re: What do people get out of going to church on Easter once a year?

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You're right, I am. Ghepetto has no right to punish Pinocchio for being made of wood.

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Ghepetto can punish Pinocchio for whatever he wants to, but God doesn't punish people for "being made out of wood" (whatever you want to relate that to). We are punished for our rebellion and willful disobedience.

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Yet you reject Thor, Vishnu, Allah, Zeus, Osiris and a thousand other gods for the same reasons I reject the christian god. You believe in your god and not the others for one reason and it has nothing to do with evidence or experience. Its logically inconsistent to reject all the Gods but one, since they all have the exact same amount of evidence for them.

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The only logical inconsistency would be to put all of those gods/religions on equal footing. See, the different religions teach things are contradictory to one another, so to accept them all would be to accept contradictions.

No, the only logical way to proceed would to accept only bits and pieces of different religions, accept one entire religion, or reject them all. The religion as laid out in the Bible is contradictory to all others, but I accept it as truth.

But I take issue with your statement that I don't accept the Bible based on any sort of evidence. I believe the Bible, itself, is an evidence. So is the change in my life based on something completely outside of myself. There are evidences that prove it as truth to me, but you may reject them as not being strong enough for yourself. I get that, but that's not the case for me.

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The Egyptian Gods predate Yahweh by 2000 years. The very concept of Yahweh didnt even exist until at the earliest 1500 BC. How do you mot understand this? Hundreds of Gods predate judaism and christianity. Yahweh was not even close to the first god to be conceived and thus calling other gods a perversion of him is nonsense. Men lived and died for hundreds of thousands of years before God ever supposedly revealed himself to a small tribe in the levant.

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Here you are using chronology in time as the source of truth for determining, well, truth.

If we assume the Bible is true, God revealed Himself and His nature to a lot of people prior to Moses (if we accept that he originally penned the Pentateuch). A lot of people knew of God prior to Abraham and even before Noah. If the history laid out in the Bible is accurate, then Yahweh was around prior to the Egyptian religion and their gods and before the Sumerians and their gods.

The issue you seem to be having is with chronology around when each religion was documented through archaeology. That doesn't determine truth, though. If God revealed Himself to people before the flood and after the flood (but before Moses) and no one wrote down those interactions (it was oral tradition first), then you wouldn't expect to find recorded evidence where there was none. Just because the Egyptians got their beliefs written in stone and on papyrus doesn't mean that their gods predated the God of the Bible.