Posted March 23rd, 2008, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

What isn’t on this calendar?  Well, according to The Wikipedia, on this day, Jesus didn’t become the first human being ever to come back to life after being completely dead (for more than a few minutes).

Lots of interesting things did happen on this day, however.  For instance in 1903, The Wright Brothers applied for a patent on their invention of one of the first successful airplanes.

I don’t like to blog about religion (or mainstream politics), because I feel like doing so will cloud up the few messages I do really want to trumpet through this site.  But thinking about the tradition of celebrating Easter feels weird on me today.

Why do people need to celebrate something that certainly did not happen?  And going further, why is it that the story of Jesus, for most Christians, is more about the folklore of his alleged magic tricks than about the philosophical teachings associated with him?  Virgin births, resurrections, turning one form of matter into another with the waive of a hand–these are all great tricks, but what about the guy that made the Statue of Liberty disappear?  And that was so much more recent!  Magic is fun.  It’s neato.  But to me, disregard and even avoidance of what is evident, the laws of the universe for instance, is just disgraceful.

So while I know I might offend or alienate a few people with this post, I felt like I needed to say that it offends and alienate me when people celebrate bullshit and insist that things are true when they are not.  It offends me when religious people want to teach the younger generations of our species untruths.  It offends me when religious people want government policy to be influenced by untruths.

Happy Easter!