Good Friday 14 April 2006

Pic of the day: Ironically, a screenshot from Oblivion.

Good Friday

Today is one of the holiest days in Christendom. Most of my fellow believers believe that on such a Friday more than 1900 years ago, their Savior died for their sins and temporarily went to Hell in their place. Boy are they wrong. I celebrated the day by going to Hell and back myself.

In the Bible, the demons don't live in Hell, and wouldn't go there if they could avoid it. (What's with demons torturing people in Hell anyway? Demons LIKE to torture people, it would be their Paradise! Given that demons are supposedly more evil than people, people should torture them instead!) But actually Hell (or Gehenna) seems to be a place of destruction, the Second Death. The final solution, as it were, to the problem of evil. It is supposedly not a pleasant fate, but so far I have seen scant proof that it involves eternal suffering. Frankly that would put God in a rather poor light, not just because of the implied sadism but because he'd come across as a liar. First he tells Adam that the punishment for disobedience is death (a threat that is repeated later in the Bible, as late as Paul the Apostle) and then supposedly "Nah, I've thought about it and decided to have you tortured forever instead". Huh. You'd worship someone like that? If he lies once, how do you know he won't do it again? "Hehe, you thought that I'd forgive you just because you believe? How gullible can people be?"

Given that Christianity in general doesn't even know what Hell is, it is no surprise that they don't know anything else either. For instance, not only didn't Jesus go to Hell (he went to Sheol, the Grave, or the realm of the dead)... he is not our Savior either. Oh, and he didn't die on a Friday. His name wasn't Jesus either, but I think we have a long enough list of misunderstandings now.

The New Testament mentions our Savior repeatedly, and in each instance it refers to God the Father. As a matter of fact, Jesus' original name means "Yahweh saves", as far as we can tell. Of course you can argue that Jesus actually was Yahweh, God the Father. This of course has the small side effect of making God schizophrenic, when he prays in Gethsemane that God's will must happen and not his own. I'm not sure an insane God is much better than a liar God. It certainly leaves us Christians as the most wretched of all people.

But didn't Jesus say: "I and the Father, we are one?" Indeed. Shortly thereafter he prayed (to himself, if you would believe some theologians) that his disciples and those who by their words would come to the faith, should be one as he and the Father were one. So... I'm the Pope? Who would have thought it. Or perhaps Jesus prayer wasn't heard ... or it was heard and the answer was NO? All of these alternatives kinda invalidates the very core of Christianity. The only reading that doesn't is that being One doesn't actually mean you're the same person. Actually I think any mystic, no matter what religion (if at all) will know without explanation what it means to be One. But that's a whole topic in itself, more about that elsewhere. And when Jesus – after the resurrection – refers to the Father as "my God and your God", I think it is safe to say that he wasn't quite God on the cross either. (Which, incidentally, may not have been a cross either. Linguists are still debating this. The cross as a drawn symbol is unknown in early Christendom, they use a fish instead as their unifying symbol.)

As for the Friday... when Jesus was asked to perform a sign by some skeptics, he answered that they would get no sign except the Jonas sign. Like Jonas was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, so would the Son of Man be three days and three days in the earth. Now let's count: Friday evening, night to Saturday, all of Saturday, night to Sunday... That's two nights and a little over one day. Things are not looking good if this is the only sign Jesus wants us to have. Either he has to return later for another night and almost two days, or he didn't know what he was talking about. Or, of course, he could have died on Wednesday, bypassing both of these embarrassing choices.

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Actually I think I have pointed out all of these things at one time or another over the past years, and I would be amazed if one single human has even bothered to look up in his own Bible and check if I was right. (I am.) I could easily give you chapters and verses if you can't be arsed to read the whole thick book (although it is pretty interesting except for the who begat Jared parts). But no one has ever asked. I feel convinced that this is because people Just Don't Care, not because they decided to study it themselves.

Does all of this theology really matters? Isn't the important thing that we are good to each other? Jesus certainly presents this as a viable road on some occasions. He says that those who did good will come out to the resurrection. He simplifies the intricate law of Moses to loving God and your neighbor. He further explains this as doing to others what you'd like them to do to you. Belief is certainly not a way to avoid doing good, but perhaps a help to get there. A chance to start over. If you don't need to start over, fine! In the parable of the lost sheep, there were 99 sheep that didn't need rescue. If you're one of them, just stay with the flock. But some of us were definitely lost, and perhaps that's why we took a keen interest in what the Bible actually says? Because it mattered? (Or perhaps I'm just insatiably curious. Actually that seems more likely, but I also happen to be Evil Inside, as you may have noticed, and so definitely need the rescue.)

But the thing is, people are above themselves in eagerness to take the Bible literally when it comes to the 6 days of creation and Noah's flood, but they couldn't care a whit whether Jesus was right about staying three days & nights underground. Or even whether he prayed to God or to himself. That's just not right. Which one is the central tenet of Christianity here? Or could it be that people stopped reading after the first chapters of Genesis and just let the priests tell them the rest? And to think that the reason why public schooling spread like wildfire after the Reformation (thus incidentally giving North-Western Europe dominion over all the world's kingdoms and their glory for a while) was to let people read the Bible for themselves. Huh.

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Anyway, my Good Friday: I was in Oblivion, the equivalent of Hell in the Elder Scrolls Games, fighting demons and navigating mazes to shut down one of the portals between the infernal realm and the land of the living. Go me. "Close shut the jaws of Oblivion" as the dying emperor implored me. But unfortunately I can only do that for the little pixel people. For real life, I myself need a hero to rescue me from the jaws of oblivion. And that's what Easter is about for me.