EASTER GREETINGS

Yeah, I know I link to this every Easter, but it's a message I think well worth repeating. From Real Art back in April of 2003:

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.

More here.

Since I first managed to articulate my thoughts on Easter five years ago, it just becomes more and more clear. Easter is all about Hell. I mean, okay, it's ostensibly about Heaven, and God's "wonderful gift," the get-out-of-jail-free card known as "salvation," but really, when you take a no nonsense look at the overall philosophy surrounding the concept of salvation, you see that you simply cannot separate it from the notion of Hell, and the Christian point of view that we all deserve to go there. No matter what.

And the only way out of this "eternal suffering," which is cruel and inhumane at face value, is to embrace an ideology, or in Christian code-speak, "accepting Jesus into your heart," that is deeply immoral: in short, becoming a Christian is to endorse torture as right and good.

No thanks. I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.

So, where I'm at today is believing that if the Biblical God Yahweh is, in fact, the creator of the universe, which he's not, but hypothetically speaking, I would still reject Him. I mean, He's the god of genocide, always commanding his chosen race to destroy utterly various tribes and ethnicities occupying land He promised to his children, or doing it Himself when the mood strikes him. He's the God of cruelty, commanding his prophets and other believers to sacrifice their children or stone sinners to death. He inflicts lightning quick death for the slightest transgression, up to and including calling a prophet an "old bald man."

You just can't get away from the fact that the great god Yahweh, if you take the Bible seriously, is crazy, or evil, or both. No fucking way I'm going to worship such a monster, much less claim its "morality" as my own. But today hundreds of millions throughout the world are doing exactly that, totally convinced that they are siding with "good." I wish I could simply play glib and say something like, "bunch of poor sots," but cruel inhuman Christian "morality" is omnipresent, at least in the US. And people pay the price for that.

When you get right down to it, Easter is sick and horrible. If you're serious about morality, serious about creating and promoting good in the world, Easter is a day of grief.



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