Question:
Since Easter is a pagan holiday, why do you call pagans satan worshippers?
iowawarlord
2007-08-28 14:20:37 UTC
Easter is named after a norse fertility goddess Eostera, where they celebrate the rebirth of the world on the first day of spring. Her symbols are the egg and the rabbit. She is the reason why there is an easter bunny and easter eggs. The pagan holiday Ostara is the basis of the Easter hoiday. why must christians borrow from other faiths then insult that same faith?
Nine answers:
bluesagedragon
2007-08-28 14:54:37 UTC
Don't use proof in your question or the christians will not answer it. The facts scare them. It is a political gesture designed to harrass and convert others. If they were to say that paganism is ok, then many christians would convert to paganism because they are feeling empty inside from christianity.



BS
lonely suburbanite
2007-08-28 14:37:59 UTC
I answer this question way too many times.

Christians "borrowed" from their pagan neighbors because, as their faith was expanding they needed some way to get all the Pagans to join up. The Pagans liked their faith, their holdiays, etc, and didn't want to just throw that away, so the Christians were like "Fine! You can have your damn holidays! We're just going to rename them and move them about a bit. Stop whining and join!"

And thus, we got christmas and easter and halloween, etc etc.



Later, when Christianity became more dominant, they knew that it was ok to insult the now minority group of Pagans. Anything that was not Christian then became, naturally, from Satan. Why do you think the devil is usually depicted with horns? The Christians saw the great horned god and stuck some horns on their representation of "evil" to make horns seem bad.

So all the Pagans still bopping about were ridiculed for the lies the Christians came up with and begrudgingly converted.



The "satan worshippers" term stuck, however, because all the devoted Pagans who hid their faith were too afraid to come out and say "Hey. That's not true."

Only now are we finally getting the strength to tell them that they've been wrong for all these years, and promise we do not have a church of satan membership card hidden away in our wallets.
evolver
2007-08-28 14:53:30 UTC
Actually, it isn't anything of the sort.



In the vast majority of the Christian world's languages, the word used to describe this specific holiday is based on the Greek word "Pascha" (Passover) which comes from the Hebrew "Pesach" (Passover.)



In French, "Paques." In Portuguese, "Pasqua."



In short, this is an English-language issue only. And even then, it is only the name that is at issue. St. Augustine of Canterbury brought Christianity, including its pre-existing holidays such as the Paschal feast, hundreds of years after the Nicene council fixed its date.



The date of the Paschal feast, by the way, is set as the Sunday after Passover, which comes at the Vernal equinox. While some Pagan holidays may be related to the equinox, that has nothing to do with why Christians celebrate shortly after Passover. A cursory reading over the crucifixion accounts of the bible suggests an obvious explanation of why the Sunday after Passover might mean something to us...



...it's the day Jesus rose.



As to why Christians in the British Isles adapted the name of a coincidentally timed pagan feast, Wikipedia explains:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eostre
anonymous
2007-08-28 18:54:18 UTC
Hate to correct you on 1 point but her symbol was a hare NOT a rabbit.The bunny thing was a horrible Christian bastardisation of Eostara (or Eastre or Eostre as she is called by Saxon Pagans)'s sacred animal.



As for why Christians claim it-well they stole Christmas's date,the location of the Vatican and Holy Communion from the Mithras religion.They also stole the idea of a trinity deity from 1 of the hundreds of Pagan religions which have 1 and the idea of the virgin mother from Isis in Egyptian Paganism so I guess they thought they were on a roll.



I suppose they also thought it would make converting the Saxons and later the Norse races to Christianity easier-by giving them something else to celebrate on the holy day of one of their most important deities.
anonymous
2007-08-28 20:39:43 UTC
because they are human and because everything has to be based on something else or people will not be able to relate to it. some trivial information: pagans are not satan worshipers because they don't believe in the devil. wicca means wise woman. i'm a christian witch.

this is an answer, got it memorized?
St. Toad
2007-08-28 14:28:34 UTC
Eostera is great! Maybe some people think the egg-laying bunny is a fallen angel?
anonymous
2007-08-28 14:34:33 UTC
Wrong on so many levels. There aren't many people around that don't know Paganism isn't Satanism. Many of the things Neopagans claim are throwbacks to Paganism are in fact, not. Read Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton.



Here's a past answer I gave before on this question:



It’s been said that the Roman Catholic Church made Christmas officially fall on Dec.25th, partly to make a Pagan holiday called "Saturnalia" celebrated a couple of days later less popular.No one really knows when Christ was born, we just remember His birthday on that day. Because of persecution of the early Christians from the Pagans, the date of his birth cannot be known with certainty, but Dec. 25th was being observed as early as the 2nd A.D., so it isn’t impossible that this is on or close to the correct date. There are three reasons the ancient Christians decided to celebrate Christ’s birth on this day. One reason was the Roman Empire recognized Dec. 26th as the birth of Mithras. In protest, persecuted Christians began to celebrate the birth of Jesus the day before. Another reason Christians derived this day to be the birth of Christ is that Jewish tradition held that a prophet died on the day he was conceived. Since we know Christ was crucified during Passover, which is close to April, counting down 9 months would take us to December, if they thought He was concieved in April. Another reason (and perhaps the most important) was that the Jewish festival of C'hanukka was celebrated for the very first time on what would hae been the equivalent of Dec. 25th on the Western calendar. C'hannuka is a festival of lights. We Christians too, celebrate Christmas with many lights. Christmas is simply our C'hanukka, just as Easter is our Passover. Christians should celebrate Christmas for these reasons if nothing else.



Some folks think symbols of the heathen past have worked their way into Easter celebrations, such as colored eggs, bunnies, baby ducks and other newborn animals. However, in the book Stations Of The Sun, historian and author Ronald Hutton says he discovered many things about Easter like those just mentioned were added during the Christian Era, and have no connection to ancient Paganism. It's just Witch-ful thinking, and misinformation! There is no conclusive evidence of any festival or holiday connected to the spring solstice in ancient Pagan times. The reason Christians celebrate Easter in the springtime is because we know from the scriptures that Christ’s death and resurrection happened after the Jewish holiday of Passover. It wasn’t done to stamp out some Pagan springtime holiday! "Easter" is just an Old English word for "Spring", the time Easter occurred. There is the false idea that "Easter" is the name of a Germanic goddess and this is why the word "Easter" is the same in German and English. Many Wiccans are quick to quip that Easter is an ancient Pagan religion, and that even the very name is derived from the name of a Pagan goddess. However, Caedmon Parsons, an Eastern Orthodox and scholar of Middle Age writings, clarifies the true history of the word Easter. Apart from a misinterpretation of one mention in St. Bede's scientific treatise, De Temporarum Ratione, there is absolutely no mention of a Germanic goddess with a name in any way resembling the word Easter. Every other recorded use of the term is in a Christian context. In an article on the true origins of the word and holiday "Easter", he notes:



"Every other recorded use of the term is in a Christian context. Rather than the term being derived from a goddess, the supposed goddess is derived from the term. She was postulated by certain 19th century Germanic scholars in an attempt to explain the etymology of the word. These same scholars (foremost among them the Grimm brothers, famous for their folk-tale collections and less well-known as the discoverers of the ‘Indo-European’ linguistic family) had a very definite nationalist/ethnic agenda in which they were trying to rediscover the "real" roots of German culture. Thus the folk-tale collection's avowed purpose was to search for ‘survivals’ of pre-Christian Germanic religion and culture."



Every ancient recorded instance of the usage of the word "Easter" has definite Christian connotations. So the Pagan goddess "Easter" is as non-existent as the Easter Bunny!



Sadly, a lot of Christians also cling to misinformation about Easter and Christmas. Much of this due to books like "Babylon Mystery Religion" by Hyslop...a book short on scholarship but deep on speculation and imagination. The book has been discredited by serious scholars, and only the Jack Chick types accept it nowadays.
anonymous
2007-08-28 14:28:25 UTC
Yea, well, The birth of jesus is actually the birth of Mithras. You'll never talk sense into Christians.
ivy91189
2007-08-28 14:28:43 UTC
Because they are ignorant of where their own religion comes from.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
Loading...