The Easter sham

To most Christians, Easter marks the most important point in their calendar and as St Paul so aptly put it And if Christ is not risen then our preaching is empty and your faith is in vain [1 Corinthians 15:14] and so I find it ridiculous that one christian apologist says in much ado about resurrection that he for a long time didn’t get why it has to be included in the gospel story though that now he realizes the resurrection was inevitable and had to be included. I don’t know how many Christians feel the same way about the resurrection and if indeed there are who share his predicament, feel free to express it in the comments especially what the resurrection means to you.

To me, the resurrection of Jesus was no more significant than the resurrection of Lazarus. It was just one more miracle. The big deal was the death of Christ, not His resurrection.

To some extent he is true, in the sense that if any of these things happened there is really no difference. We have been told, in theOT, that people were brought back to life, what we are never told is whether after being brought back to life, they die again which then leads me to question the point of bringing them to life in the first place. What was the point in raising Lazarus from his sleep if he was going to die again in a few years? Why not let him rest. The story of the resurrection is told differently in the gospels. Mathew talks about a violent earthquake, he seems to be the only one aware of the earthquake and he further tells us Jesus met the women, he even says the stone wasn’t rolled when the women showed up; Mark tells us they were three women[not a significant difference though but who do we believe], he says the stone was rolled and a young man was sitting by the right side; Luke tells us the women were wandering in the tomb then two men appeared and for good measure let us hear John who says the women did not go in neither did she talk with anyone one. She just ran away. When the apologist finishes reading the three versions, I will wait to be told the correct one and how he got to that conclusion.

There is little evidence to prove that Christ existed and even if he did how could the death of one man atone for sins committed and those yet to be committed?

We have been told Christ suffering is significant and oft-times you hear a person suffering being told that Jesus also suffered and they should bear theirs with courage. I got a few reflections on the matter. If Jesus was truly god, and god is passionless, unchanging, all-knowing and whatever quality the theist want to give god, he doesn’t know what it means to suffer. I agree to be nailed to a cross is a horrible way to die but here we have god on the cross, nothing could have been too much for god and he died the same day anyway. There are many people whose lives are a series of intense pain, untold suffering that what Jesus, if he existed, went through can all pale in comparison. To tell such a person to take comfort in Jesus’ suffering is to not understand human suffering.

Because of the resurrection, the grave is a passageway to eternal life!

I think anyone who believes in another life apart from this cannot live fully here and now. To them this life is but a preparation for a future life. How I find this to be really sad.

I think Nietzsche said it best, when he wrote in Human, all too Human

When on a Sunday morning we hear the bells ringing, we ask ourselves: it is possible! This is going on because of a Jew crucified 2,000 years ago who said he was the son of God. The proof of such an assertion is lacking. In the context of our age the Christian religion is certainly a piece of antiquity intruding out of distant ages past, and that the above-mentioned assertion is believed is perhaps the most ancient piece of the inheritance. A god who begets children on a mortal woman; a sage who calls upon us no longer to work, no longer to sit in judgment, but to heed the signs of the imminent end of the world; a justice which accepts an innocent man as a substitute sacrifice; someone who bids his disciples drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god atoned for by a god; fear of a Beyond to which death is the gateway; the figure of the Cross as a symbol in an age which no longer knows the meaning and shame of the Cross — how gruesomely all this is wafted to us, as if out of the grave of a primeval past! Can one believe that things of this sort are still believed in?

And as a gift from me to you, please visit Tell me the old story, old story…. not for the best Easter reflection I have read to this date.