Holy Week, Batman!

It’s that time of year again! It’s the week of the first full moon of the spring, yet it’s a somber week of reflection on, well, just how nasty humans can be. But we try to better ourselves, and prove it by giving things up for Lent, I guess. A meatless Good Friday ensues, followed by a cautious Saturday, and a joyous Easter Sunday as the day of bunnies and eggs and Zombie Jesus.

Anyway, Holy Week kind of sucks for me, though entirely brought on myself. Up through 2005, I heeded poor information that you can have back whatever you gave up for Lent after Palm Sunday. I found out that’s not true, and it didn’t really make much sense either. So I went eight years of Lents in which I did not continue the abstention through Holy Week. Since 2006, I make up for it by not only continuing whatever I gave up on through to Easter, but now I also give up everything I’ve given up for Lent previously! So this Holy Week, I’m abstaining from 11 things!

I allow myself half back on Saturday, and then as of sunrise Easter morning, it’s “He Is Risen, All Bans Lifted!” Hehe.

Anyway, with so many of my day to day stuff off-limits, such as Coke, Minesweeper, and beef, it’s a little difficult. Yet it’s not difficult in that it’s necessarily hard to keep away from these things for six days. I’ve got to make sure I don’t eat or play something I’m not supposed to without realizing it!

That’s when it occurred to me. Look at many of the evils of the world, the oppression, the cruelty. They are not committed usually because of premeditated desire for oppression or cruelty, but because they hadn’t thought otherwise. That’s why abuse breeds abuse, and tyranny breeds tyranny. The victims become those who victimize, because they never knew differently, and never were made to rethink the conventional knowledge they’ve always accepted as tacit gospel.

This is what fuels every abusive family, as abused children grow up to be abusive parents. This is what fuels the extremist Muslims and their oppressive Sharia law which they try to extend around the world, since most of the extremists are only following what they’ve always “known” to be right, no matter how horrible or heinous. And, of course, it is what caused Jesus to be crucified.

He was up there on the Cross, and those Roman bastards were having so much fun torturing Him. Why? Were they evil? Depends. Their evil stemmed not from wanton desire to be horrible specifically, but this was just how they did things, how it always was to them. This was a source of fun to them, since the idea of it being a bad thing to treat a human being like that never crossed their minds.

So I guess that’s why Jesus was all like “Look, Dad, these guys are nuts! They don’t know what the FUCK they’re even doing! Try not to be so angry about them. They’re just really stupid.” Okay, that was cleaned up a bit in the Bible, but whatever.

But, seriously, Jesus was a nice guy who believed in being nice and peaceful and forgiving, and look what happened to Him! He was a sacrifice sent from heaven, thrown to a pack of wolves known as human beings, who tortured and killed the nice guy because he dared to be nice and non-conformist and believe in and preach things contrary to what the powerful masses wanted to hear and believe. Whether He was really divine or not, no denying that!

Why was it done? Not out of specific desire for evil. It was evil brought on by complacency and the belief to go along with the group, to never question authority. So often an evil deed is done, and the solitary reason for it is “It’s my job.”

So, in a way, to question and be cynical is godly. The strongest evils are those with precedent, and precedent is caused by those going with the flow and continuing the evil without a thought.

So-called Christians, particularly in the South and such, shriek at the idea of being different. To them, to be different is to be sinful and impure. These people get so caught up trying to protect and promote purity, they don’t even know what purity is! To them, purity is conformity. To them, a man with a wife and three children whom he beats and tortures all the time seems pure, while a gay couple with three children whom they love and respect would be considered impure. These people don’t seem to realize, or care, that this mindset is what got Jesus crucified in the first place, and perhaps why God sent Him here to begin with.

It takes the purest heart and the soundest mind and the bravest cynical soul to break the cycles of evil. Because, regardless of what they personally may believe on the subject, they are the true Christians.

Way better than me just trying to remember not to drink coffee this week. Hehehe.