Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

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.

Stop Fear, Stop Hate

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This is what comes of blind obedience to religious dogma. Your children are GAY and your children are DYING!

We will never know who they might be. They might have cured cancer. Now nobody will know.

Your faith in the Bible is killing your children. They just want love and instead all they get is hate. Hate that kills.

Stop talking about Jesus Christ. He would have never accepted one child to die by THEIR OWN HANDS! If you love Jesus so very much then love your gay children and leave Leviticus to the JEWS!

It is time for an end. An end of hate, an end of suicide. You do not understand. GOD CREATED US GAY FOR HIS DESIGN! You are destroying children. There is no penance earnest enough to relieve the shame of a needless death.

So, if you hate gays then FIND ONE and hug him or her. See that we are not evil. We are your children, your friends, your loved ones. What do you think your GOD would say to you, upon meeting him or her? Would he or she congratulate you on your defending a book written by 2000 year old men with sexual maturity problems, or would your GOD weep at your bigotry, your hate, your baseless ignorance of the truth of your children’s lives. Well?

It is self-evident. Dead children are WRONG. WIll you all just wake up and get over your fears and grab your gay child and tell them that you love them permanently. Would you etch it in stone and carry that stone on your soul for the rest of your life? Your children are DYING and THEY DON’T HAVE TO!

Grow up and stop making God cry.

Reagan’s 100th

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Poring over the morning news I ran across a news entry that spoke about Reagan’s 100th Birthday. Much like how a very strong odor can key on a memory and bring a flood of remembered things back into your mind, so did this. I grew up with Ronald Reagan as President. I remember the Cold War with the USSR and I remember “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!” speech that Ronald Reagan gave.

This man has accumulated a halo around him that places him just beneath the Holy Trinity itself for Christian conservatives. The memory of this man and his presidency bring many overheard arguments between my parents as I started to learn that when two people are dedicated to polar opposites, that the law of attraction is mostly relevant for magnets. I don’t think anyone really regards the man, Ronald Reagan any longer. Death has transformed him from a person to a canvas, it has sucked out his 3rd dimension and converted him into a handy surface that anyone can use to their heart’s content. The man is dead, how could he complain at how his memory is treated?

Conservatives pray to him. They read what he wrote, what he said, and what he stood for as slightly less important than the New Testament in the Bible, but way more important than anything else. His political life has been transformed into a conservative ideal, and if you fashion a hand grenade of Reagan’ness and pull the pin and lob it into a GOP gathering they all will turn to the light and get very quiet and pray to the Reagan-y-Explody-Goodness. The fascination they have borders on the fanatical, there are terms for what they are afflicted with – you could call it hero-worship, enthrallment to the cult of personality, a whole host of things. For a segment of our political spectrum Ronald Reagan is the second coming of Jesus Christ. I’m surprised they haven’t tried to force the hand of the church and have him sainted.

Now, for the Liberals, Ronald Reagan is something just as precious, but completely opposite. He’s a flame-eyed monster bent on world domination and more shifty criminal acts than you can shake a stick at. Liberals remember the Contras and Sandinistas, all the underhanded dirty tricks and the policies that brought anger and rage. Death brought Reagan to a canvas and Liberals painted that canvas with their impression of the man, casting him not in a saintly light, but one of monstrousness and epic Mordor-class evil. For the conservatives savior, he’s the Liberals bane.

If ever you want a handy guide to political polarity, simply drop Reagan’s name and watch the response. If you see a halo, wistful eyes, and te-deum’s forming then you have yourself a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. If however you notice some frothing, restlessness, agitation, and perhaps the construction of effigies that are set on fire, then you are facing a liberal.

I personally celebrate the fact that he’s very much dead and can’t form any new political opinions or wield any political power. It’s not that I sought his death, that I prayed for his untimely demise, but I did thank the Light when he did die. This is in stark contrast to the oedipal-obsessed spawn of Reagan’s Vice President. For that son-of-a-bitch (the term is apt) I will hold a very large party and feast upon his death, celebrating the worlds freedom from that unbearable monster. Reagan is just as much a monster, but his corpse in the ground tempers my anger into a kind of wistful fuzzy disgust.

So, for the 100th Anniversary of Reagan’s Birth, I mark it with this blog post, I bite my thumb and I spit on the ground. And that’s all I’m giving it.