Everyone’s posting about Easter today, so I’ll acknowledge two or three of those posts, that capture better than I have time to do myself why I find the whole Easter tradition fascinating as a cultural development, but implausible and uninteresting as a religious observance.
Jericho Brisance: Infographic: Taking Easter Seriously [or, do believers realize how inconsistent and contradictory the four gospel accounts are?]
CJ Werleman at Alternet: Celebrating Easter? Which Contradicting Biblical Account of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Are You Going to Pick? [or, how do believers rationalize the discrepancies between the gospels, written decades after the event by writers who “hadn’t even met Jesus, and [..] hadn’t met the people who had allegedly met Jesus”?]
And this history lesson in a Facebook graphic [that is, that like Christmas, Easter is a Christian holiday piggybacked an on earlier, pagan holiday, in this case Ishtar, a goddess of fertility and sex. (Spring!)] Oops, never mind! Debunked, at least the part about Ishtar=Easter. Still, the spring/rebirth theme is pretty obvious.
