I-Land is where memories and experiences turn into short stories, personal journal entries and narration in first person, part memoir, part fiction, exploring topics such as the relation between humans and the societies they live in.

Deliver Us From Evil: Marching Up Golgotha

Easter6

‘People endure the disrespect the Church is showing both them and their Lord’s teachings because they want to be part of something greater than themselves, something that absolves them from having to think for themselves. They don’t want to contemplate the immensity of the cosmos on their own terms. They tolerate their wardens because they need the jail’s roof over their heads to shield them from the elements.’ ~ EON

People gather to celebrate Easter every year in ways that contradict their everyday beliefs. They suspend logic to accommodate blind faith and bad taste. They do things that perpetuate misinformation and dated perspectives, promoting symbolisms that allude to sacrifice and cannibalism. They promote second-rate literature because it has been rebranded into a religion. They ritualize themselves into accrued ignorance and march collectively down the road to mass-driven folly.

The reason they do this is because their faith is strong and their need to belong to something grand overrides key faculties and principles. Everything they have been taught from an early age — ‘be informed,’ ‘know what you’re saying,’ ‘be part of things you understand and don’t trust blindly in what strangers tell you,’ ‘challenge absolute authority, be vigilant, use your senses’ — all of it suspended in an orgy of spiritual release so that they may feel redeemed. So that they may belong with the rest of the culture.

So that they may not stand out as the troublemakers.

As if Christ was anything but. (Last time I checked, He was the greatest and loudest troublemaker of His time.)

Irony yet again. People observe the teachings of Christ in a way that contradicts His very MO, if not His core.

The Church is down with all this. The status quo suits them well. Music to their ears and power in their hands. Control over life and wealth in their pockets. Money in, money out, and forget your minds, dear believers, we have no use for them. We just want your blind faith, your presence, your souls, and, last but not least, your time and money i.e. your resources.

The rest? God will explain it to you when you’re dead and in paradise, or in hell, in which case you’ll have Satan to contend with.

And so forth and so on, in the name of salvation.

There are many things one can deduce from this terrible state of affairs, but let me focus on just one. Despots and swindlers have taken over the Church, putting on a show. Merchants of fear and ignorance are running away with the Scriptures. Agents of shady interests, small-minded, jaded and parasitic, they rule over the faithful — and not only — like pretentious Pharisees. Honchos and puppeteers everywhere. Brokers of heaven and masters of ceremony, their thick, mud-filled souls dripping over people’s live(lihood)s, asphyxiating every ounce of spirit, replacing it with scarred, calcified tissue.

And the flock marches up Golgotha, one year after another, with no end in sight.