Atheist Realm Blog
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Archive for ‘April 10th, 2009’
Being an atheist and trying to raise a child sometimes presents interesting challenges. I come from a Reform Jewish background and my wife comes form a Catholic/Lutheran one. This time of year is particularly challenging. Most Jews are observing the Passover holiday. This celebrates the merciless god Yahweh killing tens of thousands of innocent Egyptian children. Well, in all fairness the Jews celebrate the fact that Yahweh killed the Egyptian children but spared the Hebrew ones. The whole idea always made me sick so I decided long ago not to celebrate or even acknowledge Passover. Easter has always been difficult because it falls on different days each year. After several centuries of disagreement, all churches accepted the computation of the Alexandrian Church (now the Coptic Church) that Easter is the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, which is the first moon whose 14th day (the ecclesiastic “full moon”) is on or after March 21 (the ecclesiastic “vernal equinox”). As for why we have Easter in the first place; Christians celebrate their bastard child coming back to life and somehow merging with Yahweh and some type of spirit or ghost. The end result is that now all people are sinners and the bastard child died for their sins. The reason why you are a sinner is because 5000 years ago a woman made from a rib bone had a conversation with a talking snake and ate a magical piece of fruit. An absolutely ridiculous and unsatisfying story. We don’t “celebrate” this either. No, we celebrate bunnies and eggs. We celebrate bunnies and chocolate eggs. We celebrate having our daughter look for plastic eggs that we’ve hidden through the house and filled with candy. We explain that it is a minor holiday celebrating the beginning of Spring Break. When my daughter is older we will explain the awful roots of the holiday, but for right now she can enjoy it as a silly fun festival of bunnies and eggs. |