Easter

Well seeing Easter is fast approaching I figured why not do the letter E on Easter.  Now before anyone crucifies me...HA I crack myself up....(oh a two for pun, crack...egg...Jesus...crucify...get it?) let me paint a background picture (again) for you.  I would consider myself Agnostic or a Fallen Catholic if you will.

I was raised Catholic, not strict Catholicism but more of the "we need to play by the rules for the important holidays" Catholic.  For those of you who have never been to a Catholic church service, here's how it goes:

Stand, sit, stand, fake singing,  kneel, sit, stand, kneel, eat Jesus, drink blood, kneel, fake praying, sit, stand, sit, stand, shake hands, sit, stand and finally fake singing again.  You do this for a little over a hour every Sunday and longer on the "important holidays".

I do have to be thankful for my mom, she only made me go to church on the "important holidays" i.e. Easter, Christmas, weddings and funerals.  However, I was made to go through CCD (still not sure what it means) but Catholic school in order to get my confirmation.

In a nutshell, I am a firm believer that you don't have to spend your time in a building to be a good person and I do believe in God, just not one particular religion.  So with that being said, there are a few things that confuse me about Easter.

1.  Why is it on a different date each year?  Christmas is on the same date every year, don't they kind of go hand in hand?  I mean Jesus rose on the third day....but the third day of....what?  It's like the high priests of religion throw darts at March and April and what every Sunday the dart lands closest to is Easter Sunday.

2.  Where the hell did the Easter Bunny come from?  Who created him?  Was he there when Jesus rose?  All I can picture is the bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail guarding the cave. Was he put there by the Jews to stop Jesus from getting out?

3.  What's the correlation between dying for our sins and plastic eggs filled with money and candy?  We should just take strawberry jam and spread that all over the lawn and have a Jesus Hunt.  Oh wait, I got it, he died, so we dye eggs...die...dye?  See the similarity?

4.  Don't you think they could have called the day Jesus died something better than Good?  Again, how do they know he died on a Friday?  I mean, people call the Friday after Thanksgiving Black Friday, that sounds more like a day of death.  Maybe a switch should be made.

5.  Ash Wednesday...this I don't get at all.  This goes back to my thought of archaic practices.  My mom just passed away and she was cremated....I sure as hell am not going to smear her ashes on my forehead.  What are the ashes from that they are using in the present?  I highly doubt they are Jesus's actual ashes, but wait he wasn't cremated according to legend, he was buried in a cave after being crucified.  OK, my head is going to blow up on this one....

6.  Why do schools have Good Friday off when they want to remove God from their buildings?  I just heard a story this morning on the radio about a town in Massachusetts that wants to change the lyrics to Lee Greenwood's God Bless the USA to We Love the USA.  But this same school takes Good Friday off...WTF, you can't have your Cadbury creme egg and eat it to!

So now that I've either pissed off all my Catholic friends or made people worry that I am going to go on an Easter bender, I would like to wish everyone a Happy Easter and I hope you spend it....well...doing whatever you do for Easter.

Happy Easter everyone!