Easter is creepy and annoying. You have an entire religion nominally based on the teachings of a guy they call The Prince of Peace, and the holiest of holy days revolves around his brutal torture and execution. I guess celebrating something more positive and constructive, like, say, the Sermon on the Mount, with all its radical notions about caring for the poor and shunning superficiality, would just be crazy. Incidentally, I'm not sure that Passover is actually better in this respect -- it celebrates the wholesale slaughter of innocent Egyptian children, after all. But at least Jewish people don't go around wishing everyone a happy Passover. And neither do Neo-Pagan and Wiccan fertility fetishists shove May poles down our throats.
I would find ways to say cranky and dismissive things about other religions, too, but sadly I don't know enough about spring celebrations in Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Other than that colour festival thing they showed a clip of on the Daily Show a couple weeks ago, and that actually looked neat.
There's basically one grocery store chain in the SB, and yesterday it was closed. I needed sugar for my lemon meringue pie, and had to drive five miles to find a place that would sell it to me.
Now, go read about bad reporting on New Testament studies. My mom actually bought me one of the Strobel books mentioned there a couple years ago; I'm pretty sure I managed to decline the gift without calling him a hack and crappy apologist (which I did do to someone who tried to get me to read some CS Lewis back in college). He is a hack and a crappy apologist of course (as is Lewis), but I managed to keep things politic.
So, hopefully everyone had a nice Zombie Jesus day. I'm going to get some Indian food.
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3 comments:
I've been critical in the past, but that is a brilliant post about Easter that you linked to from Amanda Marcotte. I almost didn't click on it (I rarely click on links that aren't clearly identified by the surrounding text), but I'm sure glad I did.
Personally, I tend to fall into the "Christian Holidays are pretty much harmless, so I'll celebrate them with my family even though I'm an atheist, but I won't go to church and I reserve the right to be grumpy and miserable" category. It works for me.
This year, I started eating dinner before prayer and continued doing so after mulitple requests to stop.
1) As far as I know, Easter day, the day on which one would say "Happy Easter" is a celebration of life. A life after torture and death, sure, but still life.
2) The death of the "Prince of Peace" is remembered on Good Friday and Holy Saturday and to the best of my knowledge, no one wishes anyone else happy on those days.
3) Right or wrong, many of the people who live in this country practice some form of Christianity (or would pretend to their extended families that they do) and object to working on church holidays. Grocery stores may close not in observance of the day, but for practical staffing reasons.
~K
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