Shock & Blog: PZ Myers explains what Easter ISN'T about

It's got to be embarrassing for the University of Minnesota to have a professor who is this ignorant and hateful:

Easter is a vile little holiday wrapped up in a façade of pretty dresses and chocolate eggs and happy children playing games on the lawn, but at its putrescent core lies 20 centuries of exploitation and dishonesty. Here is a hard-core atheist's perspective on this awful holy day.

A "vile little holiday" with a "putrescent core" of "exploitation and dishonesty." If I were to use such language about, oh, evolution, PZ and his ilk would condemn me as a hate-filled bigot. But since it's coming from a "hard-core atheist," well, he's just being honest and open-minded. I simply do not understand how these people can live their lives with such seething hatred.

I. The fact.

This is the season when our culture commemorates torture. A particularly callous sort of torture, too: a lazy and evil form of punishment that could be carried out en masse. Nail people up in intolerable postures and they inevitably and slowly die, no active, trained labor required—nail 'em and leave 'em, confident that they'll suffer horribly and eventually expire.

Well, at least he understands how horrible death by crucifixion is, but he fails to understand that Christians don't commemorate torture in and of itself. We commemorate Jesus' sacrifice for the world he loved.

We focus all our attention on one man who suffered this torment, and regard him as somehow special. The Roman Empire did this to tens of thousands at once, in mass spectacles of hideous punishment. Throughout human history, people have died ghastly, lingering deaths, often at the hands of other people, and it was not ennobling, and it is usually forgotten.

Indeed, if Jesus were just a man like any other, his death would have been of little note. But Jesus was not like any other man. Jesus was the Son of God who lived a perfect and sinless life. In dying, he became the perfect and ultimate sacrifice for our sins.

Look at that bloody figure wracked up on a cross, and we should all be reminded not of one man long ago who suffered, but that our nation tortures to the death other brown-skinned Middle Eastern people right now. How can we look at the Passion spectacles now and not feel a deep shame?

Oh, please... Leave it to an atheist to turn Easter into a political statement against fighting terrorism and our presence in Iraq.

II. The lie.

At the heart of Christian belief is a lie: that this man was tortured to death long ago, and that afterwards he came back to life.

And that can be proven to be a lie... how? Simply because you say so, PZ?

Oh, and also that he wasn't a man at all, but a god.

Wrong. Jesus is 100% man and 100% God.

There is no evidence for these claims that defy all reason and experience,

Whose reason? Whose experience? None but yours, PZ.

but we're asked merely to believe. To have faith.

Everyone has faith in something. Everyone is asked merely to believe in something. In this, atheists are no different than Christians.

To trust the words of priests.

No. Christians are taught to trust the Word of God, not the words of priests.

I refuse.

And I refuse comply with the request to put my faith in the claims of atheists, who ask me merely to believe that we are nothing more than animals. I refuse to believe that life is ultimately meaningless and hopeless - a pointless distraction from the inevitableness of death.

If a sacrifice is the centerpiece of our salvation, it makes no sense to call the brief troubling of an omnipotent being with a few nails a "sacrifice."

It is more than that, of course. Jesus became sin for us, and the Father turned from him. Even if but for a short time, that is an unimaginable punishment. That is the sacrifice.

It was a man who died horribly, like many others. He didn't come back.

And you know this because you were there? If he had never come back, he would have been proven a liar and the religion that began with him would've quickly died out just as many others did.