11.30.05
This country is trapped under the oppressive thumb of a theocratic regime. The president of this once-great nation openly claims to have personal conversations with Jesus Christ; as Bill Maher said, it's fine to have imaginary friends when you're eight, but eventually you grow up and start interacting with real people. Of all the half-cooked religions that the human race has invented, Christianity is the single worst.
Believing in God is one thing; I can understand the feelings of hopeless desperation that can push a person to seek some kind of otherworldly solace. I can understand the desire to believe that there is more to existence than this rickety world, that there is a better place to which we might go after passing from this life. I completely disagree with all of it, but I can understand it.
Christianity, on the other hand, is plainly ridiculous, because it purports that a man -- Jesus the Nazarene -- was the son of God. The Greeks often claimed that their heroes -- Achilles, Hercules, Odysseus -- were sons of Gods as well, and yet we know that those claims are mere fairy tales. But, as Carl A. P. Ruck and Danny Staples state in their book on Greek mythology, the World of Classical Myth -- "Our own myths we call reality." But as well as being the son of God, Jesus was, according to Christian doctrine, also God Himself; this inherently contradictory state, of course, is never explained because its unexplainable contradiction is claimed as one of the "mysteries of God." Unfortunately, it is merely preposterous.
Piling absurdity upon absurdity, Christian doctrine goes on to purport that God, in the person of Jesus, came to Earth and died at the hands of Man to pay for the sins of Man. Why God did not simply erase these "sins" of Man by blinknig them out of existence is never explained; apparently, the option never even presented itself, despite the fact that God is allegedly all-knowing and all-powerful.
One of the fundamental problems with Christianity is that it removes responsibility from the individual for his or her actions. According to Christianity, all one must do in order to achieve forgiveness for any wrong is ask Jesus; while this may ease the conscience of the Christian to some degree, it leaves the victim of the wrong without any sense of setting things right and does absolutely nothing to address the actual wrong itself since God and Jesus are both fancifal concoctions of the overactive human imagination.
Strangely, it is a piece of the secular world that demonstrates the proper avenue for achieving redemption in the real world: My Name is Earl, a funny, touching, and philosophically engaging comedy series on NBC. Career petty-criminal Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) has a Carson Daly-inspired epiphany and decides that if he does good things, good things will happen to him. He forsakes his criminal life and proceeds to compile a list of all of the bad things he's done in his life; he then sets out (with the proceeds of a $100,000 scratch-off winner) to right each of the 258 items on his list.
He returns to each person he wronged -- including high school classmate Kenny James, ex-prison convict Donny Jones, his brother Randy Hickey, ex-girlfriend Natalie, ex-wife Joy, accountant-turned-golfer Scott, and his own father Carl Hickey -- and makes up for his bad deed with an equal and opposite good deed. Earl finds redemption in setting his wrongs to right by making them up to the person wronged, not in praying to a fictional character from a poorly-written novel; his redemption, then, is more satisfying because it is real.
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