The Catholic Church slowly and gradually grafted these pagan customs on to the name and resurrection of Christ Jesus by blending Paganism and biblical accounts together to create their calendar of Easter "holy days".

From The Last Two Million Years by The Reader’s Digest Association, 1981, page 215, we learn how the worship of a Pagan Goddess became the most important "Christian" Festival:

"Pagan rites absorbed

By a stroke of tactical genius the Church, while intolerant of pagan beliefs, was able to harness the powerful emotions generated by pagan worship. Often, churches were sited where temples had stood before, and many heathen festivals were added to the Christian calendar.

Easter, for instance, a time of sacrifice and rebirth in the Christian year, takes its name from the Norse goddess Eostre, in whose honour rites were held every spring. She in turn was simply a northern version of the Phoenician earth-mother Astarte, goddess of fertility. Easter eggs continue an age-old tradition in which the egg is a symbol of birth; and cakes which were eaten to mark the festivals of Astarte and Eostre were the direct ancestors of our hot-cross buns.

Bro. J. Thomas speaks in no uncertain terms of the apostacy and its "goddess" in Eureka:

"The catholic aerial is full of these deified ghosts, whose demonial images and relics are stored in the church bazaars dedicated to them, for the adoration of their besotted worshippers. All the apostles, and “the noble army of martyrs,” and the popes and cardinals, and “the fathers,” and Constantine, and Theodosius, and St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and a countless host of the same sort of deities, with the Immaculate Goddess Mary, “the Queen of Heaven,” at the head of them, are all supposed to be there, interceding with Mary’s Son for the safety and prosperity of their catholic adorers “whose public and private vows,” says Gibbon, “were addressed to their relics and images which disgraced the temples of the east.” This catholic aerial is supposed to be before the throne. The reader, therefore, may easily perceive the fitness of the historian’s style, in continuing: “The throne of the Almighty was darkened by a cloud of martyrs, saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration; while the Virgin Mary was invested with the name and honors of a goddess.They are, indeed, a cloud darkening the Almighty’s throne, so that no worshipper of daemonial ghosts, daemonial relics, and daemonial images, can see that throne, or find transmission for a single sigh."

 

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