It’s Easter, again and every Easter I think I’m going to write something mostly banal about the true meaning of the holiday: bunnies laying colorful hard-boiled eggs, and woven baskets filled with chocolate and caramel candies. Somehow, we’ve mixed a pagan celebration with a distinctive sacred event for many. As far as I can tell, the church never tried to ban the spring renewal celebration (eggs) and just adopted it as part of Christian renewal. The church did the same in Mexico with The Day of the Dead, the day after Halloween. They folded in a cultural tradition with church ritual. Well, that pretty much covers it. Bye.

Is Easter actually a pagan celebration appropriated by Christians? There’s a lot of debate about that idea,  but there’s an undeniable fact that just as the Christmas holiday is clearly expropriated from the pagan winter solstice celebrations, it does make sense that the same would occur in the spring, which was a time of renewal for ancient peoples. The celebration of the renewal of a god, may have been a way to move the populace away from their spring fertility feasts, to the more sardonic dead man rising from the grave worship.

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Is the Easter story true? Think about it for a moment because it’s the basis of a religion that claims 1.8 billion adherents around the world.  Of course all we have to base the claim upon  are stories written by unknown authors, long after the supposed event occurred. Yet for two millennia, people have recited this story as fact. What should any of us  take from this?  Should it be that we accept the story as true simply because it has survived for so long or may we question it, because those that wrote about it were not actual witnesses?

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