by Alec Muffett
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Good for your soul!
So, where and what did you think of it?
Soul? 🙂
Interesting, pretty, and slightly depressing.
Having spent time in Catholic churches before I am well placed to be both informed and pointedly naive about the symbology — “let’s pretend jesus is a candle, we’ll carve some symbolic holes in him and set fire to his head, and then use that to ignite other candles in a peer-to-peer network as a symbol of the spread of the holy spirit” — ignoring that I associate the latter with Pentecostalism (which I consider particularly irksome) I suppose I should be glad that the other attendees were not required to eat the candle too, but instead they went for the old fallback of polystyrene bread for mass.
Stand up, sit down, get on your knees, fear worship your god else had things will happen, look at what nearly happened to Isaac because Abraham heard voices telling him to kill his son… makes me wonder if Abraham was merely bipolar and off his trolley, couldn’t bring himself to finish slaughtering the kid, and everything since has just been a terrible mistake.
Listen to how God divided the Red Sea and killed Pharoah’s army (Pharoah Whom, incidentally? Not exactly Reuters-grade reporting) – and how it sounds like a B-grade Steven Segal epic with righteous death and bodies on the shoreline… oh, and Jesus is the son of a kindly god, he’s much better now really ever since we nailed Jesus to a tree to assuage god’s vindictive nature.
Oh, and I think this is apt: http://www.jesusandmo.net/strips/2009-04-08.jpg – if Jesus was meant to *really* suffer for us, I am sure the Romans could have made his life (ie: death) a lot more interesting had they known. And if he existed at all, as opposed to being plagiarised from a bunch of other stories that were going around at the time.
Ask the Zoroastrians.
In short: I still consider it (and religion in general) to be the a shared delusion of folk who believe that people *need* to be scared of something else a) they will never do anything nice and b) they will never stop themselves from doing something bad.
I consider such belief depressing, not to say short-sighted. Daily-Mail-readerish, even.
But the music was nice, even if the pitch swung about a bit in the lower registers.
This reminded me of an absurd op-ed in yesterday’s Times, which confirmed my suspicion that the main weakness of religious people is a lack of imagination. Money quote, my emphasis:
The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn’t defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon – He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just reanimated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.
“only explanation”?!?!?! Good grief…..
Ah, yes; reminds me of the specious chain of logic that the Canon presented.
It boiled down to “because Jesus died and rose again, he saved us because if he can do it we can do it too, at least in some sense, by us being affiliated with him.
It was *phrased* with more verbiage about conquering death, and something of a bait-and-switch about the “everyone gets resurrected now” thing, but I am pretty good at deconstructing marketing material nowadays.
Yeah, whatever. A little respect wouldn’t hurt. Disappointed.
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