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Easter Tidings

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It’s Easter time, which is one of the very-important-so-lets-go-to-Church Christian Holidays. Many Christians, well, the good ones, have been involved with some sort of lenten fast for the past forty days and it doesn’t end until Easter Sunday, which is in two days from today.

As a used-to-be-Christian who now regards himself as somewhere between a secular humanist, a buddhist, and a neo-pagan this holiday is much like all the other Christian holidays, which is to say, a giant batch of goof in order to facilitate cultural assimilation. The big holidays for Christians are Christmas and Easter. The birth and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Now, Christmas has it’s own special sort of silliness. We chop down trees and dress them with baubles and we have figures that occupy popular consciousness and the “Baby Jesus” only appears as a sideline player in that yearly conflagration of economic stimulus and material goodwill. The other holiday, the one we are adjacent to now, is Easter. Once again we have a cultural hodgepodge of really goofy things all colliding at the same time. At the core of it should be, but isn’t, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’ll get to the silliness of that later on, but bear with me. The holiday is supposed to be solemn with a celebration of this one mans ability to somehow pop back to life after being dead and through resurrection cleansing our sins in the eyes of God. Except none of that matters. Children don’t give a flying rip about Jesus Christ, he’s just a suave white guy (usually) who appears in quickly flashed artistic impressions of historical events and kids just get a general sense about all the hocus-pocus behind it all and just shrug because for a child the notion of death and resurrection are meaningless concepts. To Children, summer lasts forever and nobody dies. What kids associate with the holiday is the exact core of what the Christians tried to subvert by laying their tripartite-dead-notdead-heavy_mystery_time-God on top of pagan rituals. Like Eostre. A pagan germanic tradition that occurs in April and involves candy, rabbits, brightly colored eggs, and a host of deities from faiths that Christians find distasteful, like Eostre herself, a goddess, or Freyja, a teutonic goddess. So, in order to culturally assimilate the unwashed barbaric hordes you don’t try to kill them off en-masse, instead you co-opt their rituals and you pretend that it’s always been this way. You get to their children and before you know it, after a few generations come and go, the entire backstory has been whitewashed and a new narrative has been put in it’s place. The problem with whitewashing an old narrative is that it quite often hangs around. People still do the same things even if they don’t really know why any longer. So Christians assemble (like the pagans), they celebrate Easter (the pagans celebrate Eostre! Wait, it’s so close!), people assemble Easter Baskets full of candy, dyed eggs, fake plastic grass and a host of rabbit icons… holy crap. We’ve fallen completely off the Christian wagon kids! This is all dirty no-good filthy pagan crap! Where did Jesus go, we misplaced him, oops. But at the end, after all the egg-hunts and eating of chocolate rabbits, which, I must say is about as pagan as you can get, turning an icon into something edible and sweet, BOGGLE… and then to eat an Easter Ham, which I think is a really mean thing that Christians do as Jesus was a Jew and !@#$ KOSHER and last I checked PIG WAS NOT KOSHER oh whatever. After Easter dinner then everyone gets in their finery and toddles off to Church. Then and only then do we get heaping helpings of the steaming pile of Jesus Christ narrative. It’s a lot like Jesus Christ the cannon, being packed with Jesus Christ grapeshot and aimed at the belching rabbit-icon-eating/pig-eating/non-kosher horde of barbarians and fired with magical Jesus Christ gunpowder of guilt.

Even the timing of the holiday is annoyingly pagan. The Christians really don’t get how to whitewash and properly murder and cannibalize mythic narratives. They establish that Easter is the Sunday closest to the first full moon after the vernal equinox! What the HELL does the vernal equinox or the !@#$ MOON have to do with Jesus Christ? Huh!?! Oh wake up! It’s got nothing to do at all, it’s just a bunch of confused old men trying to retain control on what amounts to being an uncontrollable herd of sweaty messy barbarians. When you go to Church next, look around. Now imagine what it looked like 1600 to 1800 years ago. Never mind, it’s the same thing, only now you all think it’s true and believe and that’s really all that matters. You’ve bought the Christians cart of goods that they have for sale, but you still do quintessentially pagan things! If belief gives godlings life, then Krampus, Santa Claus, and Eostre are very much alive and well. Keep being good, keep eating rabbit icons, and keep on futzing about with dyed eggs! Eostre needs all your belief energy to even stand up to Big Daddy, JC, and the Spook.

Speaking of dead things coming back to life, the resurrection itself. What a monumental pile of hocus-pocus if I’ve ever seen it. We have never seen anyone go from well and truly dead to alive all on their own, except for once, 2000 years ago. Sure. What’s more plausible? That Jesus Christ died, went through hell, and then was resurrected, OR that he was nailed to a cross as a form of capital punishment, where he lapsed into a coma from exposure, malnutrition, and poor hydration then when “dead” hauled off the cross and then laid in state. Then after recovering from being in a coma, got up and wandered off?!? What if that was really what happened?

So Christians elect to believe that a dead man suddenly popped back to life and then they see the miracle of that and then tacitly agree to suspend all rational thought thereafter. Accept it, it’s the word of God. Accept it, it’s in the scriptures. Accept it, you have to if you believe. Accept it, or you’ll be a sinner.

Get off the collective cross, we need the wood.

So, enjoy the Easter fantasy. The pagan rituals you still perform without knowing why. Still buy into the narrative sold to you by the Christians and never feel any hint of awkwardness that you’ve suspended your own rational thoughts and given control of your actions over to old men who don’t even notice your existence. It sounds so silly, but, there it is.

And people wonder why we haven’t been visited by aliens or have mastered space travel. If you were an advanced alien culture, and you saw the kind of hocus-pocus that we humans readily believe in, would you elect to just do nothing or would you watch us very carefully to make sure we never leave the third planet from this unremarkable star on the edge of a very unremarkable galaxy?

So embarrassing. We aren’t ready, at this rate we won’t ever be ready. Not really.

Eggs

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The recent news of the Salmonella-tainted Eggs is bouncing around the 24 hour news cycle. My mom told me about Davidson’s Pasteurized Eggs, they are still raw, but rendered completely safe to consume because they’ve been treated with heat, not enough to coagulate the yolks and set the whites but enough to kill any potential infections of Salmonella that might be lurking within the egg. I am of course wanting to explore the MAFC, and a good portion of that is mastering the Sauces section, for which under-temperature eggs are a fundamental component.

I discovered that I could pasteurize my own eggs by raising an amount of water to 150 degrees and holding eggs suspended in this water for 5 minutes. To overcome this annoying inconvenience I thought I would write to my local supermarket chain, Meijers. I suggested that they carry Davidson’s Pasteurized Eggs and basically got a rebuff throwaway message from a Meijers representative who claimed that none of the eggs that Meijers sells was involved in the recall. As it may be, Meijers, that your eggs weren’t recalled does not necessarily mean that they are safe. Pasteurized eggs are safe. I would pay more for eggs that I knew were safe so I could feel okay with exploring the Sauce section of the MAFC. I can’t really just target Meijers, as WalMart, D&W, and Hardings, all the markets in our area do not carry pasteurized eggs. This isn’t the first time that I’ve contacted Meijers, so far it’s the third request I’ve made over the years for products that would do very well in our area. I’ve decided that contacting Meijers is a fool’s errand.

I suppose that if enough young and elderly die of Salmonella poisoning then Michigan will legislate to force egg pasteurization and Meijers will turn a tidy 180 and then aggressively pursue and market it to their customers. What bothers me deep down is that expanding customers choice for truly safe foods isn’t on the radar for any of the local food marketers in our region. Then again, I’ve said time and time again that restaurants and food markets have no interest in public health or safety – filthy food from monstrous sources is perfectly fine as long as the balance sheet remains in the black. Because I don’t trust anything I buy from Meijers, D&W, Hardings or WalMart it is important to cook everything thoroughly, select against raw foods, and when there is no choice but to buy raw foods from these providers, make a weak bleach solution to sanitize what you bought because nobody is going to care for your health but you, yourself. I couldn’t imagine having a live-in elderly family member or an infant, that we don’t have more of a body-count from tainted and monstrously sourced foods is an absolute blessing.