All right, a serious post.

My family has never really emphasized Easter. That’s the thing with growing up Mormon: Easter is not a big thing in the Church. Mormons claim to be Christian, but they only occasionally ever talk about Jesus. The Bible is a sort of secondary document to the Book of Mormon and Jesus has almost nothing to do with anything.

So it wasn’t until I was about 16 or so that I realized Easter is a huge deal for most Christian denominations, being as how the entire symbolism of the ordeal is central to any real Christian faith. Easter could go by without me even noticing. I’d hardly even thought about the symbolic value because when we were Mormon, no one ever really emphasized it. We gave Jesus the briefest of lip-service and then went back to talking about our religious plans for world domination and our self-inflicted persecution complex and that kind of thing. (Okay, most religions, to be fair, have both those characteristics.) I think the Mormon Church is probably the only “Christian” church where you can go for weeks at a time without anybody mentioning anything about Christ.

But this isn’t about the Mormon Church.

So…Easter. Until a few years ago, I’d never even really thought about it. I had a dim atheistic awareness that it was important for some reason. It’s only been recently that I’ve actually understood who Jesus was (allegedly), what he said, and why, because, growing up, even though we supposedly followed him, there was a suspicious lack of any information about the subject.

People may sometimes think I have a problem with Christians, but that’s not entirely true. If the only thing that one had to do to call oneself a Christian was to accept and live by Jesus’ peaceful and generally unobjectionable central philosophy, I’d be proud to be one. Can I argue with the message that everyone deserves to be treated well despite real or imagined flaws, that everyone is deserving of dignity and kindness, that violence is bad, that charity is good, that compassion, even for one’s enemies, is a virtue? Obviously not. But I’ve met very, very few “Christians” who I think have any real claim to the label.

The problem is that Christianity, as it stands, brings a lot of baggage which, far as I can tell, has absolutely nothing to do with the central figure of the religion. I strongly feel that Jesus probably had very little to say about Heaven or God, embellished or altered accounts of his teachings in the New Testament aside — but to be properly Christian, in most denominations, one must adhere to a very specific and narrow definition of God, when, like Buddhism, I don’t really think that the principles of kindness and responsibility for one’s actions and basic human decency really need to be rooted in the concept of a symbolic being. Why does anyone have to have a condescending paternalistic figure to articulate what seems like a generally good idea? (Why, if I were a cynic, I’d feel that the only reason to add the concept of Yahweh into anything would be to validate the control of manipulative hierarchical organizations over society.)

But I think Easter is an important holiday. I think it is important to remember.

This message of peace and acceptance and love…it was so radical, at the time, that a man was killed for it. Simply for saying that everyone should be treated justly, that rich men are not any better than poor men, men better than women, anyone intrinsically better than anyone else. That we are not our parents, and that the sins of our parents should not reflect upon us. That we should love everyone as ourselves, even our enemies, and extend to them all basic human courtesy and recognize that it is not our place to judge. That we are always in control of our own actions, and that those actions should never hurt anyone else, even if that person has hurt us. I think it is, at its heart, a very powerful and empowering philosophy about personal responsibility and respect. And this message was so frightening to the people in power that they had to have him killed.

And yet, two thousand years later, nothing changes. Men are still killed for this very basic and, as I said, fundamentally unobjectionable message. All Martin Luther King, Jr. did was follow the basic tenants of his faith, simply adapting the messages of his prophet to modern-day America, and he died for it, too.

I think there’s something very wrong with the world that this is still the case, and I have the feeling that Christ, if he could or can see what has become of his words, would disapprove. More than disapprove, really, though I can’t think of a word that describes exactly how awful it is that his message has been twisted into one of hate, war, and oppression. Everything he spoke against, his followers have done in his name. Not all of his followers, obviously, but far, far too many.

So, Christian or not, I hope we all can recognize Easter for what it really is, and not for what it has become.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Random, Religion and Spirituality, Society.