Save Yourself

Most of you know that I am not what would be generally considered a 'christian.'  I am agnostic atheist in that, having been educated in the width and depth of available religious philosophies, the weight of the evidence leads me to believe that here is no god.  I see no evidence whatsoever that there is one.  I'll save the Plantingian and Lewisian arguments about where faith comes into play for those who share my academic credentials.  So don't even bother.

I do believe that the principals that give rise to the christian celebration of Easter are timeless.  And by that I mean people have been killing people who are different than the mainstream way before the first word of Hebrew or Aramaic was uttered.  This shit goes back to the cavemen.

Take the religion out of the resurrection.  (I'm not even going to discuss the biochemical reasons why its not even possible for someone to be dead for three days and rise up alive again. So dont get pissed at me yet - there will be plenty of time for that later).  What really happened?

Dude is going around poking the policy makers with a stick.  Challenging their philosophy and authority.  Its like the scrawny kid throwing rocks at the jocks on the playground.  As soon as the teacher isn't looking someone is getting their ass kicked. 

So this dude starts sharing his ideas with the rest of the world.  Salvation.  Peace.  Eternal happiness. What is so wrong with all of that anyway?  Oh wait.  The only way to get that stuff is to break from tradition, defy what you think to be absolute, and adopt a new paradigm that dude is handing out for free.  It didn't take very long for dude to get his ass nailed to a cross and spear chucked.  At least he saw it coming.  Everyone else did too. 

Then for several hundred years the big kids on the playground ran around killing everyone that had been associated with dude.  You have to regulate sometimes you know?  But they couldn't get everyone and someone finally had the idea to change some shit up and sell this new paradigm.  Of course the change ups gave the big kids the ability to continue to use force, fear and intimidation to control the mass of other kids on the playground.  But thats a whole other kind of blog.

So what does it all mean?  Its simple really.  Take away the control, repression, intolerance, authoritarianism, and greed, and people are not only generally good, they want to believe in goodness.  Easter was created so that a pagan celebration could be eliminated, but also because we need to believe that things can get better. Easter was created so we can believe that someone, somewhere, is going to save us from ourselves.

I think Easter would be more meaningful if we raise a few other people from the dead and celebrate their resurrection.

Lets start with Dr. Martin Luther King.  He certainly spoke against traditional conventions and they killed him for it.  

And lets bring Matthew Shepard back.  According to his father he was "an optimistic and accepting young man who had a special gift of relating to almost everyone. He was the type of person who was very approachable and always looked to new challenges. Matthew had a great passion for equality and always stood up for the acceptance of people's differences."  Matthew was brutally murdered for not fitting the conventional norm.

And lets bring back Angie Zapata.  She was ambushed and killed by her boyfriend because she chose to be true to her self and change her body to fit her idea of who she is.

And lets bring back Andrew Anthos, the 72 year old veteran's activist who was killed because his personal sexual preference isnt quite yet socially tolerated.

All of these martyrs carried the banner of tolerance and understanding.  Yes, even the Jesus dude. Didn't he say ... love thy neighbor as thyself...  and ...but now faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love?  (Don't be so shocked, I DO have a PhD in Comparative Religions after all).

Our salvation is not to be found in celebrating the zombie Jesus my friends.  Rather its the message he and the others carried - the message that got them killed in the first place.  Our salvation is in ourselves.  We hold the key to world peace within our minds and at any time we can unlock that gate of intolerance, bigotry and hate.  We can walk through together as humans into the bright heaven of acceptance if we only listen.  Faith.  Hope.  Love. 

Instead of looking to some outside force for which there is no compelling evidence, look inside yourself.  By understanding our differences and recognizing that differences are not evil, we begin to tolerate and accept.  Individuals are the evil.  Love is the cure.  And you can't get that by going to any church.

Put that in your Easter basket.