Easter – tinsel-covered chocolate eggs and over-eating... what a debt we owe our forebears who celebrated the end of a bleak and hungry winter with a festival to welcome spring. Australians, of course, are not starving and are probably celebrating the end of a heat wave or rain rather than looking forward to winter, but a bellyful of chocolate might cushion the blow of another interest rate hike.
Christianity puts its own spin on the ancient celebration. Instead of celebrating the symbolical ‘death’ of winter hunger, and the ‘rebirth’ of spring with the promise of plenty, Christians swapped symbols for the Real Thing!
Easter became a celebration of Human Sacrifice in which the god/man was murdered on Friday, and
re-born the following Sunday. As if this wasn’t miraculous enough, they also declared the sacrificial victim to be a ‘scapegoat’.
It was normal in those days to sacrifice goats and sheep to keep gods happy, but Christians topped this by sacrificing a living human, so their god would forgive the sins of everyone else!
I guess we should be happy about this, but the morality is troublesome. If someone does an evil act, is it ok for the courts to send an innocent man to jail instead? If not, why not? The Christian god did it. It’s scarcely a good example to set children. Wouldn’t it be better for people to take responsibility for their own actions and enjoy the cycles of nature without sacrificial blood-letting?