Santa is pretty kid-friendly, but this whole business with the Easter Bunny is basically pornography. He’s all about fertility. Think about it: He shows up in spring, when new life blossoms after the dreary winter. He’s a rabbit, a species known primarily for their practice of constant shagging and baby-making. And he’s always running around carrying eggs, another symbol of new life and procreation.
I think we should censor the Easter Bunny on moral grounds. I bet he’s directly responsible for any amount of teen pregnancy. Won’t someone think of the children?
Right. Like the way in True Blood, Underworld, Vampire Diaries and Twilight there are vampires and werewolves, and maybe a few other creatures like witches, but The Mummy is nowhere to be found.
The other thing is that when you do open the door to every possible creature, now it begs the question of how the heck do all these things stay hidden? A handful of vampires living in an old mansion can hide. An underground society of vampires having a secret war with werewolves that occasionally gets sidetracked by pyrotechnic battles with dragons, demons, elves, wraiths, ghosts, banshees, banhes (or manshee…whatever the male version is called), witches, warlocks, kraken, Rodan, and Mechagodzilla is a bit harder to keep out of the public eye.
The problem is that the Gospels themselves are not authentic. Mark is held to be the earliest one, written around 70 CE. It is not contemporary and contains nothing that can be verified as factual concerning the life of Jesus.
Christmas is (duh) a Christian holiday. It celebrates the birth of Christ, which scholars calculated to be around mid-July by modern calendar equivalents, but was moved to late December to co-opt existing pagan celebrations of the winter solstice such as Yule. The giving of gifts (particularly in the form of food) in the dead of winter is a basic community food-sharing practice that helped tribes/clans/communities/etc. survive. Although sainted for following (reviving) such a practice in honor of Christ*, Nicholas was nevertheless perpetuating a pagan tradition.
Easter (Oester?) was a pagan holiday celebrating the vernal equinox – the clearest indication of the return of the sun (No, it’s not just fading out forever; it’s coming back, see?). Bunnies, eggs, flowers, grass, and bright pastoral colors are more symbols of the practice which have persisted throughout the millenia. Passover is a Jewish observance which also predates Christ. [q.v. Torah/Old Testament/Pentateuch(sp?) and the whole Exodus/Ten Commandments thing.] There’s no small coincidence that Christians commemorate the crucifixion and resurrection of their figurehead right around the same time: It supplants the preceding cultures’ celebrations.
According to the religious cultures that are dominant in the Western hemisphere (e.g. Christianity and its many splinters), Christ is to be regarded as real while persistent symbols of other religions are to be considered foolish.
The Tooth Fairy…
Umm…I dunno! Cecil?
–G!
*It is interesting to note that, in many of the cultures that were colonized by Christian (Spanish & Portuguese) missionaries [i.e. Latin America] the stories are conflated and it’s the baby Jesus who flies around the world to deliver presents…