Excersus XXXVIII: And It Burns, The Pillar of Fire

Well, Easter and Passover are upon us, and it's a pretty tight race for which is the most fundamentally messed up holiday. If you ever needed proof that Christianity is largely a death cult, you wouldn't have to look far beyond Easter. The unctuous lingering over Jesus's wounds, the ecstatic recounting of his agonies, the glorious announcement that he is coming again to end the world and eternally damn the unworthy to unending tortures... it's a heady cocktail of death, resurrection, revenge, and slash porn, and April is its month.

But really it's no question that Passover takes the first prize of Most Fucked Up Holiday Ever. Now, I might be alone on this, but if I were a slave (the Hebrews never were, of course, but we've gone over that before), and a deity came up to me and said, "Listen, the pharaoh is going to let you go, but I think that wouldn't be quite impressive enough a sign of how awesome I am, so I am going to take over his mind, make him say no, and then I'm going to hire a bunch of angel assassins to kill a shit-ton of babies," (Exodus 10.1-2, and I'm only barely exaggerating how psychotic Jehovah's speech is) I would be inclined to say, No, Thanks for the offer and all, but I'm perfectly fine with being freed without innocent babies being killed by the thousands in the middle of the night. Of course, Moses was utterly okay with the idea (but then you'd be hard pressed to find an instance of him in the Bible turning down a chance to murder a village in a display of gutless loyalty to Jehovah), and so onwards went the slaughter. And here's where the truly stupendous bit of the story comes in: after the children and babies are all lying dead for no particular reason other than a god's vanity, Jehovah orders his people to make a holiday of thanksgiving centered on his act of horrendous bloodlust, AND THEY DID... AND IT IS STILL CELEBRATED... AND NO ONE SEEMS TO THINK THAT'S WEIRD! Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish to enter a verdict of What The Fuck.

In the meantime, Yahweh looks to have gotten a pretty good Old Testament Style Smackdown in on Jesus here, but will it be enough? If there's one Vocate episode all year you need to see and hide from your friends, it's Episode 39 - just one short week away!

- Count Dolby von Luckner