Jesus held on the cross with nails in his hands

[TaFox]

DD5 is in year 1 and has been learning about Jesus at school. Great stuff in the spirit of Easter.

The RE teacher told the class how Jesus was NAILED to the cross.

This is quite graphic for a little girl who believes that the Easter bunny will leave eggs in our garden.

Should I tell school that this is too much info for little ears?

German ‘Ostern’

Most children love the gory bits of any story, it's the parents who don't realise this! Even a magical day out, most memorable thing is usually who was sick on the bus back!
I recall being very puzzled about how the baby at Christmas was crucified there months later.

So they haven’t gone into the floggings and beatings he took?

The whole thing about Jesus dying at Easter in the Christian religion is that he suffered and died for his people, it’s all about his sacrifices.

My DDs go to a catholic school, I attended a school mass yesterday that the whole school attended and my DDs often talk about RE. Schools (at least my DDs) these days are a lot more careful in their wordings and how they get their story across but they can’t frilly everything up.

We had to watch a graphic film every year at Easter, do the Stations of the Cross, learn all about it and all the graphic ways the martyrs died. We weren't traumatised. They just felt like stories, even though we knew they were real. I think kids' brains don't make the same connections we do about the brutality and reality of it all.

Happy spring equinox, because that is happening right now. Druids, witches and pagans have been celebrating the balance of the day and night today.

Easter happens at a different date each year because it is calculated by putting it at the first weekend after the spring equinox and full moon, which is in 4 days. So Easter is next weekend, because of the pagan calendar of sabbats.

Pagans honour birth, death and rebirth, female creative power.

Christians are obsessed with malecentric everything, torture, death and mourning. It is front and centre of the whole relogion.

I think the horror of it is a key plank of Christianity: here is a man who agreed to be tortured and humiliated to redeem your sins. He gave up his life so you can go to heaven. The torture is an intrinsic part of the story. The shocking gruesomeness can’t be evacuated from it without losing the potency of the symbol.

Easter is technically not about a story of a bloke being murdered on a cross. It’s not the ‘true’ meaning of Easter at all. It’s the Christian take on it.

Easter was appropriated by Christianity from the pagan Anglo-Saxon springtime festival ‘Ostara’ which was all about celebrating the spring equinox, the arrival of new life and ‘resurrection’ happening in nature.

OP @TaFox i don’t think yabu. It’s not really an appropriate story for children when you really stop to think about it more deeply than ‘well I was told the story and I survived’.

It's the whole foundation of Christian guilt!

"Easter was a pagan festival taken over for indoctrination" misses the detail that religions absorbing elements of other beliefs is hardly limited to Christianity. The Romans had plenty of temples and blended or rebranded deities on other pagan sites. Other pagan peoples did the same.

The Easter Bunny and the eggs stuff has been stolen from pagan Ostara, along with all the good parts of Christmas.

Well he was nailed to it. Kids at my church and in church schools don't seem particularly bothered by the sight of a crucifix.

Oh, lucky them!

Love it!

Since when is a 5yr old attending school a toddler?

I remember as a child it being taught as tied to a cross- there were pictures of white cloths around Jesus wrists and ankles. No need to introduce the nails until a bit later IMO

I see you are being facetious but I think this parent did absolutely the right thing. Not at all appropriate for such young children. We should question weird macabre shit like this. Just because it’s been told for years doesn’t make it right.

If you had sent her to a Catholic school I would have said you were asking for it. But if it is just your local primary school (even if it is a CofE school) I agree with you and I think that is too much information for a 6 year old. There’s time enough to learn about all the horrible things human beings do to each other.

I’m with letting he focus on the bunnies and the eggs for a while longer. I believe that children who learn about love and joy first bring empathy to the terrible stuff they inevitably discover. Brutality lessons come soon enough.

School is wrong. You are right.

Mine wanted to know why Baby Jesus was a woman (long hair, no longer a baby). I had to explain that several years had passed between Baby Jesus being born at Christmas and Adult Jesus dying at Easter, the events in the Bible didn’t all take place over a very busy three month period.

He also asked if Jesus really came back to life again three days later, I said probably not, and he said “I knew it! I knew that was so sus!”

Even if it’s not a Christian or religious school. RE is still taught…..

Contrary to what many people here seem to think, Easter wasn't originally a Christian festival at all. The very word 'Easter' sort of gives the game away: it derives from 'Eostre', a pre-Christian pagan goddess.

Or you might think about how the date of Easter is (still) decided: spring equinox ... full moon ... weekend? To do with seasons and the lunar calendar, not really anything to do with good ol' Jesus or the nails.

Of course, like other festivals (why is Christmas at the winter solstice?), early Christians simply tagged their feasts on to already existing ones, mostly celebrating important times of year, planting, or harvest time, whatever.

Christianity is just another religion, nothing really special about it. Just a different set of parochial myths. By all means teach children as part of history and societal origins, along with Jupiter, Huitzilopochtli, perhaps, other gods from elsewhere and elsewhen. (Don't think of trying to teach all religions, as a pp said: there's far too many!) Try not to take it too seriously with them, though. That isn't fair.

Frankly if you find that bit too horrifying, wait until you hear about transubstantiation.

The conversation about where the nails went reminded me I had this on my phone 😂

Grow up. I’m not religious but went to a catholic primary. Jesus was born at Christmas (are you ignoring that too?) and died at Easter for all our sins sinplified in the betrayal by Judas. Nailed to the cross at Friday, resurrected on the Sunday. For catholics easter Sunday is bigger than Christmas Eve. We knew this as kids and quite honestly it doesn’t harm children to know some of the more gruesome bits behind their customs. Btw the bunnies you refer to are a Roman fertility ritual and giving Easter eggs as gift was originally a gift to wish fertility on the receiver. Not kid friendly either. You probably mean. Well shielding your child from gory bits of the world but you do them no favour.

Saw that series too. He was wonderful in it. The piercing eyes are what stand out.

OP, I seem to be massively flying in the face of MN opinion on this one (I'm sort of surprised how your poll went) but yes FFS of COURSE it's far too graphic for a year 1 schoolchild!! Bloody hell. Would you want them to read, outside of a religious context, something of that nature at that age? To see something on a screen that even hinted at that sort of gory violence? The people who say 'well I went to church and I knew this from 3' - there are shitloads of people like you who went to church and had this dinned into them as children who are really fucked up as a result. It's nothing to boast about, and I feel sorry for your childhood religious experience.

There are age-appropriate ways of explaining the Easter Story. I thought hardly any CofE schools went into that sort of detail at that age any more. When my own son was at our village CofE primary, he says (retrospectively) that the actual execution was so glossed over that when they, years later, covered the story of Doubting Thomas, and the holes in Jesus' hands were discussed, he thought 'Jesus has HOLES in his HANDS?! Bloody hell, what happened there?' and was quite disturbed.

Sure, Easter is about Jesus and sacrifice AS WELL as about bunnies and chocolate (things change, and it's disingenuous to say to anyone connecting Easter with chocolate and eggs 'well that's not what the meaning of Easter is'. Also annoyingly smug). But you don't go into gory unnecessary detail, particularly in a school where not all the children come from Christian families, and even then I think it's pretty awful.