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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]."
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.