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Staking Your Claim in the Neighbor's Yard
2006.04.25 (Tue) 16:22
So did everybody have a good Easter? We hope so; but we hope you didn't have nearly as good an Easter as this guy did, because he was clearly smoking some primo fucking crack cocaine:
Today is Resurrection Day. Today is nearly over. It's taken me this long to come up with something to say about this day, the greatest day of the year. This is the day Christians celebrate something no other faith can claim: the resurrection of our Savior.
He spirals down from there, printing the lyrics — apparently all of them — from one of his favorite Christian rock songs. But we'd like to concentrate on the portion we've bolded above.
No other faith can claim a resurrection? Seriously, who's this guy's dealer, because we've been looking for the kind of invincible ego trip his smack provides. How completely and totally unaware of history, mythology and theology can you actually be, Mister retrophisch? Even completely aside from the fact that your Easter holiday is nothing more than a Christian adaptation of pagan festivals of spring, how entirely insulated must you be to claim that no other faith claims resurrection stories?
Hell, in some mythologies, resurrection seemed to be something of a cottage industry. The Persians had a tree whose seeds could provide resurrection; the Celts had a cauldron that did it. (And yes, that is the inspiration for Lloyd Alexander's excellent Black Cauldron, and the subsequent Disney film.) There are some cultures where their gods could actually be listed under "Resurrection" in the Yellow Pages, like in the Lotuko tribe of Africa and in ancient Egypt.
There are some gods who seem to make it a habit of dying and being resurrected, like Armenia's Aray and the ever-popular Baal. Others were killed on one or more occasions and subsequently resurrected: recall Osiris, who got a cock made of gold as a resurrection present, and the lesser known Shinto god of magic and medicine, Okuni-Nushi. Even some non-deified folks have made the Big Rebound, like Theseus' son Hippolytus or the Hottentot hero Heitsi-eibib, who died a number of times, and resurrected himself every time...leaving an empty cairn somewhere in Africa on each occasion. We promise not even to delve into the whole Mithra deal or the suspiciously Christ-like Apollonius of Tyana.
All of this means very little to us — a bunch of interesting stories with imaginative characters, sure, but just stories. But listening to a Christian spouting off as if Christianity has some kind of original and unique contribution to make to the world is just pitiful. Christianity is one of the least "original" or "unique" religions on the face of the Earth; it's nothing but a (very) poorly constructed patchwork of traditions and concepts from other mythologies. And yet Christian fundamentalists tend to be the ones trumpeting on and on about how wonderful and special their faith is. Fundies: grow up, read a book or two, and just stop it. It's getting on our nerves.
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[ Filed under: % Religion % Two Percent Toons ]
Comments (9)
Brian, 2006.04.25 (Tue) 19:40 [Link] »
Adam, 2006.04.26 (Wed) 04:10 [Link] »
jesse, 2006.04.26 (Wed) 09:30 [Link] »
Fan-man, 2006.04.26 (Wed) 17:29 [Link] »
Brian, 2006.04.27 (Thu) 01:21 [Link] »
Rockstar Ryan, 2006.04.27 (Thu) 19:31 [Link] »
Uber, 2006.05.01 (Mon) 16:49 [Link] »
Michael Bains, 2006.05.01 (Mon) 18:18 [Link] »
Tom from the Two Percent Company, 2006.05.04 (Thu) 10:44 [Link] »
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