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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Another appropriated holiday.  Samhain is a very sacred holiday in my faith.  It’s the day the veil is at its thinnest.  We communicate with and honor our deceased ancestors. Costumes were meant to help the living blend in with the dead. We carve Jack-o-lanterns to scare away any unwanted guests.  It is our most important festival.  I love that we celebrate Halloween in the US.  But I hate how evangelical Christians pretend it isn’t a pagan/Wiccan holiday.  Same with Yule (Christmas). Same with Ostara (Easter).  All the so-called “Christian” holidays were appropriated.

If you attend a church that celebrates Samhain (Halloween), your church is 10O% hypocritical.  It is a pagan holiday. [/quote]

Easter was originally a Roman fertility rite that included sacrifices too. [/quote]

Nope. Easter started during Passover. The Last Supper was a Passover meal and the supper and Jesus’ death occurred when Jerusalem was clogged with people celebrating Passover. This is Christianity 101.[/quote]

Oh, really?  What is the origin of the word "Easter"?  And the rabbits and eggs as symbols?

It's more complicated than your curt "nope" implies.  Like many religious holidays (such as Christmas), it's origins are tied to seasonal changes, solstices and equinoxes.[/quote]

Yes really, the Last Supper was a Passover meal. This is scriptural (it’s in the New Testament) and it’s really fundamental. Why would you claim that it’s not part of Passover?

The eggs may have come from Passover. Regardless, eggs and bunnies are not part of liturgy or scripture.

What role do eggs and bunnies play in Wicca? Are you saying that Wicca has a monopoly on using eggs and bunnies, and Jews shouldn’t be using eggs at Passover either?[/quote]

Of course it was a passover meal.  That was not in question and I am not sure why you imply it was.

The point is that passover and easter are both appropriated equinox holidays, and easter still uses the equinox and lunar cycle to calculate it's date, just as the pagans did when they invented it.  The pagan celebrations were already happening, so the religious leaders appropriated them for celebrating the biblical stories of Jesus' resurrection and the time God killed a whole bunch of children but not certain ones.

It was a originally festival celebrating spring planting and reproduction, hence eggs and bunnies, neither of which have anything to do with Christianity or Judaism.  And the name comes from the goddess Eostre.  This all pre-dates Christianity.

Jeez I really thought most adults knew this.[/quote]

Did you ignore everything on the previous page? Here, reposting the gist for you.

It makes no sense to argue about the English word, because nobody was speaking English for centuries after the crucifixion. To spell it out: the English word couldn’t have had anything to do with establishing the timing of the festival in the ancient world (Passover did). For the first few centuries of Christianity, it was called Pascha (Passover) in Latin and Greek, and Paques in French. After that, there’s good consensus (except among pagans and atheists) that the English word Easter came to us first from the Latin designation of Easter week as in albis (plural of alba or dawn) which was translated into old high German as Eostarum (also “dawn”).

Your turn. You’ve already been asked to explain why pagans have a monopoly on bunnies and eggs. What specific pagan traditions involving bunnies and eggs have been transmitted from pagan times in antiquity to the more modern version of paganism? While you’re at it, could you please explain the Wicca goat. TIA.

[img]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Horned_God.JPG/1280px-Horned_God.JPG[/img][/quote]

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