March 2002

Happy Eastre (pronounced Easter) Day fellow adventurers! I hope the Atheist Rat (or chicken) finds you in good spirits this spring festival season as he passes out aborted chicken fetus’s painted up all nice and pretty. Oh! You don’t find that holiday too agreeable? Well you could drag yourself down to a protestant church and have a go at the Welches grape juice along with the ever so dry Saltine cracker as you pretend you’re drinking blood and eating the body of a dead wacko who lived 2000 years ago.

At least the Catholic bunch drink wine, and on that note let’s not forgot our fellow monks who invented beer ages ago to withstand the long missionary journeys. They would take a swig of beer, followed by the oh-so powerful body of Christ, and then a gulp of wine - and they say the Aztecs were crazy for slaughtering people to make the sun rise.

There’s many goof-ball holidays, festivals and celebrations throughout the ancient world that would make you wonder how these nuts ever thought up such absurd stuff in the first place. I would imagine some of you can harken back to your childhood with memories of coloring a lot of wasted eggs then waiting in anticipation to try to find them not even really understanding why or how this had anything to do with Christianity, even if you didn’t understand much of that either to begin with. All you knew was every spring Mom or Dad would dress you up, haul you down to some park or church, then pass out girlie baskets with chocolate and such.

If you happened to get curious and ask the big "WHY!" the only answer you’d get is something about a ‘Savior’ dying and returning to take sins somewhere. Hell you’re a kid, you don’t know what they’re talking about. But strangely enough, noone would mention anything about eggs or why you colored them, let alone hide and seek with them. Oh, they may mention that old saying "the reason for the season" or something about Jesus as they criticized the egg hunting. Do you know why? They didn’t have one fucking clue! Nope - nobody did or does now, and the only hint of any idea comes from the same guy who gave us our year, Bede the Venerable, and he was just guessing.

Yes the history of Easter is a wild and wacky one, combining forgotten ancient customs as well as creating some crazy floating feast day with different days every year. The best Bede could come up with is that ‘Eastre’ was an Anglo-Saxon name of a Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility - to whom was dedicated a month corresponding to April. Her festival was celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox; traditions associated with the festival survive in the Easter rabbit, a symbol of fertility. Also, Easter eggs were originally painted with bright colors to represent the sunlight of spring, and were used in Easter-egg rolling contests or given as gifts.

This definitely sounds fairly similar to what happens on Easter and makes more since when you realize that the Roman church was a powerful holiday destroying machine. Most all of their major holidays are usurped from some other cultures such as Christmas (Yule), Halloween (Samhain, Roman) and Valentines (Roman). And in this way they absorbed bits of other religions - I bet old Pat Robertson would drop dead if he knew he was worshipping another god for Easter.

This was of course intentional, just like St. Patrick adding the sun to the cross to lure the Irish in, and the Roman Church’s relentless attempt at world domination. Allow enough time to go by and generations down the road won’t have a clue to why there performing any ritual, but of course that’s what religions are anyway, traditions.

The Christian festival of Easter probably embodies a number of converging traditions. Most scholars emphasize the original relation of Easter to the Jewish festival of Passover, or Pesach, from which is derived Pasch, another name for Easter. The early Christians, many of whom were of Jewish origin, were brought up in the Hebrew tradition and regard Easter as a new feature of the Passover festival. The musical chair effect with the holidays’ date basically comes from the Roman Church following the Vernal Equinox around; the Orthodox are far simpler by having it on Passover ever year.

Just in case you have been living under a rock somewhere, Easter for the Christians is based around the legend that Jesus died, then was alive again, but for some reason disappeared. And since he didn’t do anything the first time he visited (from outer space?), Christians are hell-bent on the notion that he’s coming back real soon and this time he’s gonna kick ass, dammit!

After about 10 minutes, I would have given up. I still can’t fathom why people are still looking around for him (in his spaceship) to arrive any second. I imagine that would be a sight of complete mass confusion - all the denominations scrambling to board at once, insisting they knew the whole time that their "doctrine" was the right one (what wacko’s). And, if by any chance you happen to see this "Savior," by all means tell him he’s got to do something about all this shit down here, God really fucked up!!! So with that being said, I would like to cordially invite you to attend my churches Easter egg hunt, followed by a mineral water baptism. Oh! Wait I’m not a Christian! I don’t believe in that bullshit, I forgot I’m an Atheist. Atheist Rat that is!
HAHAHA!!!