Sometimes my kids get the day off school in observance of a national leader’s birth. But today they get the day off because long long ago, in a third world country far far away, somebody was tortured to death in front of his friends and family. Austin ISD, among others, nods to the cultural inertia and takes the day off. And all the children of Texas, irrespective of their beliefs, are led to associate this observance with the adjective “good.”
It would probably be a sick thing to observe MLK’s assassination every year and refer to it as good. Or JFK’s. Or Lincoln’s. In Texas, what about the death of Jim Bowie at the Alamo? These days we’re beginning to wake up to the fact that Christopher Columbus was a real piece of work, and that we likely shouldn’t be observing his life with glowing revelry. Maybe we’ll wake up to this one too.
After all, the cultural inertia for “good Friday” goes back a couple thousand years, when a cult group of religious illiterates thought that this macabre event benefited them directly, and that having someone tortured to death was the best creative solution that a supreme cosmic being could come up with in order to solve humanity’s problems. They were sick minded enough to ritually observe the event, by symbolically cannibalizing the victim’s body.
Imagine a ritual where we drank JFK’s blood on a weekly basis. Or one where we pretended feast on MLK’s body. Or where we referred to the downfall of the Alamo as “Good Thursday.” People might come to think we were insane. Or immoral.
Of course, we can always take comfort in the truism my old buddy likes to wield, “Yeah, but if you don’t think about it, it really makes sense.” 🙂
Jericho Brisance 
Matt enjoy the break, stop whining and greet the family for me
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LOL, I’m not getting the day off. 🙂
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Too bad my friend.
I had the day off but spent all of it at work. What a waste of a holiday 😦
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I don’t get the day off, either
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You’re right, that is kinda off.
Just kidding – not kinda.
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It may help sir if you consider the possibility that your understanding and perception of ‘good’ is weak or limited. From your brief essay here, it appears this may be the case.
Hint: A while back………..yep, many millenia, things were ‘very good.’ Gee I wonder what happened to make things go south.
Just sayin.
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Hint: read Journey pages.
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He won’t read anything, Matt, that isn’t full of scripture. He says his god is true while all men are liars, then believes every word in the Bible that was written by the men he has already determined are liars. Logic is not his strong suit.
Let me introduce you to Colorstorm, our village idiot – every village needs one – he will drop into blogs, fling a little scripture like monkeys fling poo, then run away, back to his Litter Box, when people ask him for real answers to things. We’ve classified him as ‘mostly harmless‘.
His main message is that Life is proof of god.
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Classic
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Arch, after due exchange over at ColorStorm’s site, I concur with your assessment. Add cowardice to the list of his attributes, and I believe it will be reasonably complete.
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Nice deflect matt. I brought to attention your own lack of clarity, then you cite me for not addressing your weakness? Sorry, I don’t play that game.
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No, he cited you for not answering his two simple questions.
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Please arch. Read the da_n (darn) thread, word for word. I swear you cannot follow a line of thought.
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You said, ‘the fool says in his heart, there is no god.’
Matt asked you two questions: (1) Who wrote those words? (2) Upon what evidence do you know they had a divine uplink?
There is no indication in the thread where you have answered either. You have danced the Teabury Shuffle and the Rope-a-Dope while waving your hands, but none of that qualifies as an answer.
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He’s feeling hurt over my lower case ‘g’. Should we tell him that Hebrew didn’t have case at all?
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I ran into the same thing, he’ll get over it. I gon’t lend his delusion legitimacy by capitalizing it. Now if he were to call his god by it’s name, ‘Yahewh,’ I would capitalize it, as good grammar requires, but he won’t do that.
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Sorry, meant ‘Yahweh’ – that was purely accidental. Or maybe da debbil made me do it.
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For the love of God and sake of the truth, listen up EVERYBODY who is interested, and you will see I am 100% guiltless in this regard, that is, if you are honest with yourself.
I have never said ‘the fool says in his heart there is no god.’
Scripture does not say ‘the fool says in his heart there is no god.’ gods are a dime a dozen. Do you understand now? Can you not pay attention to your own words?
There is one God. Count Him. He has no competitors.
Now will the apologies be forthcoming for your reading myopia? Will one person say: CS has a point, and whether we agree with his conclusion is irrelevant…..he made his case for our sloppy reading.
I doubt it.
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You’ll get precisely zero apologies for your little circus. You have two questions to answer. Let’s have them.
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Colorstorm, I’m going to accuse you at this point of blasphemy.
You have attributed this dubious passage of ancient literature to a supreme divine being. You have given no bona fides of the authorship of this passage, nor have you offered tangible evidences of its inspiration.
Until and if you do, I tell you flatly that you are engaged in blasphemy, taking in vain the name of at least one god, and potentially several.
When you deny the divine inspiration of this passage, and admit that it originated by simple human authorship, I’ll withdraw my charge of blasphemy.
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Tkx matt, but here ya go at no charge.
One god, two gods, several gods, or ten thousand gods cannot be blasphemed. Hope this helps.
Perhaps your lack of appreciation for this explains why you have no use for the living God. 😉
But do keep in mind, you brought up the topic by mocking a day known by many to be ‘good.’
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I mock the wickedness of men who would call such a day and such an event ‘good’, among them yourself.
You are, bluntly, a charlatan and a pretender to knowledge. You have no more verification for your superstitions than a typical Muslim or Hindu.
I would have infinite use for a living god, but you haven’t offered one. All you have offered is belief. Your own belief, dogmatic & naked as it stands without any apparent connection to verifiable reality.
Nevertheless, I believe you sell a popular elixir, whose luckless buyers you may find in large numbers elsewhere. Just be sure to label those bottles, “blasphemy.”
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Perhaps matt you too would berate the man born blind………accusing him of needing props and living a live of illusion…….before you would admit that he was once blind, but now sees…….
Perhaps you should ask, as the account goes, his parents……….and they would say……..’of course he was blind……..’ as to HOW he received sight, ask HIM.
I for one, happen to know whose word is good………unlike others who live lives of no absolutes. 😉
And as your ‘charlatans………’ I and my brethren sell nothing, but are well aware of WHO owns everything, so unlike they who are tresspassers on another mans property.
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Myth speak. Also, learn to use an ellipsis properly.
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That story was written by an anonymous author who wasn’t there and had no idea what was said or done, yet you are sufficiently gullible as to take it as truth.
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“you brought up the topic by mocking a day known by many to be ‘good.’”
Could that be because it’s based on an ancient pagan ceremony, celebrating the vernal equinox, Spring and the return of crops? The Jews loved to grab onto other culture’s holidays and make them their own – Christians did the same thing with the Yule season.
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Almost sounds like they enjoyed a good round of blasphemy, doesn’t it?
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I just luuuv how every single account in scripture is torn to shreds by your petulance, leaving God’s word unmarked and you a bit embarrassed.
Next thing you will tell your kin is that the river Euphrates as described in scripture is a figment of mans imagination, or that there really is not a city named Jerusalem, and that Benjamin was not a tribe, and that there was no King David, no
Pontius Pilate, no Solomon, no temple, and no Lord Jesus Christ.
I love it.
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You’d be well served to read the Quran.
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I just luuuv how you try to take a collection of myths and try to palm them off as facts.
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If you want to quickly clear up any confusion as to which god we’re talking about, try calling yours by name, to differentiate him/her/it from all of the other gods.
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Oh, I was there and saw everything, and tried joining you, but CS has his blog set up so that anything I say goes straight to moderation, then he decides what to release and what not. So I was commenting left and right, but he wasn’t allowing them through.
He’s pulled that one about the whales on me before, and I’ve posted a brief, 2-minute clip on how whales used to be land animals that over millions of years, adapted to an aquatic life – it’s still sitting in moderation somewhere, that was over a year ago. He has a ‘truth’ that he wants his cultists to hear, and won’t allow anything that diverges from that.
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Does this give you any idea what commenting on CS’ blog is like for me? He gets to shoot off his mouth, spouting any kind of nonsense he likes, then hides my responses, thus making him look like he got in the last word, to which I had no response – but HE KNOWS BETTER, whether his cultists do or not.
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Sigh. He’s just like the rest. A gun filled with blanks, and a passion for shooting it off.
I so very much wish for a legitimate challenger. Somebody who actually had something to say and some real evidence to say it with. But there isn’t, and there won’t be, because theism is bankrupt on its basic claims about revelation. They don’t know in any verifiable sense who wrote most of their “revelation”, and they cannot hope to verify that the masked penmen had a divine uplink.
They end with a fizzle on the launchpad. Makes for short, uninteresting games.
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BTW, that was an epic response, all meat & potatoes, no saccharine. Good response, and shouldn’t languish in moderation. At least here – and elsewhere – readers can decide for themselves.
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But he’s counting on members of his cult not to come to sites like yours.
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It’s Easter, that magical time when flocks look at my infamous Infographic. His hopes may be misplaced.
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Tack it to the wall.
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“A while back………..yep, many millenia, things were ‘very good.’”
You mean back when we were being eaten by sabertooth cats while still evolving in Africa! You have a very strange definition of ‘good’.
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CS, you wouldn’t know “good” even if walked up and shook your hand. Too bad you can’t travel into the past “millenia” to enjoy all those things that were “very good.”
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