I find Easter a very annoying business - the way it has turned-out. But in a revealing way. In particular, the dating of Easter is a combination of insanity and bureaucratic incompetence that discredits the early Christian church authorities.
More importantly; Easter is revealing of the unwiseness - indeed impossibility, if coherence is required - of regarding the traditions established by the ancient Christian church as primary: as authoritative and binding.
Firstly - Easter was declared to be the single most important celebration for Christians.
It was decided to create a movable feast, linked with the Jewish Passover festival not-practiced by Christians, to celebrate a fixed event: fixed not just in its timing, but in that it had a timing. The death and resurrection (and ascension) of Jesus constitutes a fixed point in the history of Men... so why does it oscillate unpredictable across some 35 days...
Okay, they decided to celebrate the birthday of a fixed event as a moveable feast; And Then to make that a movable feast that nobody to locate for sure until some days after
after it had passed.
The people in charge of choosing the timing of Easter created a system which the church was unable to calculate in advance with even acceptable accuracy until the time of the Venerable Bede (about 700 years AD) - and even then only by a tiny number elite scholars.
(Think about it - all of Christendom absolutely dependent on a handful of elite scholars. Is that really what Jesus would have wanted?)
This is because Easter depends on the Spring Equinox and the Full Moon (approximately; the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox...) - and there was no way of exactly predicting either Equinox or moon.
But nowadays - when we actually can calculate and predict these, the definition has been changed from the actual Spring Equinox to March 21 assumed-to-be the Equinox - despite that March 21st may or may not (as this year) be the date of the Equinox...
So, this week - the Equinox was on 20 March, Full Moon on the 21 March - which ought to mean that Easter was this Sunday coming (24 march) - but because the Equinox as been conventionally allocated to 21 March, Easter is delayed by another lunar month...
Actually, I cannot find any coherent and complete explanation as to why Easter this year still is not this weekend coming; because the Full Moon this week came just over an hour after the 21 March had already begun - so presumably there is another factor that has not been mentioned in the standard definition, and which I have failed to discover. Maybe the Equinox is declared to be at mid-day, or something?
(Should this kind of crazy calculation really be at the core of Christian practice? Is that really what Jesus would have wanted?)
Easter is - or rather was, because it hardly matters nowadays - erected-on nonsense. The Christian church built itself around nonsense.
And not just nonsense, but wicked nonsense - because it led to a great deal of trouble and strife; but that T&S did Not lead to a reconsideration of the false assumptions upon-which the nonsense had been constructed...
Again; behaviour typical of bureaucracy.
This whole business of Easter so typical of the workings of bureaucracy - e.g. to make something
both mandatory and impossible - that it is very revealing. Although they could not do it - the churches were in practice nonetheless compelled to calculate
Easter in advance; because (the choice was made, utterly without any scriptural mandate!) to precede the Feast of Easter by the most important fast of the year - Lent.
Because Lent was linked to Easter; the church was compelled exactly to predict the day of Easter - which could not be done.
Why such incoherence? Because bureaucracy is intrinsically totalitarian; and it is characteristic of totalitarianism to be dis-honest and anti-real. Bureaucracy is always lying and incompetent - and deals with the consequences by defining outcomes as true and necessary. In sum, bureaucracy makes a false reality; and insists that it is real.
And the consequence were serious strife, dissent, conflict about the date of Easter; which went on for many hundreds of years - and indeed still continues; with the date of celebrating Easter being a significant cause of division in the Eastern Orthodox church.
I find this revealing about the workings of the early Christian church at the highest level. They were unable to make a coherent decision. This means that the decision must have been arrived at via the systematic distortions of group decision-making - which result from the breaking down of a problem into segments, each of which is subject either to a vote, or the need for unanimity.
The decision of an individual person may be wrong, but is seldom incoherent when that individual is compelled to be responsible for it; but the decision of a group can be almost anything; and often is a decision that no individual within the group would have preferred. The decision of a meeting of church leaders is binding, even when incoherent. Incoherent decisions may - for reasons of 'group dynamics' be in practice ineradicable; because the same group cannot be re-gathered, and a better decision may not achieve consent so wrongness stands.
And this is what we find.
All this tells me that Christianity - the physical body of the church - was already an incompetent bureaucracy even in its early history. Since the early church did make such an objectively appalling mess over Easter, which it regarded as the most important of all matters; the early church revealed itself as being deeply corrupted, and such a group should obviously Not be trusted over other decisions.
As usual with Christianity; any easy or external source of authority is closed-off - because incoherent and unwise. If we had any idea of relying on mere tradition, Easter explodes it (or ought to, if we honest). Anything less or other than a profound and personal discernment is self-refuting - or, it should be, if we take seriously what we are claiming.
No Christian can (or should) be relying upon any external source of authority for final arbitration - not the authority of The Church (now or at any presumed point in the past), no person, no text, no system of logic.
The necessary essence Must Be simple, in order that we can comprehend it in order that we may have faith - so simple that it must be directly knowable by a single act of comprehension. When the Christian church made Easter its central celebration, it advertised loudly its own corruption and unsuitability.
If we fail to hear; that is our own fault.
