A Mad and Holy Week

This is Holy Week and it has been a crazy one. Holy Week is the week Christians commemorate the end of Jesus’s life. It’s a pious celebration of God’s failure, persecution and judicial murder. The week closes with Good Friday, the day when God was tortured to death, and then Holy Saturday, the day when he was among the damned of Hell. Good times.

The news seemed to catch the tenor of the church calendar. In Brussels, medieval lunatics murdered civilians so accustomed to their own modern, peaceable civilization, they were blind to the fact that it had been invaded. In Cuba, the so-called leader of the free world sat at a baseball game, grinning like an idiot and teaching a savage dictator the wave while shrugging off the cancer whose name he cannot even bring himself to utter, and the spread of which he facilitated by his own feckless policies. Here at home, Democrats and their allies in the news media denounced Republicans for discussing the killers’ motive, namely their God.

But then God was in the news a lot, wasn’t he? In the Supreme Court, the Little Sisters of the Poor were reduced to begging the secular powers not to force them to violate their religious opposition to contraception  — and getting a pretty lukewarm hearing. In Georgia, legislators moved to protect pastors from being forced to perform gay marriages — and were slammed with the full force of secular virtue as the NFL and Hollywood threatened boycotts if the governor signed the bill.

Come to think of it, a belief in coercion was something the Islamic terrorists overseas and the anti-Christian secularists in the U.S. had in common. Both Islamists and secularists seem to think that those who disagree with them must be forced to conform to their moral philosophy. It’s not enough that we believe in Allah, so must you. It’s not enough that we believe in contraception, you must pay for it. It’s not enough that gays are free to marry, you must perform the ceremony.

Of course, our country, our guiding philosophy, our idea of our rights, our Constitution — these were formed neither by Islamists nor secularists. They were formed by Christians and those whose ideas were shaped by Christianity. They evolved from the notion of a God of love who formed us in His image; who gave each individual one of us the right and the power to choose his path for himself, always mindful of his respect and care for others.

In a world of foolish leaders, religious killers, and increasingly oppressive governments, it almost seems like that God of love and freedom has been murdered and laid in his grave, doesn’t it?

Good times.