Today is "Good Friday," a day on which Christians celebrate the brutal torture and sadistic murder of a man; two days from now, those same Christians will celebrate an even bigger holiday commemorating that dead man coming back to life and flying up into outer space where Heaven is allegedly located.
Now, I can understand celebrating Christmas. Even if there is absolutely no historical evidence that the man named Jesus as portrayed in "the Bible" was born in Bethlehem on December 25th at any point between 2,016 and 1,996 years ago. Even if the historical evidence that does exist indicates that Christmas was actually set on December 25th in the 4th Century by Roman Emperor Constantine merely to encourage a common religious festival for both Christians and pagans; even if December 25th was plagiarized from the popular contemporary Persian cult of Mithras, a diety that was also believed to have been of a virgin mother and witnessed by shepherds and magi. I can understand celebrating Christmas because it is, in essence, just a global birthday party, even though the birthday-boy happens to be fictional.
Easter, on the other hand, is a ridiculous fairy-tale through and through. The story of Easter begins with the trial, torture and execution of a man -- as most good wholesome family stories do -- and ends with that man defying the laws of biology by coming back from the dead three days later, at which point this newly-undead man defied the laws of gravity and floated up into the upper stratosphere where he defied the laws of physics by entering a parallel dimension called Heaven.
The origin of the secular Easter Bunny character is even more obfuscated and bizarre. It seems to have come from Western European culture, where Catholic tradition forbid the consumption of eggs during Lent; the character was a hare instead of a rabbit, and it brought colored eggs to good children on Easter as a reward for their fasting during the preceding 40 days. A recently created bit of fascinating fakelore claims that, once upon a time, a character named "Eostre found a wounded bird in the snow. To help the little bird survive the winter, she transformed it into a rabbit, but the transformation was incomplete and the rabbit retained the ability to lay eggs. In thanks for its life being saved, the rabbit took the eggs and decorated them and left them as gifts for Eostre."
As rational human beings, we can read these Easter stories by themselves and chuckle inwardly at such quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. But a disturbing fact is that fully grown adults in America today read the Biblical story and believe that it is an historically accurate reflection of reality. Despite the fact that no human being in recorded history has ever verifiably died, stayed fully dead for 72 hours, and then come back to life, Christians believe, despite a profound lack of evidence -- or, perhaps and more frighteningly, because of a profound lack of evidence -- that this exact magical scenario took place with their Jesus character as the protagonist.
Compounding the strangeness of the story is the fact that unlike Christmas, Easter is celebrated on a different day each year. Easter is what Christians call "a moveable feast," by which they mean that the date of celebration is not fixed to a specific calendar date. Specifically, the First Council of Nicaea decided in the year 325 of the Common Era that Easter would be celebrated on the same Sunday throughout the Church; the date for the Easter holiday was later refined to "the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox; this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21."
This may be a minor point, but it bears pointing out that the vernal equinox is not astronomically fixed as March 21; it varies between the 20th and the 21st depending on the year. More importantly, though, is that if Christians celebrate the character's birthday on the same calendar date each year, then it seems highly suspicious that they would not celebrate the return-from-the-dead day on the same calendar date each year. It is entirely unnecessary to develop elaborately convoluted computi to determine the date of celebration if we supposedly know the date of the man's death.
If a man really did live and really did die on, shall we say, 15 April 33CE, and really did came back from the dead on, say, 18 April 33CE, then it stands to reason that the holiday commemorating his return to life and subsequent flight into the cosmos would be celebrated on April 18th of each year regardless of which day of the week that date fell on, just as the holiday commemorating his birth is celebrated on December 25th of each year regardless of which day of the week that date falls on.
The arbitrary nature of the holiday, then, demonstrates the desperate baselessness of the celebration and its underlying mythology.
