March Madness

I bet you thought this blog was going to be about basketball right? Nope. But now that I have your attention...

I want to talk about something else that happens in March and involves baskets: Easter. Even though I was raised by the unholy union of a Pagan and a very devout Atheist I love Easter. This is only contradictory if you are one of those people that are unaware that pretty much every Christian holiday is superimposed right smack on top of the older Pagan ones. So basically if you are a Republican congressman from a state that was formerly part of the Confederacy, but otherwise it makes total sense. Easter is jolly good fun, especially if you're not a Christian, because Christians have to bother with all that ecclesiastical business that is incomprehensible to the rest of us. Such as Easter week:

Manic Monday
Shrove Tuesday
Ash Wednesday
Thirsty Thursday
Good Friday
Super Saturday
and....
Easter Sunday.

Or something like that.

I recently saw a contentious debate on a religious tolerance forum the other day where folks were arguing that Easter is not a Pagan holiday, because the historical evidence was rather thin about Eostre, an alleged Anglo Saxon Goddess of Spring whence the holiday got its name. Apparently the only reference to Her in historic documents was by St. Bede, an English monk known for the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and considered to be the Father of English History. So he probably didn't know what he was talking about. I'm far from a Biblical scholar but I'm pretty sure that if during one of our school mandated annual viewings of the seminal 1961 classic King of Kings the rock on the tomb of Jesus rolled away and a bunch of rabbits and eggs came bouncing out I would have remembered.

Also, Jesus was a cracker, obviously

 Easter is on the first Sunday after the Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox. That couldn't sound any more Pagan if you had Bjork ululate it from the top of a volcano clad only in sheepskin and a crown of mistletoe.

Many Christians have tried to eradicate all vestiges of Paganism from their practice or revise history to pretend that there were no religions in Europe prior to the Apostles spreading the probably mistranslated word of Christ to the fur clad barbarians. This is like cutting all the pictures of your husband's old flame out of his high school yearbook. It's petty and just a tad whacko because all structures, either physical or philosophical are built on the bones of what came before, including and especially Christianity. Seriously, Christianity is a sequel to Judaism. It's like the Highlander II of religions, except that Jesus was a really nice person who made the religion friendlier and more accessible than the Old Testament, whereas Highlander II just made you want to cut your own head off.

The story of the dying God echoes through all the religions because that narrative is part of our Collective Unconscious: Tammuz, Osiris, Orpheus, Adonis, Elvis. We need to believe that heroes that are killed are reborn stronger. It's Humanity's ancient way of convincing itself that it's ok to cut down the wheat at harvest time because it will come back in the Spring. And when Spring does return, we celebrate. Let's not be stingy with this joy. The flowers are opening, the birds are singing and dark time is over. Let the God rise from the lettuce patch, roll away the stone, open the gates of Graceland, whatever. There is sunshine enough for all of us.

Diet Catholic

At the risk of seriously dating this particular post I've got to comment on something as we wait for the Papal Smoke to issue forth from the Vatican Chimney like the Holy Ghost took a big ole bong hit. It's funny watching the 24 hour news channels armchair quarterbacking this whole process like it has any relevance at all. The camera pans out over a ginormous crowd of people in the big courtyard of the most pimpin' house on Earth and it's mystifying what they're all doing out there. I mean, there are more than a few nuns in the crowd and I can see why it's such a big deal to them. This guy is basically their new fake boyfriend, whoever he his.

"He looked right at me!"

I had a guest last night in the restaurant remark, "Black smoke today girl! No decision yet!" and I struggled momentarily to compose myself and respond accordingly. Was that a joke? Uhhhh....

But I digress. The latest in a string of absurdities is an article linked here about Catholics wanting their new pope to be more liberal. 

• 71 per cent of Canadians (55 per cent of Americans) want to allow priests to marry
• 62 per cent Canadian (52 per cent of Americans) want women to be ordained
• 57 per cent of Canadians (43 per cent of Americans) want to allow birth control

Now I'm no expert but I think that maybe these guys are misunderstanding how the Catholic Church works. It's not a democracy like California. The Pope says to build the Death Star and they build it, they don't get a vote on it or anything. If they don't build it he puts the squeeze on the Cardinals and they come on board and figure out who's responsible for the delay and use the Force to crush this person's trachea while the other priests look on in mute, subdued horror.

...Or something like that. The point is that the Pope is the king of the church. He makes the rules and the Catholics follow them. No matter how big a pain in the ass. Do you Catholics find that system old fashioned? Yes of course you do, because it is. So is making burnt offerings in a temple and eating the blood and flesh of a dead god. The only thing I can think of that might be more old fashioned is cutting out people's hearts on the top of your pyramid temple and throwing the bloody things down the steps into a pit in the bottom of which lives the Rabbit god that eats the moon.

Western Catholics are gradually ignoring more of the edicts of their Pontiff for convenience. Not that there's anything wrong with that- it's common sense that if you can't afford to feed 143 kids that you should not have 143 kids. But I'm not sure that giving up Twizzlers for Lent is really cutting it.

The idea that Catholics want their church to modernise to the level of current society is indicative of just how much our world has changed in the couple of thousand years since they started. It used to be that the  social standard originated in Rome and the Faithful (and everyone else that didn't want to get burned as a witch) adjusted their lifestyles accordingly. How quaint to think that Catholics now want this reversed. The people whose soldiers still look like this:

"Oh Alphonse, you dapper little minx!"

There is a name for a Catholic church that allows priests to marry and doesn't require the members to be beholden to the whims of an old man in a castle: I believe they're called Episcopalians.

I Have Bigger Issues To Bitch About

So it is with some embarrassment that I realise it's been six months since my last post. While my jet set lifestyle does take up a great deal of my time the real reason for my silence is that since I got a new job at a restaurant that I love I'm no longer filled to the brim with restaurant induced rage that boils over and congeals into blogs. So am I ready to throw in the towel and stop writing about the bottomless well of human stupidity? Shit no, dear readers. I'm widening the lens of my analysis.

No, more bigger

To Serve Man is heretofore going to be a place to shoot the shit about mankind's silliness on a much larger scale: a COSMIC scale. I think it's time we started talking about how silly religion is. I'm not going to apologise for this. Nobody that is religious has ever apologised to me or as far as I know to anybody else for the weird stuff they believe or the silly things they do because of it. I have never knocked on anyone's door and given them a pamphlet telling them that they are most definitely NOT going to Hell and that Jesus does nott give a crap about them because he has been dead for 2000 years.

Everybody on this planet has to deal with religion and  the consequences of silly beliefs every single day so To Serve Man is now officially about the biggest issue there is.