Why Easter is called Easter, and other little-known facts about the holiday

[Igel]

4. Today's Friday.

So if you use that name it's because you appropriated Freya worship and continue it in some other guise.

I don't keep Easter. I keep Passover.

But that doesn't mean I can't see that a lot of the criteek of the day isn't actually a critique but a cheap imitation.

Religions often allow a certain amount of syncretism. That's often superficial. Find the goddess in the Easter narrative. Is Jesus the bunny or the goddess? Maybe the cross is the Easter egg?

Yeah. It's a name. And most of the syncretism is folk custom that carried along with the official, very much non-rabbity/non-eggy/non-chickeny Easter narrative. The closest you come is the widespread belief that when Jesus was resurrected he hatched from a large egg, and the best the writers of the NT could manage is to describe it as a tomb and a large stone that was rolled away from its opening.

Oh, wait. That's not a thing.

It's a lot more clear that Judaism has the Torah procession from the habit of people dressing up their carved gods and carrying them around. "Hey, look what they do with their piece of wood. Let's take a chunk of sheepskin and put a crown on it, a breastplate, even a little yad-scepter and parade it around!" Yeah, syncretism sucks. But that procession is more crucial to Judaism than rabbits and chicks are to the Xian Easter. And let's not even mention Islam's "I'm left out" pastiche of Judaism and Christianity with some local additions to make the stew palatable and themselves, driven to see themselves as always more honorable, the best and greatest.