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Calculating the Date of Easter
The God Plays Dice blog has an entertaining post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. "Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21... [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years]."
Come on, there must be some way to show that the date of Easter involves the number 666. With all the brutal evil things that have been done in the christian church's name, there has to be!
There's so many lies involving easter, so many people misled that a dead person came back to life when really someone who was almost dead just made a surprising recovery, there's got to be some evil references in this!
I'm so disappointed in this article.
I bet next people will believe that this guy's mother was somehow a virgin, and not just spouting the same lies that every young, newly sexually active woman says when confronted by her parents.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Actually it has far more interest for druids etc.
Sort of like Christmas being near another pagan day.
Yes, I'm really given up on tolerance for god-botherers as I find them to be, in the context of their faith, irrational. I was not trying to start an argument, just stating my position vis-a-vis the significance of this particular date relative to any other.
I never understood the whole stink with these fuzzy holidays. Isn't Easter supposed to be the day Jesus died or some other TV magic bullshit stunt of his ? I'm pretty sure he didn't perform complex astronomical calculations before deciding to get stabbed by a bunch of half-breeds.
I mean, Christianity is funny enough to begin with, but having a non-fixed historic date is the pinnacle of ridicule. Just pick a date and celebrate already... that's the point! The number isn't the important part. Why can't they just pull a number out of a hat and say Easter's on day N from now on ?
I only care because I celebrate post-Easter, and by "celebrate" I mean "eat lots of discounted milk chocolate". Maybe if they didn't land it on a Sunday each time, I could get a weekday off where there's actual good TV to watch, instead of the boring 60's Disney movies and Pope biographies.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Wow!
... and you can't see that those beliefs are just as false as every other religion that has existed throughout our species existance. It's a very self-centered and ignorant point of view to think that jesus is worth worshipping anymore than the THOUSANDS of different gods that were worshipped by your ancestors.
... you only have to stop believing in one more god.
You really truly are some dumbass aren't you!
There is an excellent chance that your twisted religious beliefs exist purely due to being born into it
You're actually very close to reforming, to becoming an atheist as you should.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"