Under the definition for Easter inWebster’s Dictionary (College Edition)one finds: “originally the name of pagan vernal festival . . . Eastre, dawn goddess.”Further reading in an encyclopaedia, or most books on the holidays will identify this Eastre with the pagan goddess known variously as Eostre, Ishtar, Semeramis, and Astarte. This is the same Babylonian “Queen of Heaven,”whose worship is condemned in the Word of God (see Jeremiah Chapters 7 and 44).
Read what God says about the Queen of Heaven.
As noted in my comments about Bede. You'll also note that the holiday is only called Easter in English-speaking lands. From Wikipedia, about Eostre:
Old English Ēostre (also Ēastre) and Old High German Ôstarâ are the names of a putative Germanic goddess whose Anglo-Saxon month, Ēostur-monath, has given its name to the festival of Easter. Eostre is attested only by Bede, in his 8th century work De temporum ratione, where he states that Ēostur-monath was the equivalent to the month of April, and that feasts held in her honour during Ēostur-monath had died out by the time of his writing, replaced by the "Paschal month". The possibility of a Common Germanic goddess called *Austrōn- was examined in detail in 19th century Germanic philology, by Jacob Grimm and others, without coming to a definite conclusion.Linguists have identified the goddess as a Germanic form of the recontructed Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn, *Hausos, some scholars have debated whether or not Eostra is an invention of Bede's,
>> Further reading in an encyclopaedia, or most books on the holidays will identify this Eastre with the pagan goddess known variously as Eostre, Ishtar, Semeramis, and Astarte. This is the same Babylonian “Queen of Heaven,”whose worship is condemned in the Word of God (see Jeremiah Chapters 7 and 44). <<
By this, you mean the uneducated rantings of new-agers and radical fringe Christians, like the Branch Davidians. Astarte/Ishtar is associated with Aphrodite (Greek) and Venus (Latin). The Greco-Roman God of the dawn was Eos / Aurora. The word, "East" comes from "Eos." "Easter" was that which prompted one to East. Bede probably mistook the great antiquity of the Paschal month for having some pagan antecedents, given the name "Eostre," especially given the word's pagan routs, but again, I emphasize, Bede is the only historical record anywhere of any supposed Byrthonic god "Eostre."