believe the Book of Mormon supplants Christianity entirely, they only give lip service to the old and new testament as precursor holy books which the Book of Mormon acts as a New-New testament to. Are you going to frame yourself and your beliefs as 'Yes, My religion is all about denying Joseph Smith's divine translation of the golden plates er, (rather fake) books of Mormoni and his eventual ascension to heaven and the truth of how the Mormons will rule in heaven'... or are you going to roll your eyes and say, 'My beliefs simply do not revolve around you, please get stuffed'.

Roger said...

I suppose you could say that anyone who believes one religion rejects the others. But many Mormons consider themselves Christians, and most Christians do not care about Mormons. The conflict between Judaism and Christianity is far greater.