He Is Risen

Back after a long hiatus, to wish you a happy Easter.

Faithful readers of this blog, all 12 of them, may recall the 3 Weird Sisters classic, “Touchdown Jesus” Smited from several years ago, in which a monumental tacky Jesus sculpture erected by an Ohio megachurch was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.

Well, several months ago that church finished their new tacky monumental statue to replace the one that burned, and I have been saving the pictures from then until today just so I could use this headline.  Behold the new, and one presumes, fireproof Jesus:

Zombie Jesus wants your braaaaanes….

Which of course reminds me of this classic from the lamentably departed Poor Man:

This, however, is my favorite picture of the resurrection of the giant tacky megachurch Jesus statue:

Hey! Bring that BACK!

Easter is, I must admit, about the most impenetrable holiday for me.  The meaning, for those of us raised in homes that were at most religiously apathetic, extends to bunnies, baskets of goodies, and hunting for hidden eggs; in that context, it’s a holiday you outgrow in adolescence.  It becomes even more confusing when you consider the way it moves around on the calendar.  Then there’s the whole thing about breaking out the white shoes, buying new outfits, and celebrating by eating ham of all things, which Jesus as a Jew would not have eaten.  Maybe the message there is that after he died for our sins and was resurrected, the reward was bacon.  Well, as Eddie Izzard says in the clip below, you tell me.

Alternately, because wordpress apparently no longer supports youtube videos, see it here.

Also, because what would a religious holiday be without rightwinger outraged butthurt, the culture wars have erupted all over Fox News and the nutosphere, thanks to Google’s unconscionable recognition of the day as Cesar Chavez’ birthday, 20 years after his death.  The offending doodle:

On Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy (or as I call it, Tweaker) conservative alternative to Twitter, it was suggested that Google could have used a more holiday-appropriate theme, such as eggs, which of course reminded me of the Eddie Izzard bit above.  As I told one complainant in blog comments elsewhere, who insisted the doodle was a “slap in the face” to Christians and claimed that from here on out, he would be using bing as his search engine…”so, what you’re telling us is that Google, a private company, only recognized your portable religious holiday with a doodle on the date in the past 14 out of 15 years, but because they skipped one year, it’s a slap in the face and you’re going to switch to using an inferior product for conducting web searches as a result?  That’s a pretty weak-sauce version of getting thrown to the lions, bro.”  Funny how flexible that idea of a “free market” is when the actors in it don’t mindlessly conform to the religious preferences/prejudices of the conservatives who are its most ardent defenders.

Silly me.  I should know by now that Easter, like Christmas, is meant to remind us of the untold suffering and oppression the Christian majority in this country has endured as a result of the fact that not everyone believes exactly the same things they do.