Didn’t “the next island over” have Father Ted Crilly at just the right time?
Sunday opening is still constrained, although seemingly by labour MPs for unions, and Easter Sunday seems to be still betrothed to the church, even though it’s the Celtic festival of spring.
Sure. You can annotate the history however you want. I don't think there's a "truth."
Various clerical abuses/scandals probably played the real lead role, if you ask most people. You can always convincingly argue for "one damned thing after another" as the real engine of history. There's also the plain fact that the BBC interview involved an entirely different church in a different country, which is points againt my version.
..That's why I say symbolic.
That interview just feels like the magic is gone, curtain is pulled or pick your metaphor. Suddenly (it seemed to take them by surprise) the bishop was just an old man in silly clothes who couldn't make a relevant argument, didn't seem like an authority and wouldn't be taken more seriously than the comedians who's film had interesting commentary, besides being funny and entertaining.
It captured a moment, imo. I also like python... so bias.
> Didn’t “the next island over” have Father Ted Crilly at just the right time?
British produced and made, Irish written and acted. Guess it depends on your defintion of an Irish show but you can be sure that if something is funny, RTE had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Yes, folks were always smart to re-use things such as dates, and even forms of workship etc.
But the semantics changes substantially with different religions, only dates, abstract motions, and symbols remained (seldom the symbolisms, meanings, etc).
Which is why pointing that this or that custom was adopted from an earlier religion doesn't say much about it's new role -- some skeptics seem to go like "it was adopted, so it's fake" and can't fathom that it just means it was convenient and served a role for both religions, nor that the role can be completely different, even if the date is the same.
Like if we replaced Xmas on Dec 25, but kept the date as a new holiday of a new religion, say, "The day of buying gifts". So, instead of the message of god becoming man, redemption, love, etc, it would mean "time to indulge ourselves with crap, and buy some token BS for others to keep the market moving". Hmm, wait, we already did that.
Certainly, though they often seem to be some form of melding or merging of the two. There's still plenty of pre-Christian aspects to Easter and Christmas for instance.
At this remove it seems just about impossible to pick apart, let alone identify the previous significance.
I believe Christmas does, falling near enough to midwinter celebrations.
Easter, however, is conceptually linked to Passover, since it commemorates Christ's death at Passover and subsequent resurrection [1].
Easter's actual date is highly variable and notoriously aggravating to compute, though [2]. For reasons I do not know, the church did not want to just say "the first Sunday following Passover."
Easter came from Ēostre that tracks back to German paganism. So it seems to have been some sort of merging of the two as it can be seen in pre-unification England long before the adoption of Christianity.
If this wikipedia link is to believed she may also have been the origin of Easter hares and rabbits.
The date of Easter was decided in AD 325 by the council of Nicea (following earlier traditions and precedents), on grounds having nothing to do with German paganism.
I think it's important to make a distinction between the English (and other language) terms for the holiday and the holiday itself. The holiday existed before the religion spread (or fully spread) to those regions and has a different name in Latin with no connection to Eostre (Pascha).
Now, the hares and rabbits and all, that's obviously not from Christian tradition or the Bible. That's clearly a regional adaptation of adopting a local tradition into the Christian celebration. This is a typical way to assimilate a culture. Reuse their traditions, but rebrand them (change masks of pagan gods or entities to be saints, change the parade to focus on the Christian symbols, etc.).
I don't think there's really any "rebranding" going on in the case of hares and rabbits. Easter is round about the time when you'll start to see more hares and rabbits outside during the mating season. Hence "mad as a March hare": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_as_a_March_hare
There's probably a long tradition of people in Europe associating March and April with hares, but I don't think there's anything particularly "pagan" about it.
Well, yes and no. It all depends on interpretation. Pagan religions typically had their festivals following the cycle of the year, and spring is naturally when all of nature is working towards reproductive success. The rabbits as mentioned, eggs are still big around easter. Planting of crops, etc. So the symbols are older than the paganism of pre-christian Europe, and probably a whole succession of religions have used the same symbols.
It wouldn't surprise me if the pre-indo-european cultures of the area also had the same symbols for whatever religions they practiced.
The fertility symbols of spring have very little to do with Christianity, and I can't see where they are even made part of the theology. So looking backwards from a thousand years later, it seems like the pagan religions did recognize them as fertility symbols and rites. Even if those symbols have always been there, it feels like the pagans used them to make sense of their world in a way that Christians haven't.
Well, in Western Christianity there were/are the Rogation Days[1] and Ember Days[2] (and extra-liturgical customs that could vary from place to place), certainly related to "making sense of the world" with respect to cycles of nature.
Holy Week (preceding Easter) and Easter itself are full of themes and symbolism, but the focus is different — it's square on the mysteries of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
See for example the Exsultet[3] and the Victimae paschali laudes[4]
Eggs relate to Easter because it's the end of lent (and you can eat eggs again).
The Easter bunny has about as much to do with Christianity (or pagan religions) as Santa Claus.
So yeah, I'm sure you can loosely trace lots of this stuff back into the distant past. My point was just that this isn't an instance of Christianity taking over or "rebranding" some older pagan tradition.
Eggs can be consumed during Lent (I presume you mean the Catholic tradition of fasting, particularly "no meat", on Fridays during Lent). It's not considered meat.
Among Eastern Christians (Catholics / Orthodox) eggs are traditionally abstained from during all or parts of Lent, it depends on the particular church.
Interesting. That's not the case with US-based Catholics, or other Catholics I've met from Western or Southern Europe and the Americas. But while I know a few Eastern Orthodox folks I haven't really compared the specifics of the traditions.
"Easter" is just the English name, which is indeed related to the Germanic goddess associated with the Germanic month which the holiday occurs. The Latin and Greek name of the holiday is "Pascha", which is a direct cognate to the Jewish holiday "Pesach", or passover.
That's a misunderstanding related to the fact that in a few parts of Europe the Spring-related word became commonly used to refer to the Christian feast. In most languages of Europe, the name for the Christian feast is derived from the Latin paschalis or the Greek pascha, in turn derived from the Hebrew pesah.
Depends on which branch of Christianity. Some Christians have nothing to do with Christmas because it is just a pagan celebration with a fake wrapping of Jesus. They might say anniversary of the resurrection instead of Easter (the date is correct if I understand the Hebrew calendar correctly - which I probably don't), and they would object to bunnies and other non-christian symbols of Easter. Those are the major holidays I can think of.
Most Christians of course don't, which is why we think of the above as Christian holidays even though some Christians find something objectionable.
> Christmas because it is just a pagan celebration with a fake wrapping of Jesus. They might say anniversary of the resurrection instead of Easter
The only “Christians” (the application of this label to them is controversial within Christianity) that take this approach are Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and some related groups, who share the trait of rejecting the concept of holidays (with the exception of, or as distinguished from, the regular Sabbath). I know of no Christian group that rejects Christmas for pagan ties and refers to Easter in the way you describe.
I know of several other Christian groups today who don't. The ones you mention are the only ones anyone is likely to recognize without personally knowing someone in the church. It isn't only about rejecting holidays.
Sunday opening is still constrained, although seemingly by labour MPs for unions, and Easter Sunday seems to be still betrothed to the church, even though it’s the Celtic festival of spring.