Questions Copyright 2001 by Kenneth W. Collins. All rights reserved. The bunny has nothing to do with Easter.
Most societies depend on the fertility of their fields for food.
They depend on the fertility of their farm animals not just for food, but also for the muscle power to pull the plow and the grindstone, and they depend on the fertility of their own bodies to produce sons who can labor in the fields and daughters who can fetch dowries. So natural religions generally center on fertility of everything in the field, the barn, and the marriage bed. In a fertility religion, the greatest good is marriage and bearing children. This can lead to gross immorality, as happened in the middle east in ancient times, because infertile people sought a remedy in the arms of the priests and priestesses and it became a religious act, because by having union with the priest or priestess, they were communing with the pagan fertility god. The Old and New Testament writers constantly condemned this, because for them it was a contemporaneous practice.