REAL ART EASTER BASKET 2007
"Hoppy Horrifying Easter!!!"

As longtime Real Art readers know, I don't celebrate Easter. At all. I mean, okay, I'll eat the chocolate my mom sent me. Like these disgustingly sweet, but somehow irresistible Cadbury creme eggs.



Or these much better Cadbury caramel eggs.



Or even this delicious chocolate Peter Rabbit.



And how could I refuse these extraordinarily weird Lindt "mini lambs," complete with a black sheep? I guess I'm supposed to be the black sheep.



So yeah, I'll eat the chocolate. I even watched a bit of the four and a half hour long presentation of The Ten Commandments earlier this evening on ABC--even after all this acting training I'm getting here at LSU, I'm still a sucker for the 1950s style science fiction acting of Charleton Heston, and almost every other member of the cast, excluding, of course, Edward G. Robinson. But the more I think about it, the more I hate Easter.

Why? Easter is about eternal punishment and damnation.

Yeah yeah, I know it's supposed to be about how Jesus died to save us from such a cruel fate, but the fact that we need a savior simply means that God is either insane or evil. That is, no good and just god would ever, ever, ever condemn anybody to eternal hellfire. I mean, I can understand some punishment aimed at correction, you know, make you learn the error of your ways and all, but eternal punishment defies all reason. It's just plain sadistic. And if that's all part of God's plan, then he's fucking evil. Or crazy. Either way, if the Christians are right, this is one fucked up universe. I just can't accept it.

Here, I explained it much better a few years back:

EASTER GRINCH:
Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell

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.

Click here for the rest.

So I'll be hiding out Easter Sunday, doing my taxes and trying to forget about the cruel and horrifying Christian universe. But you know, there is a pretty good Peanuts Easter special, It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown.

Here, I've embedded it from myspace:

Peanuts- It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown


Hoppy horrifying Easter!

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