Reprinted from last year. Enjoy — DS

Ahh sweet Friday, prince of days, harbinger of the precious weekend. But this Friday is better than most, it’s Good Friday, AKA Black Friday, Holy Friday, Easter Friday, and my favorite, Great Friday. But what makes this Friday so Great?

This Friday is special because it’s the Friday before Easter. Christians celebrate the weekend Jesus was tortured to death so that an all loving merciful God — because he can really take care of business! — could spare a few of us from the eternal torment He allowed his evil sidekick to create and manage.

See, up to then, only perfect people went to Heaven, and since no one was perfect, we can surmise God was somewhat lonely, what with nothing around except a chorus of moronic Cherubs and a handful of brown-nosing archangels. After brutally hard labor and in most cases, a painful, lingering death in the non sterile, savage world of the Ancient Near East for a whopping 35 year life-span, every poor slob got to look forward to an eternity of unbearable torture with no possible reprieve, appeal, or release. We all know in the “end” God wins, so how exactly it’s an eternity is unclear. Like so many things it made no sense even then. Scholars have spent the better part of two millennia trying to force it to make sense, to extract some sliver of goodness and decency out of the horrific carnage and endless misery God intentionally produced with little to show for it outside of a few lines of lame, authoritarian armchair sophistry.

Apparently, months, or years of suffering until final death and eternal torment was no big deal for regular folks, just par for the course God made. But one fucking weekend of rough treatment followed by relatively quick death was such a monumental sacrifice, when God-eh was on he receiving end, it not only got every human off the hook for all sin from matsurbation to the Holocaust — in some undefined way that cannot be measured or understood by mere mortals — it also entitled the sacrificial victim to rule the universe as an immortal man-God hybrid for all time, plus s/he/it got to know this to a 100% metaphysical certainty before it all went down.

Some sacrifice.

(For what it’s worth, I would like to state here and now I am willing to underprice Jesus: I’m happy to be beaten half to death for a weekend and killed if I can be resurrected whole after three days with a modest ten million dollars in my bank account. No immortality or cosmic omnipotence needed or required.)

Again, that makes absolutely no sense, any child suffering with spinal bifida or adults watching their body parts decay from leprosy underwent more pain and far more terrifying uncertainty, but this is the fable that leaves millions of misled people praying gratefully and crying out in ecstasy to the cosmic monster who engineered the whole godawful shitty mess.

And to this day the world celebrates the Good News of torture and death by hiding chocolates formed into egg shapes and telling young children they were planted by an anthropogenic rabbit during the wee hours. That last part may be the strangest of all. Stranger still, it’s the only part I find the tiniest bit appealing. It’s kinda weird though, makes you wonder what the Easter Bunny does for the rest of the year?

Oh, OK, well considering the origin of the tale, that makes sense. Hippitus Hoppitus, have a good Great Friday and a Happy zombie day my athiest friends.