Miscellaneous Prats14 Apr 2009 09:29 am
William Blows Minds For A Living
By NelsonYou know how to predict easter right? It is the weekend after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
And why is that? Because that was the timing of the pagan festival. Nothing to do with Christianity. Likewise Christmas (which corresponds to the winter solistice).
William, Manchester
Brilliant! Another victory for us atheists! I challenge anyone to maintain their faith in the face of this astounding revelation about dates.
60 Responses to “William Blows Minds For A Living”
but he didn’t claim to be disproving god, or blowing anyone’s mind. he just pointed out something interesting about the dates that not everyone may be aware of. where’s the prattery?
facepalm
I find that the best way of predicting Easter is to look out for tiny signs in the world around, such as aisles full of chocolate eggs at the supermarket, or the appearance of the words “Easter Sunday” on my calendar.
No doubt any Jews reading HYS will be delighted to be told that Passover is a pagan festival. Not to mention people from countries that celebrate Christmas in early December or January, weeks away from the solstice.
Anyway, my dates are just brown and wrinkly.
Or maybe Good Friday is designed to coincide with the Jewish Passover (since that is when Jesus is thought to have died) and Easter Sunday is on the third day after this.
Someone needs to tell the Jews that they’ve been celebrating a pagan festival for thousands of years, unknowingly part of a conspiracy to set the date of Easter on a day that has “nothing to do with Christianity”.
As for Christmas, the very first Christians to celebrate Christmas appear to have been the Egyptians, who celebrated it on the 25th of their month of Pachon. Others celebrated it on the 24th or 25th of the month of Pharmuthi.
Different areas ended up with their own ideas for the day, month and year of Christ’s birth, so when the celebration was standardised to the 25th of December, this probably wasn’t the worst choice in the world, even if it was influenced by pagan practise at the time.
ok, if the easter date thing is entirely made up (as opposed to the christmas date thing, which isn’t), my bad. =) i was looking for prattery in the delivery, rather than simple factual error.
i’d have to say “orthodox christians use a different date!” is one of the weaker arguments possible, though, rod..
Don’t be silly. That will just tell you that the christmas holiday is almost over.
Lets get this ‘my bad’ nonesense banned. After all, we’re not Americans are we?
You cannot claim ownership of an adjective.
Arguments? If I wanted arguments I’d post on HYS. Our job is just to take the piss out of arrogant morons.
People can have what ever religion they want as long as it dosent involve two things:
1) Banning me from drinking.
2) Looking like a fuckwit in public.
Athisum fails on the second, as it requires you to spout stupid Dogma like that.
I think it’s a bit unfair to have a pop at William for imparting a bit of semi-interesting trivia.
But he’s probably a cunt anyway, so carry on.
@steve:
athiesm is not a belief or a way of life, you shouldn’t group people who don’t belive in god with people who do. thiests reguarily make bigger “fuckwits” of themselves than atheists do.
If you can’t understand such simply terminolagy, then i advise you to stop drinking.
Whether it’s a factual error is debatable. Easter now involves rabbits and eggs which, while you may look as long and hard as you like, don’t really feature too prominently in the whole crucifixion story. As far as being connected to Passover, there are plenty of historians who believe the Jews’ exodus never happened, making a feast to commemorate the event somewhat redundant, and making its precise date even more redundant.
And Steve, what’s ‘athisum’?
@Miguel,
No, I was calling him a fuckwit. Please see Rod Wrongnob.
Ill stop thinking of athiesm as a belief system when athiests stop spouting dogma and stop acting like a religious group, and let people just get on with there lifes.
athisum is a typo. Please see past posts on not becoming spelling or gramma nazis.
One who denies the existence of a spell-checker?
im a cunt.
I’ll stop thinking of Steve as a fuckwit when he learns to express his cretinous gibberish in something that approximates to the English language. Until then he take his ‘gramma nazis’ and shove ‘em up his arse
@Steve
Since you just violated your probition #2, which religion do you belong to? I presume you’re not an athisumerist.
Or are you perhaps just not too bright? Being not too bright can sometimes lead one to mimic religious behaviour unconsciously, I believe.
I generally predict Easter by noting the date that the Easter Eggs appear in the shops and then adding three months to that date.
Usually works out okay.
I’m fucked if I’m going to get into a discussion about how religion undergoes evolutionary processes to try and maintain its own survival, and as such tries to smooth over the myriad anomalies and coincidences in the same way film makers, comic writers and TV series producers try to explain how Superman / JR / Bill Bixby wasn’t really dead and it was just a dream / clone / arse pineapple.
I’m far too busy worshipping the Atheist NotGod, which happens to be Melvyn Bragg if you weren’t aware.
@steve
“Ill stop thinking of athiesm as a belief system when athiests stop spouting dogma and stop acting like a religious group, and let people just get on with there lifes.”
it’s not very often that i get random athiests knocking on my door demanding that i follow their way of life.
i have never heard of large groups of athiests coming together to do anything at all.
so i have to ask, where do you live that you find such occurences?
This whole ‘Christian festival are at the same time as pagan ones, therefore blah blah blah…’ statement is trite.
As we live on a planet with a roughly uniform sidereal year and tilted axis of rotation, there are a set number of significant dates derived from astronomical observation to which attach dates of religious significance.
If I was God and wanted to establish a new religion, in order to avoid confusion with preceding belief systems I’d move the planet to a new orbit, tweak the tilt, perhaps give it a bit of flick to adjust the rotational velocity, and so on.
Don’t see too many Martian or Venusian atheists these days, do we? That showed the bastards.
@Steve,
“Ill stop thinking of athiesm as a belief system when athiests stop spouting dogma and stop acting like a religious group, and let people just get on with there lifes.”
So pointing out discrepancies about Easter and Christmas and questioning some popular misconceptions is dogma? That’s some low threshold you have. Do you write to Coca Cola and complain about the dogmatic use of nutrition facts on the can too?
@Anyone
How do I quote previous comments?
“Easter now involves rabbits and eggs which, while you may look as long and hard as you like, don’t really feature too prominently in the whole crucifixion story.”
This is true, and maybe they are a distraction from the real message. It’s not surprising that shops are decorated with pictures of eggs and bunnies rather than blood-stained crucifixes and burial tombs, though.
If you want a religious justification for them, though, it’s worth remembering that traditionally people used to give up eggs (and at a later date chocolate) for Lent, so giving eggs or egg-shaped chocolate was a natural way of celebrating Easter (when Lent ends). Giving up eggs and milk and butter is also why pancakes are traditionally made on Shrove Tuesday.
Also, somewhere along the line, people got the idea that bunnies laid eggs, possibly because the “nests” that hares make (called “forms”) are dips in the ground, which are also used by some birds to lay their eggs in. The idea of hares (which go “mad as a March hare” at about Easter time) delivering eggs to children seems to have emerged at some point, and transformed into the Easter Bunny tradition we have today.
So druids had “weekends”?
Ooh look! Tits!
Well, as long as we’re talking about mixed up mythology…
http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/cross.asp
Being an atheist with a bit of conviction and so not feeling the need to wave my arms and yell “I got the belief thing right, didn’t I? Tell me I’m right!”, could I kindly ask the rest of you spackers who share my belief to stop embarrassing us with your tired whining? Thanks.
He’s got his ‘solstice’ and his ‘equinox’ in the right order. He’s a bit of a strident Sixth Form Nerd with his rhetorical, “You know how to predict easter right?” and, “And why is that?” But there are lower hanging, much juicier turds to be plucked from The Garden of HYS’s The Tree of Ignorance.
So, in the style of many HYSers’ irritating, self-righteous sign off… there’s nothing to see here people, move along… move along.
The quote I heard was that “atheism is a religion just like not collecting stamps is a hobby.”
Should clear that up.Let people give each other chocolate is my vote. I like chocolate!
*sigh* Pagan ≠ atheist.
Fuck it, I’m off to eat the eggs that my bunny just laid.
I think Nelson’s point is that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD knows this already, and yet it gets pointed out by a million dullards every single Easter and Christmas (mostly Cristmas, I find).
I may be wrong.
Fuck you William you lying little shit!
Everybody knows the Baby Jebus was a real person what came to Earth to die for our bins and everything. And on the third day the Easter Bunny and Santa flew out of the sky in a magical sleigh and shot all the Romans and shit and pulled the Baby Jebus out of his tomb and did the Heimlich Manouvre to bring him back to life so’s Darth Vader could tell him he was his dad and stuff and he could go back up into space and blow up the Death Star and live happily ever after with Saint Jade and that!
I read it in a fucking book – or possibly watched it in a film with Charlton Heston and everything – so it MUST be true!
You’re just a big fat fucking liar with burning pants you are!
You need to have a working week to have a weekend. All the druids I’ve seen at Glastonbury are quite clearly are significant tax contributors. Bless ‘em.
Atheism is a set of beliefs which influence its believers’ life and morality, just like doubting the existence of the postal service is a set of beliefs which influence its believers’ life and stamp collecting.
‘not’… there is a very significant ‘not’ missing from that sentence where the second ‘are’ shouldn’t be. Balls, it’s divine retribution for being smug.
If His powers, these days, only stretch to causing typos, I don’t think we have much to fear from rejecting god.
Wow, this is the biggest bowl of arse gravy I have ever seen on this website
Noooo!!! I’ll cease to exist!!!
In much the same way that fuckwittery is a competence.
But you weren’t.
Blah blah blahblah JOHN ADAIR blahblahblah. Blah, blahblah stoat scrotum blah. Blah blah blah blah blah.
Dr Shade – where do the Smurfs figure in your otherwise entirely accurate account of the Easter story?
Why the fuck are so many shops shut on Easter Sunday? It’d be a great day to go shopping. I mean, Christmas is fair enough I’m too busy eating turkey and opening presents to go shopping.
Er… Wonder where that came from. Yeah, pagan festival and did anyone know that Coca Cola made Santa red and white? (except they didn’t).
Can you bring back the blah filter please? I think HYS has cunningly invaded SYB.
Ok here goes, I will now bring down the whole edifice of Christianity with a single MINDBLOWING manifesto of revelations that no-one has thought of before. The pope will declare himself an atheist after reading this, If I’m right.
1) Christmas Day was originally a pagan festival
2) Mithras was BORN IN A STABLE
3) Osiris rose on the 3rd day
HAHA, I can hear the church doors closing all over the world. I can see dirt farmers in Bogfuck, Idaho prising their jesus fish offa their pick up tracks and saying “Dammit, now I gotta be a secular humanist”
pick-up trucks, not tracks.
Oh deary me
It’s a shame really, because he seemed so certain. It’s just a pity that he’s wrong on both counts. The timing of Easter has bog all to do with Paganism (which kind exactly?) or Judaism (Passover is not timed to any solstice/equinox, it starts on whatever day of the week the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan chances to be). Ditto Christmas, not timed to a solstice either. Still, game effort, next time you plan on being smug, William, do try to be right.
That is all.
Mmmm, and to quote Malcolm Muggeridge when he was still with Monty Python, womens’ tits and/or bottoms are appreciated by atheists, pagans and Christians alike.
As long as I get free chocolate and a long weekend, Easter’s good with me. I don’t give a fuck about whether it’s Christian, Jewish or Pagan in origin – it could be a celebration of the anniversary of Jeremy Kyle getting a huge bunch of piles for all I care. Same goes for Christmas.
Never understood why it’s called Good Friday though. Surely Rather Unpleasant Friday would have been more accurate?
It’s very rare for me to think that a Jade Goody joke would IMPROVE a thread on SYB.
Somebody make me laugh before I decide to return to ‘Get Huntley Off Facebook’. Kfanks.
I have read this entire thread.
Now I am banging my head repeatedly in the floor. It hurts but it relieves the spiritual turmoil.
william writes “predict” when he means “calculate”, and resultingly sounds a bit foolish.
goldstein – bravo. pigfrottage – i love that stamp quote
I am a non-believer but define my intellectual position as agnostic. This seems to confuse several of my atheist friends who always seem to default back to thinking that I am Christian. Obviously I deserve no better because of my awful woolliness, but it does seem strange. Do I somehow not unbelieve enough?
Oddly enough; a sudden or devout intrest in religion or the occult is often an indication of mental illness. Just thought I’d pop that in there.
I always think it’s unfair that religious beliefs are considered normal whereas a more original exciting belief such as that failing to count all the grains of rice in a meal will lead to evil goats growing out of one’s ears is somehow “mad”.
Blah blah blah agnostic blah blah goats blah blah blah blah can’t spell blah blah blah I have the right blah blah blah blah cunt.