I am always asking what we are celebrating at Easter. As a child I looked forward to chocolate eggs from Peter Cottontail and other goodies. As I got older I was told it is a celebration of Jesus dying on the cross for us. I just could never get away from the rabbits and eggs, what did this have to do with our savior.
As I got older and went on my worldly secular way embracing "pop culture" and all the unimportant nonsense that comes with it, I never questioned the "rituals " I was taught as a child. I went with what I was taught, nobody would teach me wrong, right? Not purposely anyway. So I went on my blissful merry way........trusting what I had been taught.
Trusting what your taught can be deadly, I was taught that islam was one of the Abrahamic religions. Islam is an evil suicidal death cult. Islam is an ideology. 9/11 got me to study the quran because I wanted to know where exactly these people got the idea that it was acceptable to murder in Gods name. which turned me back to the true word of God
So after 9/11 I became interested in Scripture again, this time with an older more patient mind willing to do critical thinking. And critical I have been.
Jesus/Yahshua was nailed to a pole on Passover, Scripture tells us this. So what were we celebrating in 2008? 2008 is not the only time we see this. If easter is about our savior why the rabbit and the eggs.....
Here is an interesting exert from Ken Powers book " A Future History" I am not saying this is gospel but it should get you to think and maybe even get down to some investigating.....
"All that being said, note that we’re well over halfway through the Revelation when we see one of the primary players for the very first time: “And another angel followed, saying, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she has made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” (Revelation 14:8) If we can figure out who or what Babylon is, we’ll be well on our way toward understanding what angers Yahweh in this present world. Useful information indeed.
The angel here was referring to scripture: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen! And all the carved images of her gods He has broken to the ground.” (Isaiah 21:9) When Isaiah penned these words, Babylon’s (i.e., the city’s) glory days were still a hundred and fifty years in the future. But by the time John’s angel repeated the refrain, Babylon as a political entity had been dead for half a millennium. So it’s clear that neither messenger was talking about temporal military or political power. Rather, both passages speak of God’s judgment upon idolatry. Fornication or adultery, as we saw in Hosea’s prophecy, is invariably a picture of false worship—of giving to another “god” what rightfully belongs exclusively to Yahweh. Isaiah talks about the “carved images of her gods,” but idolatry goes beyond the worship of “graven images.” It is anything that takes the place of God in our lives.
I can’t speak for the whole world, but I know Americans pretty well. We worship some very strange things. Of course, there are the big three (power, sex, and money), but we obsess over pointless fluff as well. The toys. The career (or worse, the work itself). The car, the house, the lawn, for cryin’ out loud. Relationships, recreation, children, friends, health, political causes—even church. I have heard of fundamentalist Christians being accused of worshipping the Bible. Intrinsically, there’s nothing wrong with any of these things—not even power, sex, and money—but if these things obstruct or take the place of our personal relationship with Yahweh, they become wrong; they become our “carved images.” The good things in our lives are gifts from God—they’re not supposed to be mistaken for gods themselves.
Babylon, then, is a code word for idolatry. But it’s also a physical place (a few miles down the river from Baghdad), with a history that collided with that of God’s people on occasion. Some Bible expositors teach that it will rise again as a world power in the last days. And at first glance, a few passages like this one seem to support that view: “Then the angel who talked with me came out and said to me, ‘Lift your eyes now, and see what this is that goes forth.’ So I asked, ‘What is it?’ And he said, ‘It is a basket that is going forth.’ He also said, ‘This is their resemblance throughout the earth: here is a lead disc lifted up, and this is a woman sitting inside the basket.’ Then he said, ‘This is Wickedness!’ And he thrust her down into the basket, and threw the lead cover over its mouth. Then I raised my eyes and looked, and there were two women, coming with the wind in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork, and they lifted up the basket between earth and heaven. So I said to the angel who talked with me, ‘Where are they carrying the basket?’ And he said to me, ‘To build a house for it in the land of Shinar [Babylon]; when it is ready, the basket will be set there on its base.’” (Zechariah 5:5-11) God is telling the prophet that he intends to “keep a lid on” the whore of Babylon until her “house” is ready. Is this a literal place, or only a metaphor for the form she will assume in the last days? Let’s look carefully at the record.
We first see the city in Genesis, shortly after the flood. “Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. Then they said to one another… ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.’ But Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And Yahweh said, ‘Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth; and from there Yahweh scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.” (Genesis 11:1-9)
A cursory reading of this passage might lead you to think that Yahweh was a petty and vindictive God, afraid that people would get so smart they would accomplish great things. So in a jealous fit, He used his magical powers to squash their dreams like a bug, changing their language comprehension so they couldn’t communicate with each other. That picture couldn’t be farther from the truth. What actually happened was that Noah’s great grandson Nimrod, along with his wife, Semiramis, began a secret cult that deified its founders. It came to be called a “mystery religion” because its hidden doctrines were revealed little by little to its followers—the really nasty stuff remaining a secret until the devotee was too compromised to back out. Yahweh chose to divide the populace to slow this insidious false doctrine’s spread among men.
Though the details have been muddled by time and a plethora of conflicting traditions, the religion seems to have been based upon the aggressive personality of Nimrod and the insatiable ambition of Semiramis. Nimrod was known as “a mighty hunter before the Lord,” that is, a warrior, a conqueror, a despot—the first of his breed (after the flood, at least). His ruthlessness led to his being worshiped as a demi-god during his lifetime.
Semiramis may have been born of humble stock, but her beauty elevated her to the position of Nimrod’s queen. Being the wife of a demi-god had its perks, as you might imagine. But Nimrod died unexpectedly. Faced with seeing her position of power evaporate for want of a male sitting on the throne beside her, Semiramis became pregnant—long after Nimrod’s untimely demise (oops)—and bore a son, Tammuz, at the winter solstice. The boy, of course, was claimed to have been miraculously conceived, and he was marketed as the fulfillment of the Messiah prophecy of Genesis 3:15—the seed of the woman who would crush the head of Satan. Semiramis was positioned as the holy (if not quite virgin) mother, the queen of heaven, having been impregnated by her now-fully-deified late husband. This made Semiramis the prototype for the goddess of fertility. Because he was born near the winter solstice, on December 24th or 25th, Tammuz was worshiped as the Sun God, the conqueror of winter’s darkness, celebrated by the burning of the “log of the son,” or “yule” as it’s called in the Chaldean tongue.
Alas, no good scam lasts forever. According to the legend, Tammuz was killed in his fortieth year by a wild boar. (By some accounts, it was Nimrod who was boared to death, but the legend stuck to Tammuz, who was supposedly the reincarnated Nimrod. Other accounts state that Nimrod was slain by Shem (Noah’s son) for his idolatry and cut in pieces as a warning.) Satan needed a rebirth or resurrection miracle if he hoped to pass his boy off as the Messiah (remember, the Genesis 3 prophecy had said the serpent would only “bruise his heel”), so Tammuz was said to have been brought back to life as a miraculous egg that descended from heaven into the Euphrates River, from which hatched a rabbit. Tammuz’ birth was celebrated every December 25th by hanging silver and gold-covered balls upon an evergreen tree. The phallic inference was lost on no one. It was a fertility cult, after all.
Every spring, the faithful would feign sorrow, “weeping for Tammuz,” for forty days (cf. Ezekiel 8:14), one day for every year of his life. At the end of the mourning period, though, there was a day of great rejoicing for the reincarnated “son of god.” That day they would ritually slay and eat the boar that had killed Tammuz. There was also a ritual in which the high priest of Babylon would impregnate a lucky “volunteer,” whose child could be expected to be born the following winter. Here’s where the thing got really demonic. The highlight of this annual spring festival of Semiramis (who was also known as Astarte by the Assyrians, Inanna by the Sumerians, Asthoreth by the Caananites, and Ishtar by the Akkadians) was when the priest would ritually kill the three-month-old baby who had been conceived during the previous year’s celebration, dyeing Ishtar eggs red in the innocent child’s blood.
I don’t know how to break it to you, but your “Christian” holiday traditions are a lie, right out of the pit of hell. It was not Yahshua who was born on the 25th of December; it was Tammuz and every subsequent permutation of the “sun god.” Evergreen trees hung with festive balls, holiday candles, mistletoe, yule logs—even the Christmas goose—all have pagan origins, and they’re all an abomination to Yahweh. (All of the historical evidence points to a birthday for Yahshua at the Feast of Tabernacles, in the autumn of 2 B.C.) And Easter? Forty-day Lenten fasts preceding the big day (and lascivious carnivals preceding Lent), colored eggs, and the traditional Easter ham were all instituted to honor not Christ, but Satan’s false redeemer, Tammuz. It’s no wonder Yahweh declared swine’s flesh unclean in the Torah.
All of this was Satan’s counterfeit of Yahweh’s plan for the redemption of mankind. The center of worship for Nimrod’s mystery religion was Babel, or Babylon, one of four cities he founded on the plain of Shinar, in the Euphrates river valley. Yahweh, of course, could have wiped out Nimrod’s little scheme on day one. But as we have seen time and again, God is (if you’ll pardon the expression) pro-choice. He won’t force anyone to love him, but rather lets us choose, for good or ill, and then usually gives us time to repent of our bad choices. That’s exactly what He did here. The earth’s languages were divided in the days of Peleg, who was six generations removed from Noah—two generations past the time of Nimrod (though on a different branch of the family tree). And why did Yahweh choose to split up the families of the world like this? It was primarily to separate—to keep holy—the people through whom He would someday provide the Messiah. We see this pattern of separation and isolation recurring in scripture, first here, then with Abraham, then with Moses at the Exodus, then with Joshua at the time of the conquest of Canaan. And what were the Canaanites doing that was so horrible they had to be wiped out? They were following the mystery religion of Babylon!
The city of Babylon went through its ups and downs (as city-states are wont to do), finally to reach its glory days under Nebuchadnezzar II in the sixth century B.C. At the very height of its power, as the Chaldeans were carting Yahweh’s rebellious people off in chains, the prophet Jeremiah, “Mr. Diplomacy,” declared concerning his nation’s new masters, “‘They shall not take from you a stone for a corner nor a stone for a foundation, but you shall be desolate forever,’ says Yahweh.” He gave the quartermaster of the captive Jewish King Zedekiah a message to take with him to his new home in exile. “Jeremiah wrote in a book all the evil that would come upon Babylon, all these words that are written against Babylon. And Jeremiah said to Seraiah, ‘When you arrive in Babylon and see it, and read all these words, then you shall say, “O Yahweh, You have spoken against this place to cut it off, so that none shall remain in it, neither man nor beast, but it shall be desolate forever.” Now it shall be, when you have finished reading this book, that you shall tie a stone to it and throw it out into the Euphrates. Then you shall say, “Thus Babylon shall sink and not rise from the catastrophe that I will bring upon her. And they shall be weary.”’” (Jeremiah 51:26, 60-64) “Desolate forever,” and “sink and not rise” sound to me like the city of Babylon is finished as a political entity. It will never rise from the sands of Iraq to be anything more than an archaeological dig, a tourist attraction. The spirit of Babylon however, the insidious fraud meant to replace Yahweh in the hearts of men, is a different story. That never left."
Scary, scary, scary. Remember there is nothing wrong with a healthy dose of intolerance!
