Slashdot Mirror
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]."
I find it quite amusing that the birth of Jesus is pretty much set in stone (at least if I believe that day to be Christmas), but the date of his death (or resurrection) isn't.
;)
I guess even Christians smelled too much bullshit on the whole story, they rather kept it as vague as possible.
Feel free to tag this one under the whogivesashit category.
Interesting theory, and good analogy to the comic book industry. Both want you to return each week and buy their product, each wants you to become part of a group of people who follow their story, each fights to fill in the gaps to make their stories more complete.
But I wouldn't totally throw off the idea of Mary and family lying to cover her indescretions. Maybe when questioned, her father helped spread the word, being too softhearted to simply kill his daughter by stoning, the way he would have had to if this were a Muslim story.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
I've always thought it rather bizarre that Jesus is supposed to have been born on a fixed day (25th December), but his death (which is arguably even more important to Christianity) just kind of floats about sometime in spring. Yet presumably in Easter services the priest/vicar goes on about how "Jesus died on this day", as if it was actually a fixed date.
Why can't they just agree on a single date and stick to it? I mean, they make up so much other nonsense and claim it as hard fact, so why not this as well?
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
There was me thinking that Christianity was just some sun worship cult. But your post seems to say that's not the case. In fact it's based on other religions, who happened to be sun worship cults. That cleared it up for me.
Christmas = Winter Solstice
Easter = Spring Equinox
Michaelmas = Fall Equinox
Jesus = Rah
Those romans always trying to be in charge.
The correlation between the stories of Jesus/Rah/Buddha/Krishna etc is to strong to be anything but fabrication. One religion capitalizing on the history of another. Unless you are stating that the virgin birth, crucification, resurrection etc are historical truths?
While the direct worship of the sun is not acknowledged in the modern day Christian church it's traditions and architecture point explicitly to sun worship.
There is very little linking modern Christianity with the teachings of Jesus. Pauline Christianity has no direct link to Jesus. The Roman Catholic Church was based on Pauline Christianity.
I think that is the expression.
There are people that can draw very rational conclusions in one field while being completely irrational in the greater scheme of things.
That would apply to all Christian Scientists in my opinion (it is unfair to bag Copernicus and other older thinkers there, back in those times you could be punished if you did not adhere to your local religious orthodoxy, so it is not like thay had any choice).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If history tells us anything, if you want to invade France just do it whenever you want.
Copernicus was a priest but he wrote his works in secret from the church and had them only released post-mortem.
Not all christians are no-brain idiots, but the Church as an institution definitely is.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2