Fixing the date of Easter
Second, though, there was the desire to simply do this to symbolise the power that the state has to decide on such issues
The date of Easter should be fixed in order to demonstrate State Power. How that’s for a bit of fascism then?
There is also this joyousness:
I know that Easter is not just a Christian festival; it is also Passover.
Stupid cunt doesn’t know that they both wander around on their own schedules.
So, I feel that this is a case where the state should say that some order for the sake of assisting planning would be of benefit. But I also happen to think that statement of who has to the power to decide would, in itself, by symbolically important.
Tutto Nello Stato. Fascism, pure and simple. It should be done simply to demonstrate State Power.
It may not seem like a big deal, but power relationships matter, and this one is about the power of the established church, and all the nonsense (as, for example, was seen in the coronation last year) that goes with it. In that case breaking that power of the broader establishment that the established church symbolises does matter. That is why I think the date of Easter – or the spring festival of hope – should be fixed.
Jesu C onna pogo stick the man’s a shit.
Stopping Ramadam wandering all over the place is mor important, shirley ?
I presume he’s giving himself the power to make all nominally Christian countries, include orthodox ones use his preferred date to make sure all is in order across the world?
That should be a nice way to kick off WW3.
Next up, the state will force you to celebrate our dear leaders birthday, potato day.
In 1928 Parliament provided for this, allowing the date of Easter to be set by Order of Council as the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April.
Proviso: all churches had to agree to it.
So it never happened.
Can we just ditch it? I feel like Christmas is such a universally shared event amongst everyone that a public holiday works, but my leisure club was open yesterday, the small shops were all open. B&Q would be open except for the law.
@WB one would never know that Easter, not Christmas, is the most important Christian festival. (Not that one would know that either is a Christian festival from the BBC.) Handel’s “Messiah”, most performed in Advent, was written for Easter.
@Ottokring: Ramadan doesn’t wander about in the Islamic calendar, it’s the same month every year. You can imagine a muslim version of Murphy demanding that the Sun should sort itself out and go round the Earth in 354 days.
I’d be perfectly happy to see the date of Easter fixed. The UN should take the matter up – that would keep those twats busy for decades.
People are rather attached to having the Friday and Monday as holidays just as they are fairly wedded to the concept of Bank Holiday Mondays, so were the state to fix the date it would need be fixed to a weekend not a specific date like Christmas. Consequently some sort of algorithm would be required. Perhaps the state could decree this algorithm to be …..
the first Sunday following the first full moon on or after the spring equinox (pegged to March 21st for simplicity).
AndyF – the formula to calculate the date of Easter is actually very long. It was devised by astronomers and mathematicians over 1,000 years ago (I think). It took into account movements of the moon, leap years, shift in the equinox and more. It required major extensions in mathematics to be made.
It took a whole page in the book I read on our calendars.
There are mathematical models to predict Easter…all that the esteemed Professor need do is use one to predict the next few decades and then publicise his “research” as a public service .
Although, even a chap of his talents might struggle to get a grant for such work.
AtC
Exactly. People constantly telling us how clever Islam was 1100 years ago with Hard Sums, but their calendar is still purely lunar. I suppose out in the desert it doesn’t matter when harvest time is, because there isn’t one.
ps How to calculate Easter is in the Prayer Book, it is quite tricky to follow.
If Capt Potato had any capacity for self-mockery at all, this could have been a modestly good April Fool spoof.
However, we know better….
By the way… tecknick’ly, there’s no Easter in Jockland. Calvinism And All That. (Also no national holidays at all until the Edinburgh Gasworks started shoving its dirty great hooter in.) But the Glasgow Spring Holiday coincides with it because back in the 18th(?) Century, the city fathers decided there was so much business being done with England that it made sense to harmonize our holidays. No doubt if the SNP had been around at the time, they’d have screamed blue murder.
BiP: I think you’re being pessimistic. Apparently Rome and Constantinople want to decide a common date (not necessarily fixed; this is about the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars) for the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea next year. Fixing the date could tie the UN up for millennia.
Second, though, there was the desire to simply do this to symbolise the power that the state has to decide on such issues, and not leave them to a mystical tradition that now has little influence in the lives of most people in the country.
Wasn’t somebody on here claiming Ritchie claims to be a Christian?
But, in a multi-cultural country – and we most definitely are that, whatever the likes of Liz Truss and her cohort of followers think – then to pick out the festivals of some faiths rather than others does itself feel discriminatory.
Good. This is a Christian country, and people who don’t like that are free to fuck off to the shithole country of their choice.
It also ignores the non-committed reality of the lives of most people
“We are nihilists, Lebowski, we believe in NUSSING! That’s why you’ve got to fix the date of a religious festival we don’t believe in”.
I am not even being radical when all that I am doing is asking for a 96 year old peace of legislation be brought into use, at last
But it is radical (racism) when you expect the government to enforce immigration legislation already on the books.
It may not seem like a big deal, but power relationships matter, and this one is about the power of the established church, and all the nonsense (as, for example, was seen in the coronation last year) that goes with it. In that case breaking that power of the broader establishment that the established church symbolises does matter. That is why I think the date of Easter – or the spring festival of hope – should be fixed.
We’ve got to rub Christians’ noses in it, says man who will be permanently resident in Hell within the next 15 years, probably sooner since he seems like the kind of idiot who got triple vaxxed because of his religion.
NO FLOWERS.
It’s still quite interesting – the formula for working out the date of Easter was agreed after the (first) Council of Nicaea. It is indeed based on the date of Passover, which is always 14 Nisan (but as that is a lunar month it does indeed wander around compared with months in a fully solar calendar).
One of the reasons Nicaea came up with a different way of calculating Easter was they didn’t want to be reliant on the Jewish way of calculating the date for Passover – they were quite negative about Jews in those days (plus ça change). So they basically adopted a somewhat simplified version of the Jewish calculation, which strikes me as insufficiently radical. Why didn’t they just work out what day in the (then Julian) calendar 17 Nisan would have been in year 31 (or whatever they might have agreed the date of the Resurrection was) and then fix the date of Easter to that date? After all, Christ’s birth is celebrated on a fixed date.
Nonetheless, El Twatto is indeed a fascist Twatto dei Tutti Twatti.
“It is indeed based on the date of Passover, which is always 14 Nisan”. Says you. But a historian I read said that that is a misunderstanding. In the time of Jesus Passover was meant to involve “first fruits” of the soil. So if it had been an unusually hard winter, say, the priests would defer Passover to give a chance for some growth. Or if unusually mild they’d make Passover earlier.
It follows that nobody accurately knows the date of Jesus’s crucifixion.
A no more obvious example of the man’s mental illness exists.
@Arthur the Cat. Ramadan is always the same month of the Islamic lunar calendar, but it wanders about with reference to solar (i.e. sensible) calendars.
Ramadan is always the same month of the Islamic lunar calendar, but it wanders about with reference to solar (i.e. sensible) calendars.
It doesn’t really wander about the solar calendar but a steady progression of about 10 days (from memory) earlier each year.
Steve
We’ve got to rub Christians’ noses in it, says man who will be permanently resident in Hell within the next 15 years, probably sooner since he seems like the kind of idiot who got triple vaxxed because of his religion
Like Bill Clinton I believe in a place called Hope. I think he has had every COVID jab (so up to five). He certainly believed in banning unvaccinated people from international transport and thinks lockdown should still be in place. To quote from the film ‘Demolition Man’
‘He’s evil in a way you’ve only read about’
In the spirit of multiculturalism can’t we just have state holidays for all the different religious festivals
VP – Yes, this was Professor Spud in August 2023:
Why it is that a disease as serious as Covid has been subject to the most massive public misinformation programme by a government that wants to pretend that it is over when that is anything but the case will, one day, need to be the subject of a public inquiry.
All the world isn’t a battle between Good and Evil, it just feels that way sometimes. But Ritchie consistently picks Evil and lies, every damn time. In another time and place he’d have been a particularly nasty little Stasi official, lording it over the helpless and frightened.
People can get quite heated about when Easter is celebrated (see the synod of Whitby).
Easter’s a movable feast. If you want something fixed, don’t call it Easter.
I was going to write something. But this is so fucking stupid, even by his standards, that I can’t be bothered.
@El Draque
The complex calculations you are referring give the hypothetical date of Easter. Because of that horrible complexity 21st March was designated as the ecclesiastical date for the equinox (in AD325), irrespective of actual astronomical observation. This simplification takes out all of those nasty leap years and shifts of the equinox etc. hence the algorithm the first Sunday following the first full moon on or after the spring equinox (pegged to March 21st for simplicity). The result is that the observed date of Easter is sometimes different from the hypothetical date i.e. the hypothetical date is wrong for practical purposes.
This would actually show the limits of state power.
All the Christians would ignore the state date and use their own. Just as the Orthodox do at the moment.
I felt myself drawn to look up the First Council at Nicaea. Did seem to have been a remarkable shindig. Not only did they agree a way of calculating the day of Easter. They also prohibited the self-castration of clergy. Remarkably generous of them. I’d imagine the clergy were mightily relieved to have that temptation removed from them. But it does read like the comments section under one of the tri-professorii’s blog posts. People being banished to distant parts for incorrect thoughts & their writings burned. All so hauntingly familiar.
Passover is always on the 15th of Nissan, but is required to be in the spring, so
to harmonise (lunar) months with (solar) years, leap months are added when required.
For about 1800 years these leap months have been on a fixed schedule.
There’s nothing to say that the Christian festival of Easter (or the pagan one of Eostre, if you prefer) need also be a public holiday. In my youth we had a Bank Holiday for Ascension Day (a similar moveable feast 39 days after Easter) but it was moved to be the (fixed) May Day Bank Holiday. The world continued to turn.
@bis, The prohibition of self-castration was because some folks took Matthew 10: 9-12 literally: “9 And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery. 10 His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry. 11 But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. 12 For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”
And that was the temptation?
Doesn’t seem much of a temptation.
I was expecting gold & jewels.
Or at least an assistant professorship & some grant money.
The Council of Nicaea is where St. Nicholas punched out one of the other delegates. Yay Santa! 🙂
Chris M
And that was the fault of the EU. They insisted on a May Day holiday, so instead of it actually being May 1 it was the first Monday in May in Britain.
Most of Europe still gets Ascension Day off too. In fact it is impossible to get anything done in May on the continent because everyone is on holiday.
“In the spirit of multiculturalism can’t we just have state holidays for all the different religious festivals”
That’s approximately what Singapore does.
In fact it is impossible to get anything done in May on the continent because everyone is on holiday.
See also: August – and probably most of the remaining 10 months 🙂
I do enjoy this, because of how barking it makes Christianity look. We’ve just actually celebrated Oestra, which is a perfectly self respecting pagan equinox festival they’ve highjacked (as no doubt did Judaism) on a day depending on calculations set out by a bunch in 325 would have have made a Monty Python sketch look sensible & rational. And people believe this stuff?
BiP
That was the idea of Bank Holidays in the 19th Cent (1871 I think ).
At one point there were 125 ( or something including Jewish ) recognised possible holdays across the British Isles.
“Early Spring” replaces May Day and Ascension Day
“Late Spring” replaces Whitsun and Empire Day
August Bank Holiday ( originally at the beginning of Aug ) was entirely secular.
Boxing Day and Easter Monday became officially recognised then as well.
Ditto of course Xmas for the solstice. Couldn’t they think of anything for June?
I think you’re conflating Holy Days with vacation days there, Ottokring. They’re not always justification for skiving off. Unless you’re Spanish of course. I think we get San Juan here, who seems to be the patron saint of getting pissed & having barbecues on the beach. And fireworks of course. Can’t do anything without fireworks. You certainly don’t find anybody working anyway. Unless they’re counting the dosh in the bar.
BiS
Well in Germany and Austria they tend to be called ‘Window Days’ – so they have May Day, Ascension Day and Whitsun and if the calendar ( and religion) is right ( like this year ) Corpus Christi in May. If the non-Monday holidays fall on a Tuesday or Thursday then people will take the Monday or Friday off and often take advantage of the Holy Day to take a weeks holiday.
Really, when I worked in Munich and Vienna, May was an absolute disaster if we had an early Easter. I could just write it off, because no would be around.
In French “fair le pont”. Make the bridge to the weekend.
French public holidays are fixed days of the year – e.g. May 8 for Victoire*. So if they fall on a Saturday or Sunday, you get no extra holiday, but if they fall on a Tuesday or Thursday you get the ‘pont’ of an extra Monday or Friday, and it all evens out over the 365 days.
* when I worked for AXA we would sometimes ask why they celebrate VE when they didn’t actually fight all that much 🙂