How this Jew Celebrated Easter
Why and How Christianity Castrates the Moral Majesty of Jesus
By David Gottfried
As I write this, Easter Sunday is finally ending. I was too sick to do anything today, so I suffered epic movies about Jesus on television. All the banalities and platitudes made me sicker. However, like the protagonist in the film version of “A Clockwork Orange,” I would love to be dressed “in the height of Roman Fashion.”
In any event, the unremitting onslaught of dramas about Jesus’s life, combined with saccharine, shmaltzy, sissified Judy Garland classics which seem intent on putting everyone, guys as well as galls, in prim “Easter Bonnets with all the frills upon it,” made me write this critique of the salient themes of Christianity and how they might maul morality.
Because Jesus Died for Your Sins, aren’t You Just a Little Bit Glad that He Died – and Does this prompt you to believe that the Ends Justify the Means no matter how gruesome the Means.
Some Christians used to wax histrionic and were hell-bent on having a pogrom when they thought of nails going into Jesus’s flesh. However, they are so delighted with the result: If they are black, I suppose they fantasize about eating Fried chicken for millions of years in Heaven. I reckon that if they are Irish, they are elated at the prospect of getting drunk for millions of years. (I think I would get very bored spending eternity suffering the sound of fagelahs playing the harp, and I think that time constraints on life are worthwhile incentives to use our lives to make and obtain more joy and goodness. BTW, I am gay so don’t give me any shit over using the word “fagelah,” Yiddish for faggot or, more precisely, little faggot – or it might mean “little bird”)
Because they are glad that Jesus’s death guarantees them salvation (provided that they accept Jesus’ divinity), I am sure they are just a little bit delighted that we evil Jews allegedly killed him.
This moral stance can prompt people to think it’s okay to badger others if good things will ultimately ensue:
a) So the Spanish killed millions of Native Americans because of the good things they got: Gold and riches, and those “Indians” who accepted Jesus would be saved in heaven after being hacked to death by a Spanish sword.
b) In the mid-19th century, the British made a fortune selling Opium to the Chinese. The Chinese tried to stop this. The British clobbered them in the Anglo-Sino Opium War. The Brits won the war, and the Chinese were forced to allow the Brits to sell more opium to them and had to pay millions of pound sterling to the British for having the temerity to suggest that their children shouldn’t be a bunch of addicts.
(My remembrance of history is what makes me such a suspicious and anxious guy. After what the Chinese endured at the hands of the British, I am sure the Chinese want to sell us fentanyl and would laugh with glee if they could destroy us. Of course, we Americans are not Brits, but to the world we are New Britishers, just as Massachusetts is part of New England.)
The Idea that Jesus’s Death results in our Salvation is another manifestation of the eternal yen to find a scape goat for one’s sins.
Some Jews, on Yom Kippur, kill a chicken and throw it in the river. In this ritual, they supposedly cast their sins on a chicken. In ancient Carthage, they routinely put 4-year-old children to death to make the gods happy. The Jesus story is a reenactment of a perennial pathology in the human brain: We seem to think that we will be exonerated of our sins if someone else would hurry up and die in our place. Also, if we believe that other people can die in our place, we will be more amenable to the notion that we can all be absolved of responsibility by pushing the guilt onto another person.
Christianity also seems to delight in practically traumatizing us when it shifts guilt to another person, namely Jesus. Jesus, the guy who will die for our sins, is described as the nicest guy who ever lived on earth. Of all the people who will die for our sins, Christianity’s ethical hot house of perverse moral predilections has decreed that we will be saved when the nicest guy will die. It’s no wonder that we have adages such as “only the good die young.” Perhaps this is meant to instill a despondency that will make us accept the murderous machinations of the Tzars, Kaisers, and Emperors who stalked across the stage of European history like ghouls and goblins from hell.
Using Christianity as a Carte Blanche to Vice and Viciousness
By holding that one is guaranteed a ticket to heaven if one accepts Jesus as one’s savior, one is given what might be a fool proof stratagem for being as evil as one wants and then living like a rich happy son of a bitch in heaven.
The formula is simple: On Monday, I’ll get my sadistic rocks off by putting hundreds of Africans on slave ships, and on Thursday I will get a hotel reservation in heaven by accepting Jesus as my savior.
This problem is not that severe in the Catholic faith. The Catholics have definite conceptions of right and wrong; they may be rigid, but they are relatively immune to the crazed logic of some of the more severe Protestant subscribers to antinomianism.
Antinomianism is the tendency to believe that one is absolved of abiding by G-d’s moral precepts if one kneels to Jesus. I have known some Texans who have proudly and brazenly told me, with a sadistic laugh, that they could commit murder and then happily go to heaven because of the formula for salvation bequeathed by their faith.
We should be absolved of our guilt by atoning for our misdeeds, not by finding another person to bear our guilt
The Catholics are a little bit better than the Protestants on this. The Catholics believe that salvation is contingent on two things: Accepting Jesus as one’s savior and doing good works. The Protestants, for some weird reason, concluded that getting into Heaven is only contingent on accepting Jesus and that whether one feeds widows and orphans, or runs a slavish factory which creates widows and orphans by the dozen is quite immaterial.
And in England, this Protestant point of view created the greatest chasm, between rich and poor, of any state in Europe. Queen Elizabeth the First reputedly screamed, “Why are my subjects all beggars or are starving,” (I don’t remember her exact language.) The answer to Elizabeth’s question is the Protestantism she so zealously adored. The British, smugly certain that one could go to Heaven loving Jesus and being Scrooge to everybody else, got rid of home relief, and hunger and want soared. (See Henri Laski’s “The Rise of Liberalism” (1936) for a brilliant and scathing account of how England became both Protestant and Capitalistic)
This of course made the British rich not just a little bit insanely rich. Their wealth was magisterial, and they were as implacably opposed to reforms as the Red Sea keeping the Israelites in Bondage. Indeed, some English castles had 500 rooms, and it was not unheard of for English Manors to hire 100 servants to maintain the mansion and the fields. Hell, when the wage for a maid is a crust of moldy bread, very little money will buy a dozen or two dozen maids.
Friends, Unromans, Countrymen, lend me your ears: Stop
Rendering Stuff to Caesar.
A lot of my Irish Friends applaud themselves because of their alleged readiness to go to war. They patiently and proudly tell me that this is a consequence of their loyalty and obedience. Maybe a certain measure of obedience is healthy, but we send dogs to obedience school, not humans.
I think that Christian slavishness, which is celebrated with the euphemism "loyalty," stems, in part, from Jesus’ admonition to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Indeed, whatever rebelliousness or identification with the downtrodden which Christianity may have possessed in its early days was certainly sent to Golgotha when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity. When the pope became bosom buddies with people as vulgar and as vile as Roman Emperors, Christianity ceased to become the sort of religion that cared about people in the manger. Indeed, it became an apologist and a justification for royal ruthlessness. Recall the miserable logic of the Divine Right of Kings: One must accept whatever the king does, because the king is king because G-d wants him to be king. If one opposes the king, one is necessarily in league with the Devil.
And this, I suppose, leads up to my strongest reason for loving America (when I am not nauseated by its commercial shabbiness). America is almost a little bit Jewish.
For me, the closing stanza of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and its steadfast resolve to fight the good fight, makes me think of the Maccabees.
“In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me
As He died to make men holy, let us fight to make men free 1 (
While God is marching on”
This is so splendidly Hebraic. Whereas classical European Christianity primly praised popes and potentates (Think of the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933), America would fight for what was right. Instead of passive sadness, instead of bending the knee to Caesar, the men of the union army fought to do the right thing, as they fought to do the right thing when they went to war against Nazi Germany.
Some people say the lyric is “let us die to make men free.” I have heard the word fight instead of die.
As a former (or recovered) theist (Evangelical Christian), I found this piece interesting. I'm currently writing my de-conversation/emancipation narrative. Most likely this will be the prompt that forces me to create a second Substack and YouTube channel.
Christians would have a number of counter-arguments to the analysis you provide above. Mostly, they come down to, "We cannot understand the mind of God and are not worthy to judge or question his plan." This blanket perspective covers a multitude of sins with a simple wave of the hand.
As has been pointed out before, when something positive happens, "God is good" and when something miserable happens, "God is mysterious and we cannot know his divine plan." In this way, Christians absolve God of sins far greater than any they have committed.
*Sigh*… it’s easy to attack a Straw-Man Christianity. How thoroughly you misunderstand it. No Christian delights in the fact that the Jews killed Jesus, and those that did in the past, or attack Jews for it, were wrong and misunderstood the Scriptures and the purpose for Jesus dying. His death is not an ends justifies the means situation— His sacrifice as exactly a scape goat for our sins was God’s plan from the beginning. It’s a way for God to satisfy both his justice and his mercy. No man can atone for all his sins and misdeeds— the payment for sin, even just one, is death. Are you willing to pay that? Jesus is a substitute atonement— it’s not people getting off scot-free for their sins. It means that God took the judgement He would have for them, for me, and put it on Jesus instead. That means when I meet my Lord one day and am asked to atone for my sins, I can show my “already paid in full” slip that points to Jesus. But the Bible makes it clear that this gift of grace from God does not give us the excuse to keeping sinning—- contrary to your Texas friend, if you have Ben forgiven and you know murder is wrong, you won’t knowingly commit murder just because you think you are assured of heaven. No, the Christian takes great care to live a life that is worthy of God, after being saved from the penalty of sin. Of course, until we meet our Lord, we will still sin, because we are not made perfect this side of heaven. But it’s about our hearts being orientated towards seeking Jesus and his commands and away from sin. So a person who truly seeks the Lord will not delight in sin, and therefore won’t use any kind of “the ends justify the means” justification for sin. But I don’t suspect you to understand this. I do tire of so many really, really bad straw-man Christianities that get put out there though.