Question about Easter

[lionroar0]

Here you go; fascinating for those who want to learn

Here is some actual historic evidence.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05228a.htm

Peace

 

[lionroar0]

http://www.lasttrumpetministries.org/tracts/tract4.html

In essence, the Mass is the ceremonial slaying of Jesus Christ over and over again, followed by the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood.

Like I have stated before in a previous post. This myth about easter being pagan is an anti-catholic myth and promoted by anti-catholics for now hundreds of years.

Peace

 

[icedtea]

Well, I'm not going to stop believing it.

 

[lionroar0]

Well, I'm not going to stop believing it.

Is that guy a historian. No. Is that guy versed in babylonian religion. No

Does he know hsitorically what he is talking about? no

Does he have alot of unsubstanciated opinons not based on facts. yes.

Just presenting the evidence.

Peace

 

[Oblio]

But I'm like 98% sure that it's because it follows the Jewish Lunar calendar so that easter conincides with passover.

Yep, the feast follows passover. If one calls Easter pagan for this reason, then by necessity they are also ascribing paganism to passover.

 

[S Walch]

I'd rather celebrate Passover (the day our Messiah died for our sins), unleavened bread (the saturday when He was punished for our sins), Firstfruits (the day the Messiah was ressurected, as well as several others (see Matthew 27:52-53), Pentecost (the day the Disciples were immersed in the Set-apart Spirit), Trumpets, Atonement (that's today! ) and the Festival of Tabernacles.

All were instituted by Yahuweh as well. I'd rather follow Him.

 

[Hairy Tic]

We are to worship the creator, not creation. The sun was created.

## We know that. All things but God are created. That's why we - & Anglicans, & others - begin the Creed with:

• I believe in God the Father Almighty
  Creator of Heaven and earth
  And of all things, visible and invisible;
  And in Jesus Christ
  His Only Son Our Lord
  God from God
  Light from Light
  Begotten, not made;
  He was conceived by the Holy Ghost
  From the Virgin Mary
  And was made man....

...and so on.

Actually, I've run the Apostles' Creed into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed - but you get the idea.

For something non-liturgical yet official, try this, from the 1968 "Creed of the People of God" of Pope Paul VI:

PROFESSION OF FAITH​

8. We believe in one only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, creator of things visible such as this world in which our transient life passes, of things invisible such as the pure spirits which are also called angels,(3) and creator in each man of his spiritual and immortal soul.

For the whole thing, go here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/p...s/hf_p-vi_motu-proprio_19680630_credo_en.html​

Sections 8 to 13 show what the Catholic doctrine is concerning God.

IOW - we do not adore the sun, nor the stars, nor the heavens above, nor the earth beneath, nor the seas, nor anything that is or has been or shall be or might be in the heaven, the earth, the seas, or under the earth, or in part of creation. We adore neither angels nor saints nor any created thing whatever - but God the Blessed Trinity, alone, Who is Father, Son, & Holy Spirit.​

IOW, Catholics are monotheists. And because we are monotheists, we offer sacrifice to God alone. If we thought the sun were a god (which is an absurd idea) we would offer the Mass to the sun. But we do not, cannot, & will not. Therefore, it is impossible that we should even dream that it is a god. God is able to receive the sacrifice of the Mass - but nobody & nothing else, because there is only One God.​

Not long ago, on another forum, I managed to upset an Evangelical by insisting that the Bible was a created thing. I may have been too forceful - he thought I was belittling the Bible. I wasn't - but the Bible, though certainly a great gift from God, is not fit to be treated as anything but a created thing. Only God is to be given total, unreserved, adoration & love - this is why I for one am a Catholic & not a Calvinist: ISTM that they give Scripture the unreserved respect of which God alone is worthy. Maybe their veneration for the Bible is equivalent to ours from the Mother of God: both the Bible & the BVM are the supreme created symbols, next after, & for the sake of, Christ, in the respective forms of Christian faith.

The Babylonians & Assyrians, OTOH, did worship the sun as a god, the god Shamash. The Assyrians offered him rams in sacrifice, and read the innards of the sacrifices so as to divine from from them what his will was on particular issues. Many of these divinatory messages have survived - about 300 have been translated into English. He was regarded as a god of oracles (reasonably enough) and is best known as a god of justice - again, by a very natural connection of ideas between the all-seeing sun and the acts of men. A well-known hymn to Shamash - which is about a thousand years older than divinatory messages from Assyria, which date to 700 BC & after - preserved nearly complete, can be found here: http://www.angelfire.com/tx/gatestobabylon/uthymn.html

Catholics do not worship the sun, offer rams or any other creatures in sacrifice, read their innards, consult oracles, or do any such things. Nor do we have any temples to the sun, as Shamash had, in both Babylonia & Assyria. Nor do we think of the sun as having a father, mother, wife, household, servants, weapons, or suchlike. In fact, it's difficult to think of anything that Catholicism has in common with the worship of Shamash at all - even if one includes his Sumerian counterpart Utu. No, I don't think we worship the sun - only "the Sun of righteousness", of Whom the Prophet Malachi speaks, in the OT book that bears his name. ##​

 

[Hairy Tic]

This is false relationship. This does not account for others who do not use the word "easter."

In Spanish it is Pascua.

## No it's not - the statement that "Semiramis became known as "Ishtar" which is pronounced "Easter", and her moon egg became known as "Ishtar's" egg" is completely false: it is not even vaguely accurate. None of it is correct; it is wrong from "Semiramis" to "egg".

If only because Semiramis is a composite character made up out of a goddess, and two Assyrian queens who lived about 120 years apart. Add Hislop's contribution, & Semiramis becomes even more of a patchwork. Nor was either of those two queens deified.

Ishtar had nothing to do with the moon - except in so far as her father the god Suen was the moon-god. ##

 

[Hairy Tic]

Is that guy a historian. No. Is that guy versed in babylonian religion. No

Does he know hsitorically what he is talking about? no

Does he have alot of unsubstanciated opinons not based on facts. yes.

Just presenting the evidence.

Peace

## OTOH, There are plenty of books on the history & religion of Sumer, Babylonia & Assyria - & although many are written for specialists (as one might expect), plenty are not.

If people would only have the intellectual curiosity to study Sumerian, Babylonian & Assyrian history & religion for their own sake, instead of trusting a badly out-dated & wildly inaccurate 19th-century polemic against Catholicism, they might be surprised to find just how fascinating those three cultures are. ##

 

[Hairy Tic]

And that is fine. I'm just saying the date picked for easter is obviously pagan. The first Sunday after the first full monn after the equinox?
I'm just suggesting remembering that day isn't the exact right day, and its not about bunnies, or ham, or eggs.

## I for one have never heard of ham being related to Easter, till today. I always took for granted that Easter was something to do with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ; was, in fact, meaningless without it. It's not us Catholics or Anglicans or Orthodox or Lutherans who need to be told that Easter is about the Resurrection: it's the people who insist we worship non-existent Babylonian goddesses.

As for the paganism - anything is pagan if one sees it so. Literacy & accounting & mathematics & the calendar & farming weren't invented by Christians. Nor was the wheel-barrow. They were invented by the Sumerians, the Egyptians, & the Chinese, pagans all. Maybe capitalism - which relies on the Sumerian inventions of accounting & literacy - is pagan, & had better stop. Roman paganism came up with the Senate and the Capitol - abolish it. To cut a long story short, if everything of pagan origin were subtracted from society, there would be no doctors, veterinarians, accountants, judges, laws, literacy, weapons, ships, farming, mathematics, alphabets, weights & measures, clothing, wine, singing, prayers, Psalms, confessions of sin, or a thousand more things that some Christians with an eye for paganism in Christianity take for granted. Chocolate ? that's from the Aztecs - Christians had better not eat it, in case they feel an irresistible urge to go to war in order to capture victims to sacrifice to the sun-god. Gold ? There's a shipload of the stuff in the tomb of the Pharaoh Tut-ankh-amun - so gold is also forbidden; otherwise Christians might feel the urge to worship the sun-god Re.

Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming, a Catholic - maybe Evangelicals had better avoid using it: they might be infected with Romanism otherwise. That's daft, obviously - but no more daft than the idea that Christians are going to be infected with paganism because they keep a feast the date of which is determined by calculations which, in part, were pre-Christian & pagan.

It is Jews - not Catholics - who since the sixth century BC have had a month named Tammuz; it is Presbyterians who insist on election & predestination, two doctrines very important for the royal theology of Babylonia. Was St.Paul preaching paganism by teaching them ? If one is to accept some people's reasoning & ideas, he must have been.

People who condemn the feast kept by the various Christian Churches because of the Easter bunny or hot cross buns or eggs, are like people who condemn the Church's faith in the reality of the human nature of Jesus Christ because of Macy's or Walmart.

The Churches are not responsible for the commercialisation & materialism of people who think that feasts commemorating the great acts of God in Christ are an excuse to get drunk. One might as well blame St. Paul for preaching the Gospel of Grace, on the grounds that there are those who turn grace into wantonness, debauchery, & gluttony.

No one - no Catholic, anyway - is condoning paganism; but too many Evangelicals use the word without defining it. They talk at length of "Babylonian paganism" - but they give no evidence that they would know the difference between an arnabu & a nunu. (Those are the Akkadian words for "rabbit" & "fish" BTW) Much less between a baru-priest & a lamassu. Those of us who do know something abut this subject, may be forgiven for being distinctly unimpressed.

Of course, if they want to persevere in the idea that Catholics:

• name their children after their personal gods;
  inspect the innards of rams for omens;
  divine the purposes of the gods by the appearance of the heavens;
  have their dreams interpreted for the same purpose;
  float those accused of crimes in rivers, so that the river-god may judge the accused;
  present offerings of food & drink before statues of the gods;
  call upon the services of exorcists when they are sick, so that the demon bringing the sickness may be driven away
  believe in gods with
  - associated beasts (such as the lion-dragon of Ishkur, the Sumerian wind-god);
  - heralds
  - messengers
  - parents
  - sons & daughters
  - spouses
  - barbers;
  - weapons;
  - clothing;
  - houses;
  - & much more;

- if they want to believe that these are practices or beliefs of Catholics, so be it. All these things, & many more, are features of the religions of Ancient Iraq (&, in part, of the religion of Israel as described in the OT) - but they are not Catholic.

I hope the tone of this is not harsh ##

 

[tall73]

I'd rather celebrate Passover (the day our Messiah died for our sins), unleavened bread (the saturday when He was punished for our sins), Firstfruits (the day the Messiah was ressurected, as well as several others (see Matthew 27:52-53), Pentecost (the day the Disciples were immersed in the Set-apart Spirit), Trumpets, Atonement (that's today! ) and the Festival of Tabernacles.

All were instituted by Yahuweh as well. I'd rather follow Him.

If the goal is to follow the passover dating that would certainly do it.