To still not understand Easter?

[Kayano]

I was raised a catholic and attended catholic school.
I got an A* in my RS GCSE because I had been bashed round the head with a bible for many years not because I tried

But although I get Easter. Crucifixtion, raised from the dead three days later...

Why does it MOVE?!

I'm sure I know this but now I am an adult and have finally said you know what? Bull I still don't understand why the date changes.

I mean. Jesus was born on one day (Christmas... Supposedly) 25th Dec

Presumably he died one day too... Why does it not stay the same date then? Jesus died this day... Blah blah april... Jesus last year might have died this day march... Blah blah

? Can someone explain it to me

There are plenty of people who believe Mary remained a virgin all her life, and some people also believe Mary was conceived without her parents having sex (though they'd had sex previously - they thought they were barren). There are shedloads of traditions and there's not a lot of point trying to untangle them.

The cult of St. Anne is mostly quite late. Her story is first told in the Book of James, which is second century and which is apocryphal (ie., it never made it into the 'Bible proper'). In the High and Late Middle Ages she became immensely popular, partly because she was thought to have played all the main roles open to women - saint, mother, wife, widow, and chaste vowess. People thought she had three daughters by her three husbands (Mary the Virgin, Mary Cleopas and Mary Salome), and the children of the other two Maries were the apostles, Jesus's cousins. Anne is also a symbol of motherly education - she was always shown teaching her daughter to read, which symbolically means, teaching Mary to prepare for the Word, Christ.

FWIW, 'annunciation' means 'announcement'. The annunciation to the Virgin is when Gabriel told Mary she was to be the mother of Jesus; the annunciation to the Shepherds is when he told the shepherds to go visit the baby Jesus. Same word.

Doomcats, are you seriously suggesting that it's acceptable for adults to believe that people can have children through some sort of virginal supernatural occurrence?! That's the stuff of serious delusion, not quaint tradition. Requires MH attention, not protecting under the guise of tradition, IMO.

Christian Easter is all about celebrating horrible torture and death then someone becoming a zombie afterwards. Odd, odd stuff. No wonder they thought it best to tack it onto all the fun Pagan stuff!

Actually, Scorpette, Christian Easter is about celebrating altruism to the point of self-sacrifice, and total resurrection. No Christian believes that the actual method of Jesus's death was good, or moral. No Christian believes that Jesus came back 'undead'. Just because you don't believe that resurrection is possible, it does not mean that is what Christians believe.

I say this as an atheist, by the way.

Many people do still believe that though Scorpette - or at least at some level part of them does. It would be part of the catechism which a generation or two back we'd all have learnt by heart, and many people still recite the creed regularly which contains all this stuff - virgin birth, resurrection etc. etc.

So, having trained as a psychiatric nurse myself, I do actually think you're wrong to say that believing any of it would be a mental health concern. It is very much part of our tradition and still part of many people's belief system.

Personally I don't really take these things literally anymore, though I do find some value in the Christian tradition.

scorpette - I don't quite get you. As you can see from my post, I'm talking about what traditions people have believed in over time. Lots of these date back to times when people didn't necessarily know what we know today. That doesn't mean they were stupid, or cruel, or deluded - they just didn't have the background we do. I don't like the idea of mocking them for that.

If you're asking whether I personally would advocate anyone trying to believe things like virgin birth literally - no! I think we're past that. We know now that the word got a whole lot of mis-associations tethered to it, and we know that we don't need to attribute virginity to a woman in order to believe she is exemplary.

But that does not mean I like the idea of looking at people in the past and sneering. Such an attitude is pretty ignorant - can't you see, we will almost certainly look just as naive and deluded to someone else in 500 years time!

In the Christain faith, resurrection is not resuscitation.

Easter's about the triumph of life over death, not death itself. That would be weird, and most unChristian.

Btw - I feel very lucky, myself, to live in a time when we are getting such a sense of medicine can prevent death, even in some cases when parts of the body are beyond saving, through transplants and transfusions. I find that stunning and amazing.

I don't think 'oh, how disgusting, so-and-so has a liver in her that belonged to a dead man, now she is part zombie, ewww'.

Of course to us this looks very different from Christians' understanding of Jesus coming back from the dead, and we like to think we're far more rational and sane. But I bet you if you could transport a person from Jesus' time to now and show him a modern hospital, he would think it was a factory of unimaginable horrors.

It's not really possible to get into the mind of people from another time but it's really nasty and cheap to assume they couldn't have had good reason for their way of thinking.

Very interesting thread, I had no idea that there was a school of thought that considered Mary to have been the product of an immaculate conception. Although I don't really understand how this can be taught in the context of her mother not being a virgin and her father not being God but just her mother's husband. Surely, the whole point of the immaculate conception is virginity and God's holy spirit.

I know someone will point out it's just made up, but it's still interesting to ponder where such ideas come from.

On the original point of timing what I really don't understand is that here in Northern Ireland lots of people have to work Good Friday and instead have Easter Tuesday off. Considering we have what must be the highest density of practising Christians in the UK I find it quite odd, that the holiest day in the Christian calendar is ignored by some businesses (obviously I mean the ones thatwoulf normally close on bank holidays rather than hospitals, shops etc.)

@thefurryone you have missed the point. the immaculate conception has nothing to do with virginity. it is being conceived without original sin.

Not surprised I often do!

I think I'm just finding it very hard to understand why anyone would accept, or even consider that a married couple, that had normal marital relations, had a child without having sex .

It's probably because I've never really understood why sex is considered so sinful, surely if God went to all the trouble of creating the Earth, and humans it would then have been totally pointless if him to effectively ban procreation.

@thefurryone. That is the teaching of the virgin birth and the perpetual virginity of Mary.

the immaculate conception has v little to do with sex or lack of it.

I always create very good interesting threads

blows own trumpet of the apocalypse

Sashh, the idea of celebrating an event with a family meal is in most religions, very few have celebrations without food.

The dates for some festivals were made to link up with Pagan festivals, but in the case of Easter, it was made to link up with Passover, as Jesus died on the Friday before the Passover feast (it clearly states it was this feast in the gospels, so the time of year is quite clear). I find it very hard to believe that Western European Pagan traditions (that weren't consistant across Pre-Christian Europe) influenced the timing of a Jewish festival, Judaism being a mainly Middle Eastern religion.

I can believe that some of the 'trappings' the eggs, symbols of spring etc will have come from older religions, the idea that the date moves around to fit in with a Western European religion is at best, somewhat Euro-centric thinking, and rather insulting to Jewish people that their history isn't important. If you were to claim passover was replacing a Eygptian festival, I'd have more sympathy, what with the Passover being all about the Jews fleeing slavery in Eygpt.

thefurryone, the way I see it, Mary's virginity has nothing to do with any idea about sex being sinful either. The belief is that Jesus was both God and man, and therefore had one human parent - Mary - and one divine parent - the Holy Spirit (NB don't ask me to explain the Holy Trinity however!). For the certainty of Jesus's paternity, Mary had to be a virgin, otherwise people could claim that Joseph (or some other guy) was Jesus's "biological" father. It wasn't because it would be sinful for him to be conceived through sex.

Also, the belief is not that all sex is sinful, only that which takes place outside of wedlock, and if you are very literal, not for purposes of procreation.

Original sin, which Mary was supposedly free from, and which otherwise taints all humans, requiring baptism and belief in Christ to be rid of it, arises from Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit - which is often interpreted to be about them having sex, but it is the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and it's actually about disobedience and wanting to have the same level of knowledge/power as God.

In my first line above, I mean Mary's virginity when conceiving Christ. I'd never heard of the belief that she was perpetually a virgin after that until I came on this thread.

Scorpette - firstly, if you believe that God is an all powerful being with power over life and death, what's so hard in believing that God could make a woman be pregnant without sex? If a being can make the whole universe (although I differ from most creationalists in the 'how'), how hard can it be to make 1 person?

As for the celebrating death, it's actually celebrating the sacrifice, which is why Good Friday services tend to be rather sober affairs, but the Easter Sunday (Jesus rising from the dead) is the celebration. But mainly, the whole point of Christianity is this sacrifice - Jesus died to pay the price for our sins so if you want forgiveness, you can be forgiven and your 'punishment' has already been paid. (I was told in sunday school to think of it like a parking fine, Jesus is like someone coming along and offering to pay the fine for you, the fine still has to be paid, but you don't have to be the one to pay it). That's a wonderful thing to do, it took the barrier from God to man away.

Oh, and the whole 'sacrificing the lamb' that might have been something pagans did, but it also fits in with the Passover tradition - a lamb was slaughtered in a specific way and the blood marked on the doors of the Jewish homes, therefore the angel of death "passed over" their houses as the lamb had died for them. In Exodus (after the whole parting of the sea bit) there's really clear details of how Jews are to remember this, including sacrificing first born animals (although for donkeys they were allowed to sacrifice a lamb in it's place as donkeys are rather valuable - that fed into the comments about Jesus being a 'sacrificial lamb' as he died in our place). Remember the first Christians were Jews and would know all this.

Aaaand, harking back to the Pagan/Wicca thing (and then leaving well alone) I don't think there were "early Wiccans" as it is a fairly modern faith which took older traditions thought to be Pagan/Pre-Christian and formalised them. Here, for example.

My leanings, btw, would definitely be Pagan albeit less formal than modern Wicca.

What I really don't understand, though, is why Passover is affected by the phases of the moon when that was a celebration of the passing over by God of the first born boys when the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, wasn't it? So surely that was on a specific date too? Unless that too was grafted over something else? Zorastrianism? No idea if they have/had a Spring thing!

I'm sure a quick Google could clear that up so am just thinking/typing out loud.

Belle - because it is in the Jewish traditional calendar, same reason that Hannukkah moves each year too - although always over sabbaths.

belledamesansmerci when I said 'early Wiccans' I meant Gerald Gardner and his peers, not that Wicca was some kind of ancient religion. As a Wiccan myself I'm well aware exactly how old my religion is. Apologies if my original post was unclear in that respect.

Mary was the 'Immaculate conception', but that doesn't mean she was conceived without sex being involved. Jesus was the only Virgin Birth.

The Immaculate Conception refers to the concept that Mary was the only human (including Jesus) who was born without the stain of original sin, and was therefore incapable of committing sin. But she was conceived the regular way.

Not that I believe any of this, because I'm an atheist, but let's get it right!

Thisisanickname I used this site for my cubs last night. thought it was a great simple answer!

Rhinos you are obviously unaware that the author of that 'bollocks' has also been a pagan all his life, as has Ronald Hutton.

I'm unsure how being a pagan all your life makes you any less likely to spout bollocks than someone else who has also been a pagan all their life.

If anyone is interested in a summation of the Pagan Wheel of the Year and the historical evidence for it, there is a very brief essay with links here