On Easter Not being Pagan

JAU

Chesterton posited that tradition was a way for the dead to have a vote in the modern world we live in. This in mind, what is wrong with observing pagan customs during winter and spring festivals? -- Holy Ishtar!!

HGL

When it comes to Pagan dead, they are not really our dead.

Ishtar is NOT the origin of Easter. That is part of a very bad Protestant tradition of Anticatholic smearing:

Great Bishop of Geneva! : Whom did Christ call "that fox"?
http://greatbishopofgeneva.blogspot.com/2014/04/whom-did-christ-call-that-fox.html

JAU

What i'm saying is that we should not be ashamed if it is.

HGL

First of all, if it were really a celebration of Ishtar, one would be ashamed. She was goddess - or rather falsely honoured as such - of harlots. As well as of love in some cleaner aspects.

Second, no, English and German are about the only two languages now alive that call the Christian feast so. And in German it sounds very much less like Ishtar. Ostern is the German word.

Third, there is a connexion to pre-Nazi lodges here (of which I am not ashamed), namely insofar as one of them or rather the whole Odinist Masonry, was called Ostara. In proto-Germanic that would have been Austara and English has this curious quirk of changing au to ea (original AEnglisc pronunciation roughly like "air" without the r pronounced), so if any Pagan goddess is involved at all, it is Eos / Aurora / Ushas = goddess of dawn (the name is ths related to East).

And a god or a goddess of a purely natural phenomenon is, this time for seriously, not a thing to be ashamed of. Helios is about synonym for Brother Sun, with the difference that St Francis was not offering 100 kine or oxen to him, but telling us to praise God for him, and the three men in the oven were themselves telling him and Sister Moon to praise the Lord.

Obviously, offering 100 kine or oxen to Helios would be a sin.