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"Easter is a pagan holiday" nonsense is like a smell embedded in fabric that no amount of scrubbing ever manages to fully remove. But I'll do a little deboonking.

The first and ultimate deboonk is that Jesus really did rise from the grave as a matter of historical fact. So even if all the practices and methods of celebration do have explicit pagan roots, that fact is completely irrelevant. What we're celebrating is Jesus's resurrection, not springtime or planting season, or a fertility festival. You can't accidentally worship a pagan fertility spirit when celebrating Easter.

An obvious analogy should spread some light. When we think "cake" we usually think "birthday." But you can use cake to celebrate anything, like a wedding or retirement. Saying that having a religious festival in the spring is inherently pagan is as silly as saying cake is inherently for birthdays. The method of celebration is incidental, what matters is what you're celebrating.

First claim in the video: Eostore remained the name of a month, and therefore the cult was still active. There's really no reason to think this. What things are called lingers a long, long time after the cultural reference has ceased existing or become irrelevant. Look up the original reference for the word "OK" as just one example.

Second claim: Eostore is cognate with other "dawn goddesses" from across Europe. Not really relevant, but worth noting that it was really only the Romans who bought into this kind of divine occasionalism, the idea that, say, the Germanic chief storm god and Jupiter were actually the same being. Going by the raw data concerning various spirits and taking everything at face value, you could posit that ancient European pantheons followed similar hierarchical structures. Otherwise the claims made about various spirits are mutually exclusive.

Third claim: Eostore was worshipped all over northwestern Europe. The presenter relies heavily on assuming (but never bothering to prove) occasionalism, and cognates to draw parallels. This doesn't really hold up for reasons i mentioned previously, and all of this is still irrelevant.

Fourth point: Apparently these dawn goddesses were gigasluts, and the pagan rituals that celebrate them were sexually charged. Does that sound anything like Jesus's resurrection?

My takeaway from this video is that it's irrelevant to the point at hand, and being charitable, only establishes that a month in springtime in the anglophone world is named after a pagan goddess.

RT: https://poa.st/objects/9d2764b1-a7c3-4c70-82b6-2dbc18185d93

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