As my mother recently put it, Easter seems like a sort of macabre holiday. We celbrate the martyrdom of Jesus just the way some Muslims celebrate the martyrdom of a suicide bomber. Odd, I think.
Another odd thing is that most "civilized" culture has bought into this good vs. evil thing. It seems to me that good and evil, and the knowledge thereof are what we received when partaking of the forbidden fruit. It was forbidden, I think, because it leads one down a path of misery and destruction, shame and limitation. It seems to me that in the moment "adam and eve" took the fruit and ate it, that was the moment they accepted the knowledge of good and evil as a dualistic concept of the universe, and hence created a separation from God. As Bonhoffer said, shame is a result of our perception that we are missing something fundamental (i.e. we have the idea that the Holy Spirit is not within us). So, to me, the story in the bible tells us not that we are flawed and we must accept that, it tells us that we will have a flawed concept of God if we believe in the dualistic version of how things are, good vs. evil. We're better off realizing that we have created this myth and we'll be a whole lot better off in the world (and in our neighborhoods) if we merely discuss what works and doesn't work rather than who is GOOD or EVIL, since good and evil don't exist except in our creative minds, the minds that created the concept in the first place. The bible tells us so.
Sincerely,
Tad
