They found the body.

You usually save that old chestnut for Good Friday, Dave!

Michelle Shocked, 1989:

GOD IS A REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER

IRONY! She was born into & raised Mormon / lds!!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2021 01:08AM by GNPE.

Let's eat!

donbagley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Let's eat!

A very old, inside-the-tribe, Jewish joke:

"They tried to kill us...We survived...Let's eat!!"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2021 04:55PM by Tevai.

So what am I supposed to do with all these eggs?

There is one for Christmas too.
“Christmas has been canceled this year...Mary confessed.”

Geez. I hadn't even gotten my Authentic Crown of Thorns from the Holy Land out of the box yet.


Yes, I do actually have one. Yes it actually does hurt when you put it on.

Well, then, Done & Done, don't put in on!

Every year, Dave, I fall for that, every year! Doh!

Breeze Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Well, then, Done & Done, don't put in on!
>
> Every year, Dave, I fall for that, every year!
> Doh!
It’s written correctly this way: D’oh!

you omitted the apostrophe

Enjoy!

https://weheartit.com/StillHotMess/collections/178945362-trains-and-tracks?page=2&before=353522494

Looking through the logs, 2012 is the only year since the new board software was installed that you haven't posted this identical bad joke.

Dave the Atheist 04/22/2011 --- Easter has been cancelled.
Dave the Atheist 03/31/2013 --- Re: I find it mind-boggling that Easter still exists
Dave the Atheist 04/12/2014 --- Easter has been cancelled ...
Dave the Atheist 04/05/2015 --- Easter has been cancelled
Dave the Atheist 03/09/2016 --- Easter has been cancelled
Dave the Atheist 04/13/2017 --- Easter has been cancelled.
Dave the Atheist 03/24/2018 --- Easter has been cancelled
Dave the Atheist 04/07/2019 --- Easter has been cancelled
Dave the Atheist 04/07/2020 --- Easter has been cancelled
Dave the Atheist 03/29/2021 --- Easter has been cancelled



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2021 04:14PM by Concrete Zipper.

I believe I beat him a few years ago, though. It was part in fun, also to make the serious point that even Paul acknowledged, "If Christ be not risen, our faith is in vain, and we are the more to be pitied." More than Christmas, Easter is the fulcrum of Christianity, attracting the wisecracking of scoffers, the ire of skeptics, and persecution from Islamists. Already, there have been church bombings, starting in Indonesia.

In 2012 I was busy fighting the ice age.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDc2ODg2NDM4NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjcyOTIwNQ@@._V1_UY1200_CR112,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg

DtA:

Did U have a Zamboni available?

``````````\|||/
``````````(0 o)
|--ooO-----(0)---------------|
|-------DaveTheAtheist--------|
|-------------is-not----------|
|--------2-B-trusted----------|
|-------------Ooo-----------|
````````|__|__|
````````||``||
```````ooO Ooo

Mine definitely has been for the second year in a row

Lethbridge Reprobate Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Mine definitely has been for the second year in a
> row

I am sorry, Ron.

Video chats with my grandchildren are great but nothing like being with them. Soon...I hope.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/30/2021 09:35PM by Lethbridge Reprobate.

My family is still debating if we celebrate Eastover on Sat or Sun. Pizza is the main dish. Hopefully not made with a matzo meal crust.

Since there is no empirical evidence that the event ever happened it must be to further the mind control agenda that it continues

How did a celebration of the raising a dead Christian god (the dead Christian god) back to life, ever get blended together with a pegan holiday that celebrates fertility? Considering what a prude the Mormon Jesus is, these two events don't look very compatible in the sharing of a holiday. Maybe Halloween should share a holiday with Christian prayer, or some other un-related event from some other religion. Does anyone here know the back-story about how Rabbits and eggs became linked to this Christian holiday?

It's probably for the same reason that the Roman Saturnalia became Christmas -- people were going to celebrate it anyway, so might as well give it a Christian twist.

That's exactly right. It was a pagan agricultural holiday, which is why it follows the lunar rather than the solar calendar.

I thought Easter was basically the Christian version of Passover, which is based on the Hebrew lunar calendar. And ham became the traditional meat for Easter dinner mostly to annoy Jews.

In theory, Orthodox Easter, Roman Easter and Passover should all be on the same weekend. In practice, they rarely are, due to vagaries in the details of the various formulas.

The basic formula for Easter, minus the details, is "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox."

Some of the details are: what happens if Sunday falls on the same day as the full moon? And what if it is Sunday in one part of the world, and Monday in another part? What cities get official dibs on declaring what day of the week it is? What happens if the full moon falls directly on the spring equinox? What happens if the spring equinox falls on Mar 20 or 22, instead of Mar 21? This happens, depending on when the last leap year was. [I don't think that matters - I think they always use Mar 21 as the nominal equinox]

And of course the Orthodox date of Julian Mar 21 is about 11 days off from the actual equinox, which is why Roman and Orthodox Easter usually do not occur on the same Sunday unless it is pretty late in the Roman cycle,

The Orthodox countries refused to adjust the calendar to move the actual equinox back to Mar 21 because a Roman pope (Greg the 13th) came up with the idea. The Protestant countries also refused to change, for the exact same reason, but there was enough international trade going on in western Europe that it was too big a pain in the ass to have two different calendars, so the Protestant countries switched to the Gregorian calendar in dribs and drabs over the next 200 years or so.

I don't think the Hebrew calculation uses either the Julian or Gregorian calendar. They have their own lunar calendar for calculating the date for Passover, which I suspect occurs on the same date every year on their calendar.

In Germanic Northern Europe there was a goddess named Oestre/Ostara who was associated with the dawn, the vernal equinox, fertility, rebirth, and the rabbit/hare, which was itself a symbol of rebirth.

Hares were associated with eggs because both are symbols of fertility and because of the former's mating habits. At the beginning of the new spring hares perform mating dances at night ("mad as a March hare"). Hares don't live underground but nest in long grasses, where game birds of some sorts (I forget which species) lay their eggs. So in April/May you see mad hares, followed by eggs in nests like those hares bolt from when spooked by passing humans.

In pagan Europe the coming of spring was often celebrated orgiastically, with humans behaving much like rabbits/hares. The Maypole is an associated tradition, representing an erect penis around which girls danced and often associated with communal orgies.

There are of course lots of other New year's celebrations in different parts of the Roman/Christian world and in many cases their imagery and meaning are similar to those of the Germanic world. But the North/Northwestern European pagan traditions and their suppression are well documented in early and medieval Christian documents. No less an authority than the venerable Bede wrote in the 8th century about the separate origins but similar meanings of Easter and Passover.

For me the dispositive thing is the non-Christian imagery. Are there Easter rabbits and eggs in the Orthodox or Jewish worlds? Is there an "Easter/Aester/Eostre" in the Slavic, Latin, or Semitic languages? I don't believe there is. Most Latin words for Easter are variants of "pesah/pasah/passal/" which are Greek renditions of the Hebrew word for "passover." I suspect the Orthodox vocabulary belongs to that tradition.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 04/03/2023 01:56AM by Lot's Wife.

I would assume that the Phoenician/Babylonian god of fertility, Ishtar/Astarte, is the same god as the Germanic Oestre/Ostara. The names and the job description are too similar to be coincidence IMHO.

My main source for knowledge of Astarte is the Tom Robbins novel Skinny Legs and All. That should make me a semi-expert. ;))

Which means it is entirely possible that Passover also originated as a fertility/springtime festival, and the whole Egyptian story, which never happened, was an overlay, much like the overlay of Christian Easter on the Germanic festival.


I don’t know if Orthodox or Jewish tradition has eggs and rabbits as part of their imagery for Easter/Passover. My cousins did, but they were all raised Catholic.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don’t know if Orthodox or Jewish tradition has
> eggs and rabbits as part of their imagery for
> Easter/Passover.

Here's a quick outline:

https://www.history.com/news/easter-orthodox-easter-differences

Excerpt:

"At Orthodox Christian Easter dinners, along with red-dyed hard-boiled eggs, which are symbolic of the blood of Christ, lamb is typically served. John 1:29 says, "Behold the lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world." Lamb also has a strong Jewish significance, as it was used as a sacrifice and is often served during Passover."

-----

I don't see anything about decorating eggs the way most of us are familiar with and no mention of rabbits. :)

I'm going for turkey & the usual trimmings with pie to finish. That's the plan anyway.

And no red eggs. {{shudder}}

Eggs start to look like a universal, or at least very common, symbol of rebirth and generation, don't they.

See below.

*relocation



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/03/2023 08:28PM by Lot's Wife.

> I would assume that the Phoenician/Babylonian god
> of fertility, Ishtar/Astarte, is the same god as
> the Germanic Oestre/Ostara. The names and the job
> description are too similar to be coincidence
> IMHO.

That is definitely an interesting parallel, and others have noted it, but I am unaware of any definitive work on the topic. The biggest problem is that Ishtar/Astarte is/are semitic in origin whereas the Germanic goddess stems from the Indo-European milieu. That doesn't preclude a connection; the Indo-Europeans got the wheel from Mesopotamia and the Hittites and other IE peoples also had an influence over at least later Babylon. But it's difficult to prove a relationship in large part because the intervening IE peoples--Slavs, etc--don't have a cognate goddess.

Intriguing, nonetheless.


--------------
> My main source for knowledge of Astarte is the Tom
> Robbins novel Skinny Legs and All. That should
> make me a semi-expert. ;))

I believe Astarte was depicted as wearing a green visor, so I suspect at least a spiritual connection.


---------------
> Which means it is entirely possible that Passover
> also originated as a fertility/springtime
> festival, and the whole Egyptian story, which
> never happened, was an overlay, much like the
> overlay of Christian Easter on the Germanic
> festival.

The Passover-fertility/vernal parallel is well documented. I alluded to Bede above; he was an early expert on this as well as the difficult process of setting the annual date for Easter. But yes, humans show a marked tendency to produce end-of-year/end-of-world holidays at the winter solstice and birth-of-year/birth-of-world holidays at the vernal equinox.

Sometimes they get overlaid by different cultures. Halloween, for instance, is a northern European harvest/death commemoration at which time the spirits of the dead come forth (also All Souls Day) but also the more Greek Saturnalia in late December. In some traditions the rebirth of the world occurs the day of, or after, the death of God, but in others they are separated. Christianity superimposed its traditions in the form of Christmas (Saturnalia), when the world and its god die; and the vernal holiday (Easter), when the world and its god are re reborn.

With different seasons/dates due to different climates and agricultural economies, you can see the same thing in many other cultures. The harvest/death festival comes in August in East Asia, when the main rice harvest occurs and on that day the spirits of the underworld/dead coming back to life and animating mobile shrines for a day or two. Those East Asian cultures likewise have vernal/rebirth-of-the world holidays in the spring although I believe that may have died out somewhat in Japan.


----------------
> I don’t know if Orthodox or Jewish tradition has
> eggs and rabbits as part of their imagery for
> Easter/Passover. My cousins did, but they were all
> raised Catholic.

Google informs me that decorated eggs are part of the Russian tradition, which I had not known, which makes me suspect the imagery is common to at least temperate eastern Europe.

Google additionally now tells me that eggs are an important symbol at Passover in the Jewish tradition--perhaps Tevai has insight here--which I also hadn't known. There is no goddess associated with Passover, of course, but we do know that the Hebrews supplanted various Canaanite deities and holidays, so it's possible that the egg is a more or less universal symbol of rebirth. No rabbits in that tradition, though.

What is evident is that Bede and other early historians found the Northern European pagan Easter in place before any significant number of Jews were in Britain. So the complex of springtime events probably arose separately in Northern Europe and Palestine. Again, that's not surprising because of the ubiquity of these celebrations around the world--it was not Passover, for instance, that engendered the Chinese and Southeast Asian holidays that were present well over a millennium before the YHWH cult emerged in Palestine.

Fascinating. You're one of the people who push me to think and learn more, for which I am grateful.

I just had a “d’oh!” Moment when I recalled Ukrainian pysanky Easter eggs. And Fabergé eggs. At least the Slavic countries have a strong tradition of Easter eggs. What was I thinking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_decorating_in_Slavic_culture

You think that's crazy, here are Iranian Nowruz eggs!

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=nowruz+eggs&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.visitouriran.com%2Fblog%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2FColored-Eggs-and-Nowruz.jpg

They were present in the Zoroastrian era, along with the spring New Year's festival Nowruz, and both continued through the Islamic period to the present.

So very cool. . .

Nowruz eggs look quite similar to pysanky. They are gorgeous. The two countries aren’t all that far apart, so I suspect significant cultural cross-pollination.

Yes, if you mean Palestine and Iran. But I haven't ever heard of decorated eggs in Jewish communities--again awaiting Tevai or others--and we do see that in the Slavic world and in Central Asia/Xinjiang, which at first glance would suggest the primary connection throughout the "Egg Zone" is Indo-European.

It seems there is a Sephardic tradition of egg decorating, that I would guess relates to their presence in the Middle East. The Atlantic magazine has an article about it that I am unfortunately paywalled out of, but I found several articles lacking The Atlantic’s firepower,

https://www.creativejewishmom.com/2015/03/huevos-haminados-decorated-eggs-for-passover.html

The problem that arises here is that the Sephardi mainly stemmed from a Jewish population that existed in Iberia and that dispersed just over five hundred years ago, meaning that they coexisted with Christians for well over a millennium and hence absorbed a lot of western European/Christian ideas and customs. Cross-pollination works both ways, of course.

I cursorily scanned the web for articles on Arabs and decorated eggs as part of the springtime festivals and found references to both the adoption of Christian practice and the much earlier Iranian/Zoroastrian practice. I didn't see any history of the custom indigenous to the Arabic tradition. That would indicate that if the Sephardi absorbed the custom of decorating eggs from others, it likely came from Christianity and not from Islam. It would be helpful to see evidence about the Ashkenazi and other Jewish groups to see if they too celebrate Passover with decorated eggs and when they started doing so.

It turns out that the earliest references to the World Egg as the beginning of the cosmos is in the Indian Vedas, including the Rig Veda, with the Iranian Zoroastrian version appearing in the historical record shortly thereafter. There's also an early indication of it in Greece, and scholars think the World Egg was closely associated with Indo-European cultures.

China had an egg tradition but it appears to have originated in late Taoism, which is muddy because that religion may well have been influenced by Indo-Aryans. But the native Taiwanese (pre-Han) had a similar mythology as did the Polynesians--which shouldn't surprise us since they were largely the same population, meaning that the Austronesian peoples migrated from China to Taiwan around 3000 BCE, then spread down to the Philippines around 1500 BCE and gradually dispersed by sea everywhere from Hawaii and Easter Island and New Zealand to India and Madagascar. So it would make sense to say that the egg imagery dated at least to the Taiwan period and perhaps China around 5,000 years ago.

So we're probably talking about a universal human tendency to see the egg as part of the cycle of life, with the Indo-Europeans standing out in that regard with a common original word, or proto-word, and a common foundational myth or myths. I'm intrigued by the possibility that the tradition of decorating them as part of the vernal equinox celebration is also a very early IE practice and that the rabbit idea developed among Germanic peoples.

I'm not yet convinced that the Hebrews/Canaanites had a history of egg decoration--they almost certainly had an association of eggs with mundane regeneration since the Egyptians and some other semitic peoples who influenced them did. But in my ignorance I haven't seen evidence of Jewish practices that were not derivative from Christianity and possibly Iran.

Great stuff.

It turns out that the Zoroastrians conceived of the universe as an egg from which the cosmos burst into existence, also that they marked the annual rebirth of the universe with eggs. Even today there are Zoroastrian communities in Central Asia and Xinjiang who celebrate the Persian New Year (Nowruz) with decorated eggs.

What this suggests is that the egg symbolism may have been Indo-European. I guess it's possible the proto-Indo-Europeans took the idea from Mesopotamians, but that may be a bit far-fetched given that the p-IE folk had their own cosmology, a fact that can be inferred from all sorts of different cultures stretching from Western China and northern India to Ireland.

Also intriguing is the possibility that the egg symbolism entered the Hebrew/Jewish tradition during the Captivity, when the Zoroastrians had such a significant influence over the emerging Jewish tradition. So perhaps the idea originated in the early Pontic steppe and then spread south through Persia, then through Mesopotamia during the Captivity and into Judaism while independently moving with the IE peoples into China and Europe. . .

Zoroastrian Easter eggs. What an interesting fact that is!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/03/2023 08:29PM by Lot's Wife.

> My main source for knowledge
> of Astarte is the Tom Robbins
> novel "Skinny Legs and All."


o-o-spaghettio!!



(Tim, from "Still Life with Woodpecker"

> Tom Robbins novel Skinny Legs and All

I haven't thought of that book in a long time. Adding my thumbs up! (Of course you are an expert after reading such a fine book.)

Ostara/Kristin Chenoweth from American Gods

https://youtu.be/Jv83-BzdOEE

::grin::

I will do a video chat with my grandkids and my daughter and my girlfriend....and life will go on....2022 maybe for a real personal encounter with them?

The companies that produce and sell ham aren't going to be happy about that!

> The companies that produce
> and sell ham ...

Wow, that's a HUGE swath of, at least, the American economy!!!

We’re going bowling