This year, Easter will mostly be on…
The thing I’ve never understood about Easter is it’s purportedly the celebration — if that’s the right word — of Jesus’ death/disappearance from behind a rock. Arguably to Christians, this event is far more important than his birth, because it symbolises everything he stood for as Righteous, even if it meant his own dangly end and never walking the Earth again.
Christmas day — probably the 2nd most important day in Christianity — is always the 25th December, despite evidence this is a wholly fictitious date; assuming the Bible isn’t itself a work of fiction, which is a tenuous assumption at best. So why does the most important date in Christianity’s calendar vary from year to year?
People who argue it’s not the date but the symbolism of the event that matters are perhaps missing the point. If that’s the case, why not base Jesus’ birth date celebration on a similar lunar pattern to his death? If the argument is that you can’t alter someone’s birthday because it’s a fixed date, then surely the same argument applies to someone’s death?
I know I’m going on a limb here quoting the awful Wikipedia but let’s say for argument’s sake that many thousands of people have visited their ‘Easter’ page and have verified to the best of their knowledge the following statement is accurate:
Easter is observed on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox
My question is simple: what has the moon’s cycle to do with Christianity?
Christians believe a God created the earth, not the Big Bang theory which placed our planet at this particular astronomical location (I don’t necessarily subscribe to the Big Bang either, lock stock, but that’s another story). Christians also believe Noah was over 900 years old when he died, thus we — as a species — have devolved since those times, while everything around us has evolved. Both defy science and nature, yet Christians choose to base a huge part of their faith on lunar science.
Surely Jesus’ plight is about suffering and sacrifice, not to be linked with some paganistic ritual based on planetary alignment. Christians should get their ducks in a line and either:
- make the whole faith about symbolism
- pick dates and stick to them
- give up trying to believe in something that makes very little sense if viewed rationally without the Biblinkers on
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2 muppets scribbled here
‘My question is simple: what has the moon’s cycle to do with Christianity?’
The date for Easter is less about the moon than it is about the sun; it’s the vernal equinox which is key.
Like you, C.S. Lewis also had a thing about Christianity and our solar system. He said,
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
ie, it’s not mere lunacy (ahem).
Thanks for the clarification. I still don’t “get it”, i.e why birth is celebrated on a set date and death is different every year, but there are plenty of other things I don’t understand in this world. Such as why Showaddywaddy were ever popular.
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