Oh..I just noticed that tomorrow is Easter.. we don't feel the necessity to 'celebrate' that particular day here, as we celebrate Christ's resurrection every day of our lives. I fail to see what chocolate bunnies and colored eggs have to do with it anyway.
Speaking of colored eggs.. hemmm I'm guilty of doing that very thing and wish I could get the egg dyes all year round. I love to color them and one can tell which eggs are the hard boiled ones when they are colorful. One year I bought enough egg dyes, after the Easter season was over, to last me a year.. but I misplaced or lost them all.. sigh........ I never did that again. I know I can use other things for dyes, but I like the ones you buy around Easter.. one tablet and little mess.
I do have fond memories as a child with Easter traditions.. we all had our Easter baskets.. colored eggs, chocolate bunnies..simple and fun. And we got a new dress for Sunday, new shoes, and went to church as usual. There always seems to be an unusual amount of visitors in church on Easter.. so I suppose that in itself is a good thing. It gets people into the church to hear the gospel message..
I remember a few years back when I worked in the hospital that one of the nurse aides told me that she HAD to be in church on Easter with her children. I thought that commendable until I heard her reasoning.. The children were not to eat anything in their baskets until the pastor 'blessed the chocolate bunnies, eggs, toys, and sometimes live animals'. YIKE! Once that was accomplished, they would leave and go home.. no worship, no gospel.. oh, my....
Like Christmas, Easter is overly commercialized and there is no connection to Christianity that I can see in stores.. unless you count chocolate crosses which I find distressing. It seems to have become what it started out as.. a pagan holiday.
I know Easter LOOKS like a Christian holiday, as Christ's resurrection seems to be the central theme for Christians, it's origin certainly has a dark side. It's not mentioned in scripture except in the King James version which was a flagrant mistranslation from the Hebrew or Greek. The word should read "Passover", and had NOTHING to do with present tradition.
Ask yourself where the customs and traditions of Easter come from. How do bunny rabbits, colored eggs, hot-cross buns, baskets, hats, new clothes, sunrise worship services, lilies, and all the other Easter traditions glorify Jesus . Who told you to do these things?
Easter has it's roots in ancient polytheistic religions and is well documented in history books and reference materials.
The word ‘Easter’ is derived from the name of a goddess, the dawn-goddess, the spring-deity, the goddess of fertility. This dawn-goddess was also well known as the Assyrian Ishtar, goddess of the morning.
Many cultures celebrated the coming of spring as an integral part of the worship of their gods or goddesses, particularly those associated with fertility. Bunnies and eggs were common symbols of fertility, and fertility was key to surviving in the agricultural community.
By the way, according to one source, the ancient Assyrians pronounced Ishtar the same way we pronounce Easter today.
In scripture, back at the time of the Tower of Babel, Nimrod was said, in Genesis 10, to have founded a 'mystery religion'. When he died, his wife was determined to keep his religion alive, and pronounced Nimrod as a 'sun god'. Later on, his wife gave birth to an illegitimate son she named Tammuz whom, she claimed, was Nimrod reborn. She named herself 'Queen of Heaven'.
Tammuz died at age 40 and was claimed to be resurrected each spring.
"It seems that anciently Ishtar and Tammuz were both involved in a mythological death and resurrection cycle—one as the moon-goddess of spring and fertility, the other as the sun-god messiah figure—making them perfect forerunners of the modern Easter tradition. According to Coulter, sunrise services originated with the Babylonian priesthood to symbolically hasten the resurrection of both. "
"Historically, laments were held for the departed Tammuz for forty days—a day for each year of his life. The period ended, of course, in the early spring at his “resurrection.” Hislop writes: “The forty days [of] abstinence of Lent was directly borrowed from the worshippers of the Babylonian goddess [Ishtar].” Is it a mere coincidence that Orthodox Christendom today practices a peculiarly similar custom—Lent’s forty days of mourning and abstinence leading up to Easter?"
The church at Rome tried to get as many pagans into the church as they could, and in doing so, merged their pagan beliefs into Christianity, and the result is what we have today,a convergence of various heathen traditions applied to Jesus’ death and resurrection.
"Virtually all scholars agree that Asherah is none other than Astarte—also known as the “queen of heaven.” Notice Jeremiah 7:18: “The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings to other gods, that they may provoke Me to anger.”
Verse 10 calls the practice an “abomination.” The Jamieson Fausset & Brown Bible Commentary has this to say about Jeremiah 7:18: “Cakes were made of honey, fine flour, etc., in a round flat shape to resemble the disc of the moon, to which they were offered…. The Phoenicians called the moon Ashtoreth or Astarte: the wife of Baal or Moloch, the king of heaven. The male and female pair of deities symbolized the generative powers of nature….”
These are our "hot cross buns", or boun as it was called, with the round shape and cross on top, and was the symbol of the Babylonian sun diety.“And He said to me, ‘Turn again, and you will see greater abominations that they are doing.’ So He brought me to the door of the north gate of the LORD’S house; and to my dismay, women were sitting there weeping for Tammuz”—the false messianic figure who dies and is resurrected every spring!—“Then He said to me, ‘Have you seen this, O son of man? Turn again, you will see greater abominations than these.’ So He brought me into the inner court of the LORD’S house; and there, at the door of the temple of the LORD, between the porch and the altar, were about twenty-five men with their backs toward the temple of the LORD and their faces toward the east, and they were worshiping the [rising] sun toward the east. And He said to me, ‘Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it a trivial thing to the house of Judah to commit the abominations which they commit here?’ ” (Ezek. 8:13-17).
“Do not learn the way of the Gentiles….” (Jer. 10:2)—do not even mention the name of their gods! (see Ex. 23:13). The apostle Paul wrote: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and lawlessness have in common? And what fellowship does light have with darkness? And what union does Christ have with Belial? Or what part does a believer have with an unbeliever? And what agreement is there between a temple of God and idols? For you are a temple of the living God, exactly as God said: ‘I will dwell in them and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.’ Therefore, ‘Come out from the midst of them and be separate,’ says the Lord, ‘and touch not the unclean, and I will receive you’ ” (II Cor. 6:14-17)."
Are we being deceived? Think about it.
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