It’s Easter Sunday, the day when the Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and in this one magnanimous act of compassion, stood in your stead, taking on the burden of all of your sins, and saved you in the eyes of God from the horrible person that you are.
Just so my religious readers are aware, the word “Easter” comes from the pagan “ostara,” the spring festival representing the newness, or rebirth, of life. The root of the word “ostara” is the same as the root for the word “egg.” Things hatch from eggs, and life begins. It’s only natural to attribute the Resurrection of Ye’shua (Jesus) to this spring festival.
Bishop John Shelby Spong of the Episcopal Church, has a fascinating article on his website about the Resurrection of Jesus. He points out that Saint Paul never talked about a physical resurrection of a dead human body, but instead a reversal of the verdict of original sin. Spong does not seem to believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead. (Before any detractors come forth and start spewing their idiocy, Spong is a well-respected Biblical scholar, and I’m pretty sure he knows more than you anti-realists about Biblical elements, even insomuch as he is an anti-realist himself.)
It is impossible to resurrect a human from a state of death. Science hasn’t even bothered to address this in its most literal sense, because common sense tells even the least rational mind that this is idiotic – oh, except when Jesus is involved. The problem is that at the instance life stops, decay begins. Why would anyone (God) want to resurrect a decayed human? After three days of decay, the maggots would have been so intense that Jesus would have appeared very swollen; and potentially, no one would have really been able to even recognize him. (By the way, we know how maggots interact with dead bodies: Science has proven this.)
It was only after Saint Paul that Jesus became the legend that he is. Even the people around Jesus, and those who came closely thereafter (including all of the original and “accurate” (Gnostic) Christian sects who treated Ye’shua as a knowledgeable sage and wise teacher) would have rejected the complete falsehood that Saint Paul and the anti-realists who followed him attributed to Jesus, especially the misinterpretation of the idea of the Son of God, and the fanciful idea that Jesus can save humanity from some sort of spiritual crime. Mark Twain once said that “if Jesus were alive today, he almost certainly would not be Christian.”
The intellectual giant Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, Part I, wrote: “If I owe [someone] money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this is to destroy the principle of its (justice’s) existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge.”
If one believes the silly doctrines of the anti-realists, sinners have a burdensome debt, which they have caused for themselves, because a time-distant and irrelevant rib-woman was tempted by a talking snake to eat fruit from a magic tree. However, this theory of the Savior assumes that our ultimate judge will allow a stand-in, absolving us of responsibility, leaving us to exit the apostolic courtroom with the knowledge that we can do whatever we want and get away with it. This destroys every principle of God’s demands on us, and since he cannot demand from us any more, he is not our ruler, master, or [insert other superior role here]. It eliminates the possibility that we are responsible for our own actions. (I’m not even going to address the “born again” or “rapture” stupidity of the Calvinist-style Protestants.)
Since we know God to be a vengeful and greedy deity – the Bible is rife with evidence of this (it is the “inspired Word of God,” of course) – the whole Lamb of God paradigm is ludicrous. God has punished His own creation throughout its existence, with fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. So why does he change his own approved methods of retribution, impregnate a woman with himself so he can be born, only to allow himself to be killed as a sacrifice to himself, so that you can be forgiven of being human, when in fact you were created in the image of God Himself? Is God punishing himself for being God?
We also must examine the idea of Original Sin. If God created man in His own image, and gave man freedom of choice, then God created an existence that already had a faulty variable included. Since He is omniscient, He would know this before his creation became “The Creation.” But since He is omnipotent, He should have been able to formulate His product in such a way that none of this was necessary. If He was bound to create it this way for some reason, then He is restricted by some other forces that He doesn’t control, in which case, He is not omnipotent, and it therefore begs the question, why do anti-realists worship Him? Omnipotence is an attribute of God, and helps to define who anti-realists believe that He is. Once this attribute is taken away, God has been devalued, and no longer has the attributes that the anti-realists insist upon that make Him God.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to manufacture something, I want it to be as perfect and positive as I can make it. I don’t want it to have any anomalies or faults, because that would mean that I had not given it my sincere best effort; in which case, it would have been a waste of time. If I am God, I can perform feats of magnificence without fault or variables. God didn’t have to give man free will to worship other deities, or even to worship at all. Omnipotence means that God can do anything he wants, and he could create things such that He is the one who is automatically admired, respected, and revered, without having to get overdressed on Sunday mornings. But He didn’t. From a project management standpoint, this makes me superior to God, since I give things my best effort (and exercise total, analogous control over them); but God didn’t seem to care enough to do that: Instead, this creation, this existence, is unplanned – an afterthought…..or perhaps not a thought at all.
So my first paragraph could now be edited to read: It’s Easter Sunday, the day when some Jewish criminal and spiritual opportunist who was killed by Roman centurions became a zombie, to suggest that he could be an alternate in your stead to save you from horrible crimes that you didn’t commit against a supernatural disembodied old man who doesn’t exist.
It’s clearly stupid.
In an April 2010 article in the online version of the Brisbane Times, Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen said that non-belief was an “assault on God.” Nice try, douchebag, but realists (atheists) don’t attack God, because God does not exist. Realists like me attack the idea of God, which Atheist Foundation of Australia founder David Nicholls alluded to in the same article.
People have asked me in the past why I target Christianity. On the playground of religions, Christianity is the bossy kid with thick glasses and few social skills who demands that everyone do things exactly as he says to do them. Other kids inevitably wind up taping “kick me” signs to his back, and “Christian” is either oblivious to the signs or he wonders why others would do this. Yet he never changes his ways or his thinking. I don’t choose Christianity as a target: Christianity offers itself – even begs – loudly and blatantly, to be the recipient of the fatal thrust of the Spear of Logic, and the idea of the Resurrection itself is proof-positive. But largely, religion as a whole is my target: It is not limited to Christianity, since I am also against Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.: Indeed any belief set that prefers and promotes supernatural explanations to rational ones is unrealistic in the grandness that is this existence.
The only blasphemy that really exists is the blasphemy against reality. Religion and its stories are not reality – they are false, even though their adherents profess that they are “true.” But religion, and all of religion’s aspects are constructs of creative and power-hungry human minds, leading to a shared delusion among the population (folie á ménage), like pretending that a man came back to life after being dead for three days.
For the record, I have no burden of original sin, nor have I committed a crime of sin; since your deity does not exist, and cannot punish me, and therefore, your “Lamb of God” did not die for me; for if he did, he surely did so in vain.
Happy Easter!
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