Easter Sunday

A few weeks ago I read of an educator somewhere, in California I think, who wanted to ban the bible from discussion and study in public schools. There's a lot of that going around so I didn't pay much attention then, but it's been stewing in my mind ever since. I fully accept that someone of reasonable intelligence can read and think about the same things I read and think about and yet come to the opposite conclusion. But no matter how fervent an atheist one might be, why would he want to remove from the curriculum the study of what may be the greatest piece of literature ever put on paper. Simply on account of itthe bible's literary merits it is worth knowing intimately and when it is realized how ancient some of the texts are, and how important they have been in the molding of human thought and history, it seems insane that anyone would want to keep a knowledge of of it out of the reach of childeren...as if it was some sort of toxic substance.
The only reason I can think of would be to erase that history, and many social revolutionaries have known and understood that to make it possible for their pet doctrines to prevail all knowledge of old beliefs had to be obliterated. This was true of the Bolsheviks, and it is true of the jihadists. They know that traditional Christian belief is the single biggest obstacle to their desire to dominate the world. It's also true of assertive atheists who are convinced that religion, and especially Christianity, is the root of all evil. As if Christians invented murder, war, oppression, injustice. Quite the contrary. If the bible is about anything it is about the saturation of Jewish and Christian culture with ideas of moral and ethical justice, about the equality of all souls before god, of the importance of charity and love. Love is God in the Christian way of thinking, and that has not changed in 2000 years. That doesn't mean that there aren't bad people who are nominally Christian, or that bad things didn't happen under Christian rulers, but that even the worst of us commit our crimes in the knowledge that we are doing evil. We are no longer prisoners of our instincts, we are reasoning, moral beings. Almost all western political movements have been predicated on that assumption, even the atheistic Marxists and especially the envirocultists.
Aside from the biblical texts themselves both Jewish and Christian literature abounds in commentaries and writings based on the bible that try to understand the question of evil- where it comes from, and how to overcome it. The idea of evil has gone out of favour in our therapeutic society but thanks to the jihadists we are going to have to think again about the meaning of evil.
This is Easter Sunday, the day when Christ rose from the dead according to the new testament writers. It is the culmination of Easter week. On Good Friday Jesus- a man of peace if the idea of him being the son of God is too preposterous to you- was crucified as a common criminal by the Roman authorities to keep the peace in a part of their empire that was as refractory then as it is today. According to scripture, Jesus was put on earth expressly so god could know from personal experience what it was like to be a man, to feel agony, to suffer injustice. More than that, his purpose was to take on himself all the sins of the world and suffer in their place the punishment men had earned for themselves.
This only makes sense in the context of the story in Genesis of how Adam was tempted by the devil and disregarded the warning of God who had created him. I have read many creation stories from many parts of the world and while some of them have a superficial resemblance to Genesis, the underlying meaning of them is entirely different.
The creation story most familiar to educated westerners is the one told by modern cosmologists. It involves abstruse concepts of relativity and quantum physics which lead back in time to the Big Bang, when time and space was created from nothing. This theory is now accepted by most scientists and I have no quarell with it. To the scientists, even non atheistic scientists, the Biblical creation story is nothing but a myth, a fairy tale, that never was intended to be anything else. Personally, I'm not so sure that Genesis is as simple as all that.
There is more than one creation story in the Bible. The first is a lovely poem, a poem of wonder. God divided the darkness from the light. And the light he called day and the dark he called night. In this story God created man and woman together.
In the second story, of Adam and Eve, following the creation of everything else God created Adam first, and then Eve, to be his companion. As created beings they had no need to cover themselves. There was nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide. All was truth. The Bible implies that they would live forever in the paradise God had created for them where all things would be provided for nourishment and life. Thus there was no need to kill for food, no need to have children, no need to struggle, no need for pain, no labor, no death. But there was one thing they were forbidden: the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Now why would God put something there that they could not have? It's a question any intelligent audience would want to ask.
To me the answer couldn't be plainer: Adam- us- was not a simple automaton subject to some preordained plan over which he had no control. How he behaved was entirely up to him. He had free will. He was responsible for his own actions. True it was that even in the garden of eden lurked a force that could convince Adam to exercise his freedom to his own detriment, in defiance of what he knew was right. And he chose to disobey his creator. This may seem unfair, because Adam did not have God's perfect knowledge. Adam could not tell what would be the result of his action. But the temptation to find out for himself was too strong. What did that low hanging fruit taste like? The point is that without the option of choosing wrong, the idea of free will is meaningless. In this case, Adam chose to go with his own judgement even though it was against the express orders of God.
By indulging his curiosity, Adam unknowingly chose his destiny which was to prefer his own judgement to faith in God's judgement. Now he had knowledge. Now there was time and space. Nothing would ever be the same. From then on his world would be as he created it. He would have to till the soil, build shelter, weave clothing, protect himself and his family from danger. For now there was death, death and time. Death had come into the world, and no matter what Adam did it would inevitably claim him and his loved ones. He would grow old, he would experience sickness, he would become the food of creatures larger and fiercer than he. Only through birth of a new generation was death cheated, a sort of echo through time. But he was denied the foresight to know the ultimate outcome of his actions. He had become a slave to necessity, barred forever from what he had lost, the memory of it fading in his descendants. In other words, the world as we now know it is the result of a moral decision made by Adam, the primordial man who lived in a place outside of time. For Christians the significance of Easter is that man on his own is unable to rescue himself from this fate. Only God can do that, and so he sent his son to appear before us to take that original sin onto himself and show us how to overcome it...through him, his teachings and example. That's the essential meaning of Easter as I understand it.
As an explanation for the origin of the universe my little analysis seems highly improbable and maybe it's not entirely orthodox either. I don't know. But the more I think about Christian belief the more I think that if it's not true then everything is hopeless. I wonder if the atheist who wants to deny children any exposure to this tradition has thought of that.