"Why I choose not to celebrate Easter"

Browsing my Facebook feed today, I came across a friend's post asking if shops'd be open tomorrow in her area. I'm in Europe, my friend lives Down Under. I assumed there must be a local holiday I didn't know about until reading the comments - It's "Good Friday" tomorrow. Right. Took a while but : Click.

When it dawned on me that I couldn't for the life of me remember what the whole Good Friday and Easter thing was about exactly, I checked Wikipedia. While I understand that Wikipedia is not an encyclopaedia or infallible or anything of the sort, the information it provided still surprised me greatly.

Source : Wikipedia

"Easter (...) is a festival and holiday celebrated by Christians and non-Christians"

So, according to Wikipedia I celebrate Easter?

Uh... NO. I really, really don't!

I was raised secular in a mainstream 'Christian' country in western Europe. Even though my family didn't care about religion and didn't raise me to be religious, I did go to a Christian-based primary school (the only school near our house) where I loved dressing up for Carnival and celebrating religious holidays. Commerce played a large part in my 'early religious education' too as shop windows were full of religious references months before any Christian holiday.

At home, we had a Christmas tree and gave each other presents in December, we also painted eggs for Easter morning when I was young. The latter we grew out of the same morning we realised that the Easter Bunny and Father Christmas had the exact same handwriting as my mother...

When I started searching for God and the meaning of life as a teenager, the first place I went to was the Christian faith as that was 'the norm' all around me. I spent several years immersing myself in different Christian traditions, attending different churches, reading different Bible translations and trying to come to terms with the idea of accepting Jesus into my life. My attempt to get closer to God only made me feel guilty that I could not accept Christianity's view of Jesus as son of God. After all - that's what religion was about, right?!

Yet the more I read the Bible and learnt about Christianity, the more I realised that 'accepting Jesus into my life' was never ever going to work for me.

I fully and wholeheartedly accept the idea of God as described in the Tanakh or the Qur'an; the same God who created day and night, the heavens and the earth, animals and humans - the Almighty Creator who created everything. This God I love and worship, this God I pray to and seek solace with.

What doesn't work for me one bit is that this same God would need a human male in his thirties to die on a cross in Jerusalem in order to be able to forgive the sins of all the people who ever lived or will live.

This is GOD - this is The One, the Almighty, the Creator of Everything - and as far as I'm concerned, God does not need anyone's help to do anything - creation is proof of that. God has no partners and God needs no partners as God is omnipotent and all-powerful. This to me means that while Jesus may have been a wise man, perhaps even a prophet or a miracle worker, he is not and never will be God or part-God or the son of God to me.

Believing in God seems only natural and normal, however the leap of faith required to believe that somehow God went from "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" in the Tanakh to God being part of a trinity and requiring a human male to die on a cross to somehow 'help' the Almighty God be able to forgive humanity's sins, that is a leap of faith I cannot make. I do not believe that Jesus is God or part God or that God is anything but Almighty and One. Having come to that realisation, I also realised that it felt wrong to celebrate Christian holidays. So I stopped.

I chose a long time ago that I would only celebrate those religious holidays that I personally agreed with and that felt right to me. Which is why what I read on Wikipedia simply rubs me the wrong way, no matter what else I know and understand about Wikipedia. I do not celebrate Easter and never will, no matter what some uninformed Wikipedia writer erroneously claims. .

The one who changed my thinking

There's a difference between the person who writes this blog, and the person I am when not writing this blog. In my personal life, I'm quiet, someone who doesn't like attention. There are two reasons for that: One: I often feel like people just don't get me. Being 'the outsider' is just easier. No strained interactions. No having to try to fit in. Two: When it comes to stuff I am passionate about, like sociology, psychology, politics and religion, my opinion differs from many around me. I am pro-Israel. Something that doesn't seem very popular or mainstream. Especially since October 7th. Being pro-Israel, to me... That doesn't mean that I support, or agree with, every decision the Israeli government makes. Far from it. But do I support Israel's right to exist? Yes. Do I support Israel's right to defend itself? Yes. Do I feel that the world is against Israel? Also: Yes. On the 7th of October 2023, a large number of rather angry men entered towns ...

Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917 - 2005) was a Russian American psychologist and professor known for developing the Ecological Systems Theory. He was generally regarded as one of the world's leading scholars in the field of developmental psychology. I learned about theorists such as Bronfenbrenner while studying towards my B.Ed. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory views the person as developing within a multi-layered system of relationships. Using the example of a child, the systems are: The Microsystem - One's family, classroom The Mesosystem - Two micro-systems in interaction (i.e. family and classroom) The Exosystem - External environments which indirectly influence development The Macrosystem - The larger socio-cultural context. Added later: The Chronosystem - The evolution of the external systems over time. Each system contains roles, norms and rules that can powerfully shape development. (Source: Wikipedia ) The Microsystem: The setting in which the indi...

New Orleans' Garden District

Anne Rice's old house on 1239 First Street and the setting of Mayfair Manor Photo Source: Flickr Looking up information about the house writer Anne Rice uses as the site for the family mansion in her Mayfair Witches series, I came across a lot of interesting information about that particular house as well as about the Garden District area of New Orleans. As Victoriana Magazine's website puts it: One of the world's most dazzling residential neighborhoods – containing a time capsule of historic southern mansions – is located in the Louisiana city of New Orleans. The Garden District, a large square area bounded by Jackson Avenue, Louisiana Avenue, Magazine St. and St. Charles Ave, is the live oak tree-lined "American" sector of this southern city. ... The architecture of these historic houses is a fusion of classic styles with influence of Spanish, French, Italianate and English, as well as Greek Revival. These stately homes represent some of the best...

What Makes People Tick?

Search This Blog