Easter has been on my mind lately. With Romania being a traditionally Orthodox country, yet with my family, at its root, Catholic, this is the week between Easters (as the Orthodox Easter will be on the 16th) for me. And I've been thinking about traditions we observe without really meaning to.
Every Easter, the streets will be thronged with crowds spilling out of the church gate. Yet, come next Sunday, the crowd will be dispersed, leaving one to assume that belief, in this country, at least, is a temporary power-up. How can you believe, and wait patiently outside the church for the light to trickle through, yet forget all about it the following week?
Or is God supposed to possess such an alarmingly short memory that he won't notice your truancy? A lot of people here qualify themselves as religious, even though they only ever go to church on Easter (and maybe Christmas), never go to confession, and never receive the Eucharist.
Personally, I am and have been an atheist (in as far as not following organized religion goes) for a long time. I don't particularly agree with the rules of Christianity, or any other faith, for that matter, but it seems to me, if you choose to play on their side, you should follow the rules.
In a bid for inclusion, most churches have bent and twisted the definition of "believer" to a point where it can't be recognized. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that, if you want to call yourself a Christian Orthodox, you should observe fasts, go to church once a week, and whenever else you're supposed to, and all that. It's what you signed up for.
Most people I know who identify as Orthodox couldn't even tell you why they're Roman Orthodox, instead of Greek Orthodox, or indeed, Catholic. A vague belief that whatever resides up in the heavens goes by "God" should not be your only qualifier.
What I don't understand is, why call yourself Christian, at all?
Well, a number of reasons spring to mind, the biggest one being superstition. Many people just want to be on God's good side just in case, though it seems to me, if there is a God, and he is all-knowing, as we've been lead to believe, he won't be fooled. And, I should assume, he'd be pretty pissed you tried to lead him by the nose, so it probably won't end well for you.
“This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...” (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)
But I don't think it's the people's fault. Even if you're just this two-dollar Christian who remembers God about twice a year, I don't think it's your fault, specifically. Trouble lies with clever people who lived a few thousand years ago, and who, if you ask me, at least, ruined a far more meaningful faith.
There's a lot of talk recently about the demise of the church, and for good reason. Between Pope Francis' disastrous reign, and increasingly liberal Western societies, the Catholic Church has been doing a mud slide for a long time now.
The church is dying. But it ain't the first one.
Before there was Christianity, there were a bunch of other pagan (as we now call them) religions, whose stories ran closer to the natural world, to the stars and the earth, then to some mythical, incomprehensible divinity. Religions that needed to be crushed to make way for the Christian faith, but in doing so, an important bond between man and nature was also severed.
At their core, most Easter traditions that we observe today, are pagan. The Easter Bunny and the eggs were once powerful representations of natural rebirth, and agricultural flourishing. People knew what they meant, because it was the common man who'd divined their meaning in the first place. If you start asking people randomly today who the hell the Easter Bunny's supposed to be, or why we paint eggs red, they'll mumble something about Jesus.
That's not good.
The whole point of such holidays lies in symbolism, and once we, as a society, forget that symbolism, we stray farther from our connection with the earth. Except we can't live like that, and desperate to reestablish connection and a sense of belonging, we seek it in all the wrong places.
I think it's wrong to talk of the demise of a faithful Western society in terms of Christians vs Atheists. Because that's not the meat of the problem. You've already forgone your faith when you stop understanding, or when you put your faith in a mysterious, psychotic deity who'll take you to Heaven 'cause you go to church once a year, yet observe none of his other rules.
And a people without a faith is extremely vulnerable, volatile, and dangerous. Personally, I don't think the faith we need lies with the Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, or any other of our present organized religions. But we do need something, and it's very important that we understand why we follow a god, not just follow blindly.
