Christianity and Easter Symbolism

I picked up the following ideas from a post on Facebook - linking to a Website http://www.truthbeknown.com/easter.htm  - almost all of it ties back to the information in "The Pagan Christ" which I read recently [a very good read] and is the foundation of many esoteric belief systems. It sure makes you think!!

You will need to visit the link above - for the full explanation of the dates that make Easter move - and were known many thousands of years ago. It is a fascinating and scary article. Page down to find the text after the book adverts.

There is a really good argument that Christianity started as just one of several mystery cults which were common across the Roman Empire and, via the fertile crescent, go back to the Egyptian and north African civilisations and through Persia and Afghanistan on to India and even China, with the festivals also linked (by communication or because the dates are global) to other cultures in the Americas and South East Asia and even to Australia and other ab-original cultures and belief systems. The astronomy and skills needed to work it all out go back to thosands of years BC and were progressively refined.


It is fascinating that the early Pauline Epistles have no literal historical Jesus - just a conversion or awakening experience - that led Paul to to proclaim that the God 'in whom we live and move and have our being' is to be known in the incarnation of the Crossified One.The Gospels link this to an historical Jesus figure - but by the time they were written the myth was being adapted to the Judeo-Roman world, and the historicity is suspect. The package of early Christian practice and belief is best gleaned from Paul's letters.


The New Testament is thus a reworking of the myths of the Sun God, and his Divine-Human Son [Horus in Egyptian religion or with other names in other places] which couches the ancient myth in hidden language under the cover of a literal story about a Divine- Human Jesus figure who lived in Galilee, was cruxified [crossifiied] and raised (ascended) to the heavens. Christians need to take seriously the propect that their core beliefs are really a lieralising of a long standing myth - though of course "myth" does not mean an 'untruth', rather the telling of a powerful truth in coded ways.


The common core of almost all religions worldwide is that in our humanity there is also divinity. The Horus / Jesus figure is thus 'everyman' / everyone. The role of the religions is to awaken us to the divinity within so as to enable 'return' / reurrection. The package of belief in which you wrap the myth is neither here nor there - what matters is the truthfulness that lies hidden at the core of the myth - the divine presence in all that is.


The Gospels are as good and well written a literalisation as any to capture the truth of the human - divine leader (avatar) who dies and is raised - just as the sun dies in the autumn and rises in the spring to bring new life. I can still go to churches and enter in to the mythic story under its literalising crafting - and use the framework to remind me how to live - in recognition of the divinity in humanity, the power of of that presence to enlighten and change us, and the joy of the company of those on the way - even though I more and more think that the story that infuses Christianity is not a history at all, but a powerful mythic truth about the way this universe is, and the way we should live in it.
 
Your views most welcome.