Religious Holiday Rant

I know. Christmas was more than a month ago, so this might seem like unwillingness to just let it go. I assure you, however, that this rant is of a much more dignified origin: the lack of a better subject. Besides, I’m including a number of religious holidays in this one. It’s not so much that I oppose religion. More that it’s something I find very easy to make fun of.

Let me begin with Christmas, though. December 25. The day faithful christians celebrate the birth of a savior and a loophole. God really killed two birds with one stone on this one. It’s comforting to know that the son of God can serve the same purpose as extra credit. Yes, apparently you can be as much of an asswipe as possible for 99% of your life, then do a 180, and your afterlife will be infinitely more promising than if you’d just been a good person without incorporating religion. Wait a minute. So I’m not getting into heaven, but the grinch will?! Come on! He tried to steal Jesus’s birthday! Though considering what has become of it, it may have been better off that way. I tell you, it’s enough to make you want to convert to witchcraft. Vernal Equinox may not roll off the tongue as easily as Christmas, but at least it doesn’t back traffic up for a month and a half.

The Jewish alternative to Christmas is Hanukkah, or as it is also known, the biggest fuss ever made over a lamp not going out. Oh, but how can I mock a holiday that spans eight days, comes at a different time of the month every year, and can be spelled three different ways? As the story goes, something about how there was only enough oil in the menorah to last one day, but they lit it, and it lasted eight days. God can make fuel last eight times as long as it’s supposed to? I think we know where to invade when we’re finished with Iraq! Which only gives him, I would say, a scant 50 or so years to get ready for us. I can hear it now… “God was the mastermind behind the tsunamis and the hurricanes, and if we take him out of power, the world will be a safer place.”

For some time, those two were the only holidays we really heard about around winter time. Then one day, someone was a little too desperate to win a game of Scrabble, and a new holiday was born. Kwanzaa was created in 1966, and judging from the way it’s being inserted into the p.c. holiday celebration theme, it is celebrated by pretending there’s something sacred about a holiday that’s younger than your parents. Technically, Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday, not a religious one, I just found the urge to mock it far too irresistible.

Somewhere in there too is the muslim holiday Ramadan, which if I’m not mistaken, is what you get when you cross a giant japanese monster with those cheap noodle soups you can buy at gas stations.

Fast forward about 1/3 year, and we have Easter, the holiday that managed to cross a chicken and a rabbit. And who would have guessed that such a marvel of genetic engineering would yield chocolate, cream-filled eggs? More importantly, though, this holiday commemorates god’s decision that he could forgive us for all of our sins, but only if we would commit the worst one yet, and kill his son. Apparently, we could only be saved by asserting that we will not tolerate peace and love. All the more reason to go ahead with that invasion. This guy is ten times the madman Saddam Hussein was. He’s playing games with our heads! Not only does his method for saving our souls seem insane, it took him some 4000 years to do it.

The Jewish religion has an alternative to Easter, too. That would be Passover, the celebration of the day God killed….your oppressors? No, just their children. The first born males, to be specific. Passover gets its name from the details of the last plague. The Hebrew families were each to slaughter a lamb and paint their door frames with it, because apparently the all-powerful holy spirit had some difficulty knowing who to kill, and needed an easy to understand guide to which houses to pass over. Great. So with respect to identifying behavior, God comes in second to Santa Claus. Anyway…Wow. Genital mutilation and animal sacrifice? Note to self. When attending a Bar Mitzvah, don’t drink the Kool Aid, and no matter what they say, there is no spaceship behind the moon.

Well, it’s been a blast. Hope you had as much fun reading this as I did writing it.