The clever John Robson at the Ottawa Citizen writes about Easter. No link available yet. I'd like to publish the whole thing, but I don't want my blogger license to get revoked for copyright infringement, so I'm just giving you a few excerpts:
You know it's Easter when the snow melts, little coloured eggs appear, some fool kicks the Easter Bunny and the media start running what I think of as their “Was Christ a black lesbian?” features. . . .
I realize the press is not trying to be offensive to Christians. After all, as they assured us while not publishing the Danish cartoons, they would never deliberately offend religious sensibilities. But if they were, this is how they would go about it.
They'd tell us that maybe Jesus walked not on water but on ice that just happened to form, just then, in a land where last time I looked the only ice outside a freezer was a skating rink in the Canada-Israel Friendship Centre. Then they'd breathlessly hype the Gospel of Judas, though if a document of this provenance appeared supporting orthodox Christian doctrine, the Judas Seminar and journalists would vote it off the island without delay. Not least because it was written years after the fact by people with an agenda, precisely as revisionists assert without ground about the canonical Gospels.
There's a lot you can say about the New Testament, and the Old. But not that either bears the stamp of imposture. It is not clear why someone would want to fake such a thing, nor how. But if they did it wouldn't look like this. A competent forger would at the very least have harmonized the two very different versions of Judas's death, one the mortal sin of suicide and the other where he just breaks gruesomely in half. Whereas any traffic cop can tell you that eyewitness accounts differ in bizarre ways. . . .
If Christianity was all a big inexplicable mistake can't you just shut up about it after 2,000 years? After all, most people don't go to church nowadays and many who do might as well not bother. But whatever you do, don't talk rot -- like the authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota did who removed the Easter Bunny lest it offend non-Christians. It would be splitting hairs in the barber shop of an asylum to note that St. Paul is Christian and the Easter Bunny is not. But honestly, what sort of credulity does it take to think there's a pink rabbit with decorated eggs in the Bible?
