Easter. Meh. It bores me so much that I can hardly even blog about it. I love Halloween and enjoy Christmas, but Easter? It's just sort of there. I don't do Easter Bunny shenanigans with the boys -- Exene's family usually goes over the top with Easter baskets and what-not, anyway, so I tend to not do it. And since I don't inflict Christianity on the boys, the whole "miracle of the Resurrection" jazz doesn't come into it, either. I mean, call it cynicism or skepticism, but even today, people believe that Elvis was still alive, or Jim Morrison, or whomever, or any number of urban legends.
We're supposed to believe that a few thousand years ago, when people were eminently more reasonable, intellectual, and rational than they are today (*choke*) that whatever happened to Jesus was the literal truth that actually happened? 100% factual? Right. It's like playing a game of Telephone and being forced to accept the answer on down the line....
"I really like cabbage."
"He really likes cabbage."
"I'm related to Charles Babbage?"
"His dad likes to play cribbage."
"His team's going to scrimmage."
"We forgot to get our luggage?"
"I don't have any postage!"
"They're taking me hostage!"
That is everyday human experience, that is how things actually roll. Christianity is no different. Maybe Jesus's followers, piqued at the loss of their prophet at Roman hands, wanted to give him a good Jewish burial, so they went to the crypt where he was kept, rolled the stone aside, and spirited away his body for a proper burial, as a way of sticking it to Rome. Then the ever-excitable Mary Magdalene comes along, sees the rock rolled aside, and puts that whore's brain of hers to work and is like "Holy SHIT! He's been resurrected!" I mean, everybody knows to trust the words of a prostitute, right? They are always reliable and unbiased sources of information about all manner of things. And so it goes.
The empiricist in me always quibbled about the stone being rolled aside -- since when does a spirit need to roll a stone aside, anyway? Insubstantial, right? The only reason the stone's rolled aside is to be able to say "Look! Nobody inside!" Because if the stone hadn't been rolled aside, there'd be the assumption that Jesus's remains were still in there. So, of course the stone's rolled aside. Because the spirit wanted to be sure you believed in the miracle of what had happened. Mmm hmm.
Maybe something happened, but the odds are far more likely that nothing happened, and people, in their typically credible way of being, wove elaborate mental and emotional tapestries around a particular situation in order to make themselves feel better. And, again, as I say, roll the clock back 2000 years or so, and you find people who are even more credulous and superstitious then than they are today, and it becomes not only likely, but an inevitability that something like that happens.
And then the logic of the Big Lie comes into it, where people then depend on the buy-in, or worse, the faith meme comes into it, where people just turn off their powers of reason and uncritically accept the Big Lie without question, and then the snowball can just keep rolling down the mountainside of history, at least until the capacity to reason, reflect, critique, and objectively assess is rediscovered.
Anyway, blah blah blah. Easter. Yeah, got it.
