EASTER GRINCH:
Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell

Unlike Christmas, which I love, Easter always makes me feel a bit weird. I don’t like Easter. Why? Christmas seems to be less important theologically; it is more secularized. It is about birth, hope, and peace on Earth. As a celebration, it has many non-Christian roots. I also feel pretty sure that a man named Jesus was actually born at some point in history and that he went about “doing good.” Of course, he died, too. I have a great deal of difficulty, however, simply accepting on faith that that he came back to life. Easter, you see, celebrates Jesus’ resurrection. This is, philosophically, the BIG DEAL for Christians. His execution and resurrection not only illustrate, but also literally manifest the Christian concepts of both the sacrificial scapegoat (Jesus died for our sins so that we don’t have to: “the wages of sin is death”) and life everlasting as reward for obedience to God (“the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”). The resurrection is the most important Biblical point for Christians. It seemingly supersedes even the first and second greatest commandments according to Christ, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

I just can’t get into the concept of the resurrection and it’s not just because I have trouble believing that it happened. The older I get, the more I experience I gain, the more problematic the notions of good and evil, punishment and reward, and personal responsibility and personal choice become to me.

When I began studying theater at college in the mid 1980s, I was a conservative and something of a fundamentalist Christian. I was homophobic, which is a handicap in the world of the theater, and justified my homophobia by quoting from the Bible. As I befriended more and more gay theater students, my fundamentalist beliefs were somewhat shaken. I came to believe what my gay friends told me about themselves. They were gay for as long as they could remember. They had no more choice in their sexual orientation than I had with my own. I came to believe that God made homosexuals to be what they are. What a big shaft! Exclusion and alienation on Earth and damnation in the afterlife. No just God would do this. This was the theological point that first made me question the Bible and my fundamentalist interpretation of it.

Around the same time, a childhood friend, Arthur, brutally beat a popular middle-aged couple to death with a tire iron in their home. He was once a really good kid, from a really good family. As children, he, his brothers, my brothers and I played football in the street. His older sisters babysat us often. Their mother fed my family. Our mother fed their family. Arthur, like so many other good kids gone bad, fell in with the wrong crowd. He committed a few petty crimes in high school. He started doing heavy drugs like crystal meth that seemingly altered his understanding of himself, others, and the world. And, in a botched burglary, presumably to raise drug money to feed his addictions, he finally committed the greatest of crimes. Arthur eventually turned himself in and cooperated fully with the Keystone-like county constables investigating the crime who had found no leads—his confession saved his own life while showing that he still had a conscience.

Arthur became a murderer, but deep in his heart still existed the good boy that I had played football with when I was a child. Surely, Arthur bears responsibility for his actions and must now live the rest of his life in prison, but I know that his experiences also warped his ability to clearly see the difference between right and wrong. I realized that, given similar experiences, I could be him: under the right circumstances, we are all murderers. As the Apostle Paul writes, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Good and evil are not so cut and dried.

A few years later, I was making what would eventually be an aborted attempt at graduate school in the University of Houston Theater Department. The summer before I started attending classes, a well-liked mime and movement professor stabbed to death a well liked recently graduated actress, with whom he was having an affair. It was a very public crime committed during the daytime in a fairly crowded city park with lots of witnesses. Mondo bizarre. Because both the murderer and the victim were so popular, the killing seemed to heavily affect the mood of both the students and faculty when they returned from their summer vacation. The movement professor eventually managed to kill himself later that semester.

I was taking a class taught by a friend of the ill-fated lovers, department chairman and Shakespeare expert, Dr. Sydney Berger. He weaved the murder into one of his lectures: “I know Claude and he is a good man.” He then asked a question that reverberates in my mind over a decade later, “is evil what a man is or what a man does?” To anyone who is free of Biblical notions of right and wrong, the answer is obvious. Evil is what a man does. All people do good. All people do evil. Humans are neither good nor bad; they are simply humans, capable of both.

Over the years these experiences have coalesced in my mind. I have finally reached a few conclusions. First, it’s pretty easy for me to be good. I’ve had an easy life. I have wanted for almost nothing. I have a loving and emotionally supportive family. I am well educated. Nothing particularly bad has ever happened to me. I deserve none of this. I have gotten this wonderful life because of luck, because of the circumstances of my birth. Second, if my ability to easily be good is, by and large, due to luck, any notions of absolute individual responsibility for good and evil become, at best, problematic. Third, Heaven and Hell, the absolute reward and the absolute punishment for good and evil, become absurdly simplistic, absurdly unfair. As the great philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell writes, “eternal punishment is inhumane.” I have discovered that I can no longer believe in Hell, as no just God would ever condemn souls to such a place. I have realized that I no longer care about Heaven—why should I be rewarded for the circumstances of my birth? I’ve already received ample reward here on Earth. Furthermore, doing good has become to me an end unto itself, with its own rewards. Because I now know that I, too, am capable of great evil, it is now much easier to forgive those who have wronged me. Abandoning the prison of the Heaven/Hell concept has allowed me to become a more enlightened person, a more moral person.

So, this is why I love Christmas, but kind of hate Easter. Christmas is love and hope. Easter is sin and punishment. I am no longer able to conceptualize morality in such a black and white way. Furthermore, I believe that such thinking actually undermines morality. We ought to do good things because it is the right thing to do, because it eases suffering, because it makes us and others happy. Doing good things in order to avoid Hell and gain admittance to Heaven is ultimately self-centered and greedy. See the paradox? Selfishness and greed are widely acknowledged to be evils: the notion of Heaven and Hell necessarily maneuvers people into a very problematic philosophical position. It is difficult for me to accept that good can be motivated by evil.

Today, most of America celebrates Easter. This means that America also celebrates its dedication to rigid, absolute concepts of good and evil, reward and punishment. This is no overstatement: “tough on crime,” harshly condemned sex scandals, boot camps for youth, and numerous other American social and legal institutions are the rotten fruit of the diseased tree of Christian morality—the dangerous oversimplification of terrorism as performed by “evil doers” results from this morality. I cannot be happy on Easter Sunday; there is nothing to celebrate. In fact, the reverse is true. Because this wildly popular, yet utterly misguided point of view results in so much unneeded suffering and pain, Easter makes me sad.

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