Hey, hey, it’s Easter!

2 months ago 8

ARTICLE AD BOX

Christus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali.

IT'S GOOD FRIDAY. AND YOU know what that means here at NOT PC: time to call out (again) the 2000-year ethic of sacrifice as nothing but inhuman. In a more rational place, we'd view the worship of human sacrifice not with celebration, but with horror. ("If you knew a father who gave up his only son to be killed in expiation for the crimes and misdemeanours of other people, would you call that chap a loving father? Or would you call him a psychopath?")

"What's the theme of Easter, and of Easter art? In a word, it's sacrifice: specifically human sacrifice. And more specifically, the sacrifice of the good to the appalling.
  "That's the Easter theme we're asked to respond to every year."
  Easter through art

"Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity. Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word 'Easter' comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter.
  "But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become a veneration of torture and sacrifice ..."
  Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell?

"AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.
"It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic."
  Easter Week, Part 3: The Holy Art of Sacrifice

"Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never even met Jesus but who played the largest part in explaining his life, and his death, had a big hand in both.
"Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain."
  Easter Week, Part 2: Enter Hercules…

"IT’S EASTER WEEK – a time, since human cultural life began up in the northern hemisphere, when men and women and their families came together to celebrate.
"To celebrate what?
  "Why, to celebrate spring, of course. ..."
  Hey, hey, it’s Easter Week!

Oh, and a gentle reminder that the state still owns your shop at Easter. And it still owns you all year. That's the secular sacrifice demanded by the Season.

Cartoon by Nick Kim

And a note that the greatest artists can nonetheless find the sublime within the story. Here's Wagner's 'Good Friday Spell,' aka Karfreitagszauber. Turn it up!