THE EASTER GRINCH IS HERE!

It's that time of year again.  I wrote this a decade ago:

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.

Read the rest here.

I'll do my usual best, however, to avoid sadness on Easter Sunday, simply by trying not to think about it.  I'm working a dinner shift, which will probably be pretty dead, given that most Easter celebrating is a daytime thing.  So it ought to be pretty easy to keep this celebration of torturing non-believers in eternal hellfire out of my mind.

I wrote this on a facebook comment thread earlier tonight because a guy was copping attitude with my girlfriend about zombie Jesuses in her newsfeed.  And she wasn't even pushing the idea, just noting its existence!  People are so sensitive.

With all due respect, to you, and to everybody really, Easter is absolutely the theological lynchpin on which the entire Christian faith is based. And that would be a benign enough statement in itself, but the ramification of the resurrection is that "all have sinned," and are worthy of nothing less than eternal torture and damnation in hellfire. How should a non-believer react to what is essentially an in-your-face condemnation, to TORTURE, for ETERNITY, all day long? I'd be offended, myself, if I didn't realize that the vast majority of Christians are totally clueless as to how extraordinarily offensive such a holiday must necessarily be to the non-believer.

I hear you, David, about respect. But the reality is that religion, in addition to being culture, and a way that people identify themselves, is also ideology. And Christian ideology has embedded deeply within it a horrifying and profoundly offensive statement that if one is not part of their fellowship, one is worth less than dog shit.

Personally, I think likening the resurrected Christ to a zombie is rather mild criticism, given what's at stake, philosophically speaking.

Anyway, for what it's worth, happy Easter.

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